History is ‘whispered in your ear’ on audio tour
Standing at the foot of Atwater St. on a sunny but brisk April morning, Concordia University history professor Steven High steps over the railway tracks to move out of the way of an oncoming train.
As it edges by, just inches behind him, the lumbering locomotive is our first reminder of the area’s not-so-distant industrial past — and an apt introduction for a walking tour of the area that High is about to give.
“This was once the highway into the continent,” says High, gesturing at the Lachine Canal. Today it is a recreational corridor of bike paths and walking trails lined with high-end condos. But prior to the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, it was the economic artery of the country, abutted by textile factories and steel mills.
On this day, High himself is peeling back the layers of history on the rapidly changing Montreal neighbourhoods of Little Burgundy, StHenri and Point St-Charles. He has a live audience in two dozen members of a seniors walking group, the Walkie Talkies, organized by the Contactivity Centre.
But this is a low-tech version of a much bigger project. As the Canada Research Chair in Oral History, and the co-director of Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, High has spent the last decade tracking down Montrealers who still have a living memory of the Lachine Canal’s important place at the crossroads of our economic, social and cultural history.
Over 10 years, he has interviewed 200 people to document their memories of a bygone era in formerly working class neighbourhoods that are undergoing profound transformation. And now, in collaboration with Parks Canada, about 50 of these interviews have been compiled into an audio walking tour. Anyone can download the audio tour on their smartphone from postindustrialmontreal.ca or pick up a paper guide and map of the 2.5-kilometre route at the Parks Canada kiosk next to Atwater market, the starting point.
The audio offers personal tales about what it was like growing up, living and working where cargo ships slipping past or freight trains rumbling through were part of the fabric of everyday life. The stories are shared in the participants’ own voices and languages, as if history is being “whispered in your ear,” as High puts it.
Some of the more colourful anecdotes are memories of childhood, like swimming in the Lachine Canal in the summer as if it were a private swimming pool, or jumping off the Charlevoix Bridge. Those too scared were enticed with the promise of two cigarettes, High says. A favourite pastime for kids was doing a “tour du pont,” which involved riding the swing bridges that moved aside to let ships pass. Part of the thrill, said High, was tricking the disapproving bridge operator by hiding and leaping out to latch on at the last second.
Another person told of surreptitiously hitching a ride from the Point to St-Henri to go to school aboard a train so he could save his bus money to buy pop.
Collecting these gems is High’s life’s work, but it also resonates with him personally. He’s the son of a railway switchman who grew up in Thunder Bay, Ont., another evolving industrial town. He now lives in Point St-Charles, where he feels “right at home.”
Along the route, High stops to point out a tiny window way up beside the sign of the Robin Hood flour mill, which operates to this day at Georges Vanier Blvd. and Notre Dame St. One of the women he interviewed talked about her mother bringing her to stand in this very spot as a child so she could wave to her father at work.
High also recorded testimonials about the strike at Robin Hood in 1977, one by a picketer and another by a scab. The striker described how the police escorted the boxcar full of flour out of the plant, officers armed with machine guns hanging off the side “like something out of the Wild West.” The strike-breaker recalled how he was measuring flour one night when he heard gunfire and looting erupted outside.
The tour weaves together different historical narratives, those of workers, women and Montreal’s black community, which had its foothold in Little Burgundy.
Many in the black community had a hard time finding jobs because of institutional racism.
“A lot of companies wouldn’t hire them. But the railways would as porters. About 90 per cent of black men worked for the railways,” High says. “In the railway, porter was considered the lowest job, but in the community it was the most prestigious job. … The porters were very important.”
Porters’ children recall their fathers bringing huge, juicy apples home from B.C. after cross-country trips or their delicate work dusting ash from train passengers’ clothing with an ostrich feather.
Along the route, High points out the physical vestiges of a vanished economy. The canal used to be twice as wide, he says. The bridges used to swing. What are now condos were once sprawling industrial complexes.
Gentrification is a blessing and a curse. Some of the old abandoned factory buildings were preserved, structurally at least, by being turned into condos. But High estimates 85 per cent of Montreal’s industrial heritage has been razed. We come to one such spot at the rue des Seigneurs bridge. Only two years ago, an old printing plant stood here, he says. Today it’s a gleaming glass highrise, still under construction.
A few feet in front of the project, he directs our attention to a sharp curve in the bike path. It skirts the stone foundation of what was once the Blue restaurant. In its heyday, it was surrounded on both sides by water, serving food drive-thru style to passing ships.
Even the renewal of this once neglected industrial corridor is steeped in history, High says. It’s no coincidence the federal government started plowing money into the revival starting in the 1970s, when the Parti Québécois first came to power.
“It was all because of the national question. If you ever come down here to walk or ride, thank René Lévèsque,” High jokes.
“We may think history is a far-off thing. But history is right here. It’s in our neighbourhoods, it’s in our families.”