By deciding to live in a century-old house, we necessarily think of ghosts. At least my boyfriend and me, who love ghost stories. Especially him, who can spend hours on YouTube watching videos of haunted houses, filmed by panicked people with their smartphones.
With the house he has just inherited on the death of his two parents, Mo and Djo, we can say that he is served. We see them everywhere. Sometimes we even talk to them, ask them if they are proud of us, of our renovations, of our decoration choices… And when we blaspheme while moving furniture, we can almost hear them laugh.
Mo and Djo are the owners who have lived in this house built in 1875 the longest – almost 50 years – so I think the vibrations are good and my boyfriend reenters a bosom. An only son, he describes his family as an “unlikely trio” and this place is the only witness to his hippie Holy Trinity. At first, he was just afraid of seeing his parents everywhere. Today, this is what comforts him, and I believe that our plan to live there allows him to get through his grief. He fears that I don’t feel at home in his original cocoon, so he pushes me on the back to make all the changes that suit me. But as I have the spirit of a museum curator, we never argue.
I think I have taken over the historical torch from my father-in-law Mo. I want to know everything about this house since I came across his papers on the deeds which date back to 1905 and which he had carefully preserved, with the names of the owners previous ones.
There was even in there the will of a certain Joseph Patrick Hewitt, who died under this roof in 1909, bequeathing it to his wife, ” lady » Catherine O’Brien. If there’s a ghost here, it’s probably him, and I suddenly feel like I’m in an Emily Brontë novel.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Our columnist was visited by Amélie Roy-Bergeron, Gabriel Deschambault and Justin Bur, from the Société d’histoire du Plateau-Mont-Royal, to learn more about her house and her neighborhood.
Who ever lived where we live now? Who has climbed the same stairs, used the same kitchen? I missed the origins. So I contacted Amélie Roy-Bergeron, from the Plateau-Mont-Royal Historical Society, who came to visit me with her friendly colleagues Justin Bur and Gabriel Deschambault. The latter also sent me by email a photo of the street in the 19th century.e century, with the church of Saint-Louis-de-France which burned down in 1933.
“The chronology of this house follows the chronology of the neighborhood very well,” says Justin Bur, a leading specialist in Plateau homes. He had done a good job of researching me, I thank him for that.
Ours is a charming and modest single-family home that does not have the presence of the superb houses of the Saint-Louis square not far away. It was built in 1875 by Ovila Saint-Jean, a carpenter who had purchased four lots and built four townhouses. But he went bankrupt immediately afterwards, so his buildings remained unoccupied for almost a year, when they had become the property of the Provincial Loan Co. Things are going well…
It was rented by various occupants until 1887 when it was purchased for $2,000 by Francis East, who resold it almost immediately at a profit to architect Charles T. Ballard for $2,300. In 1905, it was bought by the famous Joseph Patrick Hewitt who, as we now know, bequeathed this heritage to lady Katherine.
In 1923, the house was sold by this widow to Pinchas Silverman, a Jewish tailor. The house will have only Jewish owners until the 1950s, when it will be bought by a Mr. Forest, because it was located on the border of the Jewish quarter, and Justin Bur recalls that there were many synagogues in the area . Moreover, there would have been chicanery after the fire of the Saint-Louis-de-France church in 1933, since many did not want it to be rebuilt in this district which had become less Catholic…
This demographic shift, of course, was unpalatable. Both French and English. Justin Bur points out that in the 1930s, the Protestant schools in the axis of Saint-Laurent Boulevard, built in the 1910s, had in the 1930s a school population that was 97% Jewish. “This ultra-rapid transformation cannot be explained by normal migration, it means that people have fled! “, he specifies.
French Canadians, Protestant Anglos, Irish, Jews, it’s all exciting! And if my parents-in-law were able to buy this house really inexpensively in 1975, it’s because they were part of a movement since the end of the Second World War.
The buildings in the neighborhood were old, often transformed into rooming houses for the less fortunate, the neighborhood was getting poorer, because everyone was going to Westmount, Outremont or the suburbs. “It was new immigrants or young people from the counter-culture who came here then, explains Justin Bur, people who did not care that these were dilapidated houses ready for demolition, and it will last twenty years. before we end up thinking that the neighborhood is pretty. And along came gentrification…
My boyfriend confirms to me that he grew up surrounded by children of hippies who were called Mescaline or Zébulon, and many Portuguese children. Today, they must be called Jules or Romane, because there are a lot of French people. And descendants of hippies like my boyfriend.
No matter who comes after us, our names are forever inscribed in the history of this piece of land in Montreal. The proof ? We have just received our first notice of municipal taxes, which takes us away from ghosts and brings us back to solid ground. All the same, I find it special to make the names of Saint-Jean, East, Ballard, Hewitt, Silverman resonate within these walls – without forgetting lady Catherine O’Brien – where we hadn’t heard from them for a very long time. We don’t often know the names of our ghosts.