Third in a series of four articles dedicated to books that crystallize the essence of a Montreal neighborhood. This week, we delve into the works of those who immortalized the Southwest.
“The train passed. A pungent smell of coal filled the street. A whirlwind of soot oscillated between the sky and the tops of the houses. As the soot began to descend, the Saint-Henri bell tower first appeared, without a base, like a phantom arrow in the clouds. The clock appeared; its illuminated dial made a hole in the steam trails; then, little by little, the entire church emerged, a tall Jesuit-style building. In the center of the flowerbed, a Sacré-Coeur, arms outstretched, received the last bits of coal. The parish emerged. It was recomposing itself in its tranquility and its power of duration. School, church, convent: a secular block tightly knotted
in the heart of the urban jungle as in the hollow of the Laurentian valleys. Beyond opened streets with low houses, sinking on each side towards the districts of great poverty, above towards Workman Street and Saint-Antoine Street, and, below, against the Lachine Canal where Saint-Henri beats mattresses, weaves thread, silk, cotton, pushes the loom, unwinds the bobbins, while the earth trembles, the trains hurtle down, the siren blares, the boats, propellers, rails and whistles spell out adventure around him.
In 1945, Gabrielle Roy gave Montreal the emblematic novel of its modernity, and the South-West, her great work. Few authors have been able to describe with such striking realism the daily life of the Montreal working class, the large families crammed into tiny dwellings, the deafening noise and black smoke of the locomotives.
Today, the borough, which straddles the Lachine Canal and includes the neighbourhoods of Saint-Henri, Griffintown, Little Burgundy, Pointe-Saint-Charles, Ville-Émard and Côte-Saint-Paul, has changed a lot. Since the 1970s, local stakeholders have mobilized to bring about an economic and social revival, and new urban development approaches led by real estate developers have contributed to the intensive gentrification of the various neighbourhoods, profoundly transforming their appearance and the experience of the people who live and work there; as evidenced by the literature that has emerged in recent years.
Griffintown
The writer and columnist at Duty Marie Hélène Poitras discovered Griffintown 20 years ago when she worked as a coachwoman and took care of horses in the neighbourhood stables. At the time, the neighbourhood’s eminently cinematic aspect inspired her second novel, Griffintown (Alto, 2013), a poetic western in the world of the coachmen of Old Montreal, and their tragic and heterogeneous destinies.
“I felt like I was in a cowboy movie in this neglected corner of the city, which had first been the welcoming home of several Irish immigrants. The narrow buildings, the large carriage doors, the ruins of churches in some parks gave the place a strange feel. The stables were also really special, especially the ugliest and biggest one, which I had renamed “The Tin Castle”. At sunset, with the smell of leather, hay, rust dust; that was the Southwest, for me. One day, a coachman told me that we were more precisely in Griffintown, and it was a trigger; I had found the name of my western village.”
Marie Hélène Poitras no longer finds this magic when she walks the streets of the neighborhood today. Ten years after her experience as a coachwoman, she worked as a researcher for the show Belle and Bumwhose offices were located on Saint-Patrick Street. “Every day I saw the trucks bringing in the materials, the condo towers being built one after the other…”
Then, last year, invited by a teacher to speak to her students about her novel directly in the neighbourhood, the writer grasped the full extent of the transformation. “By showing them the remains of what I had known, we were really able to understand how gentrification works, how it invades space. Ironically, Griffintown has become an example not to be repeated, because there is no place for families to flourish, no real grocery store, few schools. It’s as if the neighbourhood had been designed for people jet set who only pass through from time to time. Then, the neighborhood lost all that was left of its soul when the horses left, following the ban on carriages in Old Montreal. It seems like there is no more personality. I really had a special experience in a place, certainly rough And trash, but which no longer exists.”
Little Burgundy
Mélanie Michaud, for her part, had a far from magical experience in her childhood neighborhood, Little Burgundy; a journey that she recounts in her first novel, Burgundy (La Mèche) — according to the nickname given to the neighborhood by locals — published in 2020.
“I don’t have good memories of the ten years I lived there, in the 1980s. The neighborhood reminds me of a life lived in fear; battles, thieves, ambient violence. It was like being constantly in a film tension, which I still feel when I visit the area today. You always had to fight for something; to be heard, to eat, for your physical integrity.”
Today, as the borough becomes visibly gentrified, Mélanie Michaud believes that the demarcation between Little Burgundy and the other neighbourhoods remains very visible. “There is the south of Notre-Dame, with wealthy people who live in a certain tranquility and disappear into their cottages on weekends, and there is the north, with its brown and grey buildings, its poverty that encloses and suffocates people in the midst of wealth. Even if there have been efforts at urban planning, it is not by putting up plants and murals of jazzmen that we change the nature of a neighborhood. When I moved to Rosemont, where I am raising my son, I gave him ten more years of life expectancy. Just by changing my postal code.
And even though the neighbourhood is where jazz culture was born in Montreal—Oscar Peterson was born there—residents had no access to this cultural effervescence. “In the 1980s, there were four rows of books in the neighbourhood library. Jazz was not listened to in white families. Réjean Ducharme came from the neighbourhood, but he doesn’t mention it explicitly. No one claims to be from there. There is a shame associated with Burgundy that I had to overcome in order to write my story.”
Saint-Henri
For Daniel Grenier, who lived in Saint-Henri but did not grow up there, culture was crucial in his discovery and love of the neighbourhood. “I was born in the suburbs, and I knew at a very young age that I wanted to move to Montreal.” He initially settled near the Castelnau metro station, but later chose to settle in Saint-Henri. “I was initially motivated by friendly reasons, then I discovered the culture and literature associated with the neighbourhood. It was through them that I made the place my own, thanks to Gabrielle Roy, and to Hubert Aquin and Jacques Godbout, with the documentary In Saint-Henri on September 5thThe fact that they weren’t from the area – Gabrielle Roy came down the mountain to observe the environment she wanted to depict – gave me permission to write.”
The collection of short stories he drew from it — Despite everything, we laugh in Saint-Henri (Le Quartanier, 2012) — is a dizzying dive into the humanity of the neighborhood, and into the imagination of an author fueled by the places that surround him. “I didn’t want to distort what I saw during my wanderings in the neighborhood, but fiction allowed me to use the kind of mythification that places call for, if only through the figure of Louis Cyr, or the Dubois brothers, who led French-speaking organized crime. All of this arouses grandiloquence and wonder. At the same time, I also had the impression of meeting the Florentine of Second-hand happiness — an ordinary woman — every day on Notre-Dame. And these characters have also become a great source of inspiration.
Jacques Godbout, in Hubert Aquin’s documentary, is perhaps the one who best explains the effect that the South-West has on artists, this neighborhood that seems to reinvent itself in a thousand and one ways under each person’s pen. “The most difficult thing is to adjust the image we had of the reality that is the one we discover. […] We would have liked to offer you an exotic film. We are happy to offer you one that is authentic. Saint-Henri des Tanneries resembles other neighborhoods more than itself. […] The mystery remains entirely within.”