A shantytown in the shadow of Halifax’s monied south end
Bill Mont may have turned 94 the other day but he still gets around pretty well.
Every week, in fact, he likes to visit Point Pleasant Park, because that piece of history matters to him.
“It brings back memories,” he told me.
Black Rock Beach was his swimming hole.
There, when he was a kid, the beach sand was coated in hardened black oil washed ashore from the harbour traffic. Since the Mont household was a poor one, he foraged there for the oil-encrusted mussels and periwinkles that, when washed, were edible.
Then he turned north, in the direction of what is now the South End Container Terminal, and struck out for home.
Before Mont became the flea market king, before he owned Devil’s Island in Halifax Harbour and Pleasant Cemetery in Sackville, he lived an urchin’s life in Halifax’s south end in a place with the bucolic name of Greenbank.
On Wednesday I took a drive down past some of the city’s best addresses to see where his old home once stood. Above Mont ‘s old Clarence Street address, an open-house for a building offering $2,000-per-month one-bedroom apartments was underway. Just to the east, the container pier hummed, clanked, and hissed.
I was there because I wanted to know how a place can just disappear, and because Greenbank, in a way, seems like the perfect metaphor for a city now perpetually being remade.
RIGHT OUT OF DICKENS
Car trouble prevented me from hearing Mont tell a crowd at the Halifax Central Library about Greenbank. Instead, I settled for a telephone conversation which meant I asked Mont a question and then feverishly typed notes as the yarns tumbled forth.
It’s a story right out of Dickens, really, the way his father, a Lebanese boxing champ, died riding the railcars in the United States and how Mont was just five when, in 1934, he and his mother went to live with a couple he calls his stepparents in Greenbank.
His new home was originally a shanty town, for the workers who carved out the railway cut in Halifax’s south end and later built a harbourside complex of modern piers and sheds.
“The shacks were supposed to have been torn down after the terminals opened, but they survived,” Stephen Kimber wrote in his book Sailors, Slackers and Blind Pigs. “Families took them over, put additions on. Other folks built new cottages nearby. Some of the land those cottages squatted on was bought up by the local gentry, who regarded the strategically situated shantytown … as a wise long-term investment.”
By the time Mont arrived, Greenbank was mostly home to shipyard stevedores and railway freight handlers who toiled in the clanking and hissing enterprises nearby. Otherwise, not much had changed.
The tarpaper homes were still without plumbing or power. There were only three community wells that would go dry in the middle of summer.
“We used to have to carry a couple of buckets up to the Tower Road bridge and all the way home,” he said.
It was, after all, the midst of the Great Depression.
Showing the kind of entrepreneurial drive that Mont would one day exhibit, his stepmother ran a thriving bootlegging operation: serving the stevedores and freight handlers dinner, taking a percentage of the pot at their card games, and selling them wine at a nice markup all during the prohibition years.
Out of necessity, Mont learned to scrounge at an early age, heading up to a butcher’s shop on Inglis Street for dog bones that would go into the soup pot — “My mother could make soup out of anything,” he said — finding fruit and vegetables where the Barrington Street Superstore now stands, using dip nets to poach lobsters out beyond the harbour breakwater, and scouring the rail cut for bottles, copper and anything else that could be sold.
Everyday life in Greenbank was full of small indignities. He and the other kids had to carry passes to be allowed through security at the government piers. Mont attended Tower Road School with the “rich kids” — a classmate was Robert Macneil the acclaimed author and broadcaster — which meant walking past homes like the Young Street castle then owned by the Oland brewing family, on the way to and from their tarpaper homes.
THE SWEET SPOTS
Childhood there wasn’t all bad: they played baseball at the nearby field, and skated and played hockey on Steele’s Pond, now as faint a memory as Greenbank.
Mont, surely as gregarious then as he is now, had friends, notably a stevedore’s son named Riggs. He also liked to frequent the community store run by a relation of hockey great Brad Marchand, where he would play checkers, and while away time on the pinball machine. But this is how impoverished life was: students at Tower Road School were required to supply their own lead pencils. His stepmother refused. When Mont played hooky out of embarrassment, a truancy officer picked him up.
ROUGH SENTENCE FOR A NINE YEAR OLD
In another Dickensian moment, he went to court, where a judge sentenced him to two-and-a-half years in the precursor to the Shelburne School for Boys where life was mighty rough for a nine year old.
Upon release, Mont returned to Tower Road School, but by 12 he was working as a chipper and scaler, crawling through the nearby shipyard’s bilges and boilers.
A year later, with most ablebodied men at war, he started working for the railway, first picking up garbage along the tracks, and in the ensuing years, doing most every job available there from cleaning and red-capping to carrying luggage for celebrities like Alan Ladd and Ronald Reagan.
THE END OF GREENBANK
As Mont aged, Greenbank began to empty out. In a situation analogous to Africville, the African-canadian community at the other end of the city that was bull-dozed in 1967, the residents there did not have deeds to the land on which they lived.
It was $5 per month for the tumbledown Mont house. Then one day in 1955 a letter came from the owner saying they had a month to pack their belongings and begone. By then, Greenbank, which consisted of some four dozen households when they arrived, had just two houses. Mont took a few boards from the old house with him when he left to build his own residence in Spryfield.
“That was the end of Greenbank,” Mont said.
The end, other than when he revisits his old stomping ground, at which point in his mind, the place once again lives in all its ruined glory.