The stark misery around Berri-UQAM these days is nothing new. The disreputable, even if it no longer has the same face today, rubs shoulders with the splendours of the city center since the very beginnings of the metropolis. Back in the past to understand the present of the Latin Quarter.
In 1800, the “city of Montreal” barely exceeded Berri Street. Orchards flourish in this stronghold of wealthy French-Canadian families. The Papineaus, Vigers, Guys, Valois and Cherriers prospered in what used to be called the Saint-Jacques district.
Already, at that time, wealth rubbed shoulders with poverty. In 1842, to the east of the nascent suburb, a religious community was established: the Sisters of Providence.
This pillar of Montreal charity was born from the will of a certain Émilie Gamelin. His “Asylum of Providence” built on the square that now bears his name serves a soup kitchen. This “asylum” also housed “60 crippled women”, including “6 mad, 11 imbeciles, 9 paralytics, 6 nervous, 6 lame, 12 deaf, 4 deaf-mutes” on the death of Sister Gamelin, in 1851, according to the chronicles of the time.
To add to the misery that haunted the place, a “correctional prison” was set up at the corner of what is now Boulevard De Maisonneuve, can we read on a map dated 1912. It is actually a a school, the Saint-Antoine Institute, which “reforms” the vagabonds of the time.
“There weren’t just delinquent boys,” explains Montreal Exploration historian Bernard Vallée. “Young offenders were placed with orphans or dysfunctional families. There were also young girls who were described as delinquents, but also young girls who came from dysfunctional families. At the time, we did not know the difference. »
The University of Montreal — under the supervision of Laval University — is being built not far away, injecting a dose of student chaos into the neighborhood. Saint-Jacques Church — long the cathedral of Montreal before it was burnt down and a new cathedral was built in Dominion Square — stood in the center of this mixed neighborhood. In these streets end up crossing “as many people of the bourgeoisie as of the working class”. We also forget that we distributed there at the beginning of the XXe century of pasteurized milk. “It has brought down infant mortality in an exceptional way,” says Mr. Vallée.
From mixed to variegated
The Belle Epoque breathes in this district made up of craftsmen, bourgeois, their university children, shops, bars… and charities.
A wave of disuse took root in the Latin Quarter when the First World War broke out. The wealthiest then left this district for the new bourgeois Eldorado of the metropolis: Outremont. The sumptuous residences are subdivided into rooming houses. Workers and students are colorful in the lower part of the city, which is cared for less and less. “These are houses in which single people live, but who have more modest incomes”, says Bernard Vallée.
Residents crowd these crowded streets. The Saint-Antoine Institute moves east around 1930. The move of the University of Montreal begins. We eye the heights of Mount Royal. The density reached such a point that brothels, gambling houses and underworld fauna proliferated between Saint-Denis and Saint-Laurent. Nothing fancy.
A second historian, professor emeritus of UQAM Paul-André Linteau, speaks bluntly of the “radical transformation” of the sector. “The Sisters of Providence were always there. They’re going to have their famous soup kitchen in the neighborhood. They will help the poor in the neighborhood, he says. When we went east, there was a kind of gradation between Sainte-Marie, Hochelaga and Maisonneuve. The poorest was Sainte-Marie. It was like that until the 1960s.
A cul-de-sac modernity
A household is needed on the edge of the Glorious Thirties. “At that time, we were in old urban stock. Houses built in the second half of the XJXe century, which 100 years later had become slums in several cases. The reputation is more degraded,” says Paul-André Linteau in his book on rue Sainte-Catherine.
Mayor Jean Drapeau’s bursts of grandeur are sweeping through this downtown area. A metro opens with a hope of renewal. Bad luck or bad faith (the story does not tell) makes things easier. The building of the Sisters of Providence burned down in 1963, freeing up the central block.
Motorway architecture dominated the landscape when the entrance to the Berri-De Montigny metro station was inaugurated in October 1966. Parking lots complete the freshly leveled square.
“Rue Berri, an ordinary street which ran up against the gardens of the Asile de la Providence, is extended, indicates Bernard Vallée. We want to make it a kind of highway, an expressway that joins the Metropolitan. This explains the incredible width of the street in front of the National Library and the beginning of the interchange that we find in the corner. »
Among the other destructions under the steamroller of modernity, let us name the famous store Dupuis Frères founded in 1868, replaced since by the blind brutalism of the building “Place Dupuis”. Red Light is also recycled by building Habitations Jeanne-Mance. Poverty finds itself once again on the streets.
Years pass and what was supposed to be only temporary becomes permanent. Thirty years would pass before the Jardins Gamelin, which we visit today, sprouted on the asphalt of the parking lot in 1992.
All these modern renovations leave a bitter taste in the mouths of historians in love with Montreal, such as Bernard Vallée, who speaks of a “sterilization” of urban life. “However, we are right in the city center! The degradation started with projects that didn’t really take the corner into account. »
Traces of this quiet abandonment of the social fabric abound. A little to the south, the former School of Furniture, where the manifesto was born Global denial, at the corner of René-Lévesque and Berri, remains unknown to all. Next door, the CHSLD Jacques-Viger has been closed for more than ten years, leaving in agony a splendid heritage building with 150 years of useful life. To the north, the National Library of Quebec seems to have closed the books on a second phase. The project that was to extend this temple of knowledge to Ontario Street no longer makes anyone talk or dream. And should we go back to the sad saga of the Voyageur island and its disused station which leads travelers to an “unsanitary” kiosk?
History therefore seems to be repeating itself with, to the west, a bourgeois district which looks towards its shows, to the east, a popular district which is concentrated there and, in the middle, a quadrilateral from which one looks away.