The engrossing matchmaker’s street is one made for walking
The man sitting at the picnic table by the Casse-Croute finishes his hotdog and lights a cigarette, using a match. He is on Rue Eddy, in Gatineau and it was not far from here that, around 160 years ago, young Ezra Butler Eddy build a shed and he and his wife, Zaida, burnt the candle at both ends making sulphur matches by hand.
By the end of his life in 1906, Ezra was the match lord in Canada, and also of papermaking; his entrepreneurship had survived two major fires, and he was a philanthropic multimillionaire.
It was he, as an MLA (he was also mayor of Hull Township), who introduced the bill that created the city of Hull, alias Wrightstown, alias Gatineau.
The man throws his match onto Eddy Street and walks down to the Bistro-Bar L’Original at 104 Eddy, which is in full swing at mid-afternoon, with That’s the Way I Like It blaring out as the door swings open to let out a woman in a motorized wheelchair with lots of bags hanging on the back of it.
The bar was, originally, the general store of Messrs. Deschamps et Carrière and is one of several red-brick, dormered buildings on Eddy that are well over 100 years old.
My stroll up this street of multiple personalities began about an hour ago at the north end. The streetscape is built for walking; olde-style lamp posts with twin hanging baskets, small, too small, trees in boxes, well-used benches on most corners and wide, bricked sidewalks. The giveaway that I am on the Quebec side of the river lies in the working-class architecture
My stroll up this street of multiple personalities began about an hour ago ...
of the two-storey homes and stores, with their concrete doorsteps, wrought-iron balconies, sandwich board roof.
The artist Henri Masson, who died a mere decade ago in Ottawa, portrayed these streets so well, often in winter with kids at play outdoors. (Outdoors!) As in his paintings, the real-life buildings don’t seem to have a right angle in them, at least at this end of the street, which has yet to feel the embrace of gentrification.
The reason it has taken me an hour to walk a mere three blocks is the presence, almost opposite each other, of a second-hand furniture store and a vegetarian restaurant, both of which I am powerless to pass.
The restaurant is replete with lunchtime civil servants who have walked down from the Kafka Komplex at the river end of Eddy the government keeps and which makes the Hull waterfront so hideous.
Looking north on Eddy towards the Gatineau Hills, the government Casino rises up in the distance, a beacon of high-stakes risk, revenue and ruination. A tunnel connecting the waterfront civil servant buildings to the Casino would keep the money turning nicely in a circle.
When I arrive at the Larouche Pharmacy a block further down, which is in one of those red-brick buildings I mentioned, I pause on the sunny side of the street to take notes.
There has been a pharmacy on the premises at 164 Eddy since the beginning of the First World War, which is pre-Big Pharma, so your remedy was mixed up from glass jars right in front of you. The Picards, who took over at the end of the war, held it for 80 years, and one of the second-generation Picards, Giliane, was among the first women pharmacists in the province, and she had to get, in the 1950s, her licence in Ontario. Quebec didn’t consider women capable of professional healing then.
The pharmacy transferred to the healing hands of Roger Larouche in 1988 and remains there now.
Not content with revitalizing his neighbours, Roger has been an unflagging force in the ongoing revitalization of Vieux-Hull, some of which I recorded when I walked down Promenade du Portage.
We shall see the results of his efforts on Eddy the matchmaker’s street next time.