May 30, 1986: Harry Stark’s newsstand

HISTORY THROUGH OUR EYES

“I’m the happiest guy in the city,” Harry Stark told our reporter. The 78-year-old newspaper vendor was back selling his papers from under the roof of a proper kiosk at the corner of University (now Robert-Bourassa) and Ste-Catherine Sts.

“Faithful customers en route to work stopped by to congratulate Stark on his new home,” we wrote.

Stark had been selling his papers out of a shopping cart since a delivery truck had jumped the curb a few months earlier and smashed his previous kiosk to pieces, we reported. Fortunately for Stark, when that happened he had been eating breakfast at a greasy spoon nearby. “If I’d have been there — I wouldn’t be here,” we had quoted him saying at the time.

Stark was a popular fixture at the downtown corner, with dozens of faithful customers, and he had been anxious to re-establish.

Montreal City Councillor George Savoidakis, one such customer, came to Stark’s aid. Kiosks were hard to come by, as the city had stopped issuing new permits for vendors using stands, and news kiosks had already become rare. George Bird’s photo of Savoidakis, left, and Stark was published in the Montreal Gazette on May 30, 1986.

Stark, who had immigrated to Montreal from Poland in the 1920s, had opened his first newsstand in 1931 at Park and Bernard Aves. and relocated several times before settling at the corner of University and Ste-Catherine Sts. in 1974.

Although he told our reporter in 1986 that he never wanted to retire, little more than a year after this photo was published, Stark, by then 79, decided to close up shop.