The only known and likely historically inaccurate portrait of Saint Catherine Tekakwitha
Kate McDonnell did me a solid and linked to my recent article about the future of the Faubourg on her site, the Montreal City Weblog (which should be regular required reading if you want to know what’s going on around town), but also pointed out that the right way to write what I might pronounce as ‘Saint Catherine’s Street’ should in fact be written (and pronounced too) ‘Ste-Catherine Street, despite the fact that my word processor is screaming red underlines at me for doing so.
Anyways it got me thinking – which Saint Catherine does the street refer to?
Is it Catherine of Alexandria, the virgin martyr whose touch apparently destroyed the eponymous breaking wheel and was later beheaded by the pagan Roman Emperor Maxentius?
Or was it Catherine of Siena, co-patron saint of Italy, philosopher and theologian who brought an end to the Avignon Papacy and helped restore Pope Gregory XI to the Holy See?
The answer is possibly neither as it was once a fashionable convention to name city streets after prominent locals and add a saintly prefix. Perhaps the best known example is Saint-Urbain, named after the 17th century landowner Urbain Tessier.
If the street is in fact simply named after a member of our city’s former bourgeoisie, perhaps it might be prudent and politically expedient to officially name the street in honour of Kateri Tekakwitha, baptized Catherine Tekakwitha and also known as Lily of the Mohawks, canonized by Pope Benedict XVI as recently as 2012.
I mean, she’s as close as this city is going to get to having it’s own saint (* untrue, see below), and she’s been immortalized in fiction both by Leonard Cohen (Beautiful Losers) and William Vollman (Fathers and Crows). Her story doesn’t inspire me to become a Catholic, but it’s inspirational insofar as it makes me think about what life was like during this city’s colonial period. It’s captivating in its own right. So why not make it official and remove the ambiguity? I think there’s a case to be made here; if one of this city’s most important streets is to be named after a saint, why not make it our saint?
The Catherine and Jacques could be a reference to a ‘road inspector’ (I’m assuming that means surveyor/street-namer) named Jacques Viger (not the mayor) and his daughter, Catherine-Elizabeth.
Or it could be named in honour of a Catherine de Bourbonnais who lived on the street in the 18th century.
So in this case, Saint Catherine Tekakwitha would be the closest this city’s going to get to having its own First Nations saint, given that she never actually lived here and was buried across the river.
It’s long been rumoured that the book’s protagonist, Dr. Jerome Martell, is based on the late, great Canadian surgeon Dr. Norman Bethune, (arguably the most famous Canadian of all time) and indeed, there are many similarities, though the author maintained the character of Dr. Martell wasn’t based on anyone in particular, though acknowledged Jerome was nonetheless similar in demeanour to a Dr. Rabinovich whom MacLennan knew, and who lived and practiced in Montreal in the 1930s. Apparently they had ‘similar backstories’.
Jerome Martell’s backstory, as told in the novel, is perhaps the most engaging thing I’ve read in the last five years.
I mean, talk about a page turner.
I didn’t know much about The Watch when I picked it up, other than that it takes place here in Montreal mostly in the 1930s and 1950s, which is in and of itself enough to get me to read just about anything. That there was this apparent connection to Norman Bethune was an added plus, and then I discovered it’s the inspiration for the Tragically Hip song Courage (for Hugh MacLennan).
The song’s reprise “courage, it couldn’t have come at a worse time” neatly paraphrases the story’s climax.
The Watch That Ends The Night tells the story of a man returned from the dead. The aforementioned doctor, who, again much like the real Dr. Bethune, left a promising career in Montreal to fight fascism in Europe, returns home after over a decade, much to the surprise of his former wife, his now university-aged daughter and best friend (the novel’s narrator, based on MacLennan and his life and experiences in Montreal in the 30s and 50s) who had stepped in to handle the familial responsibilities after they had received bad information suggesting the doctor had been killed by the Nazis. The character of Jerome Martell isn’t seeking to pick up his life where it had left off, but rather, he returns in an effort to bring closure to those he had left behind. Unfortunately and in parallel with Canada (and much of the developed world) as MacLennan describes it, the ‘lose ends’ of the 1930s come back to bite everyone in the ass, albeit in a subdued and sad fashion.
This is just a cursory overview of the plot, and it’s not giving anything away either. I won’t go in to any more detail but will simply say for something written about lives lived eighty years ago the book has a remarkable timelessness about it – it still seems very pertinent and I wondered whether any of the key social questions of the era have ever been answered.
It is in part a criticism of the generation which had survived the Depression and the Second World War but lost it’s desire to effect large-scale progressive change during the Cold War (and more specifically, the really shaky early years of the Cold War, back in the day when cities like Montreal had squadrons of interceptors on standby at Saint-Hubert airport and air raid sirens dotted suburban skylines. Back when we had bomb shelters built into the basements of federal government buildings downtown. I find it almost impossible to imagine what it must have actually felt like to live in a large city anticipating nuclear attack…)
For MacLennan as narrator, The Watch‘s present tense is the early 1950s, when Montreal was Canada’s metropolis and the Korean War was threatening to draw the United States into a direct conflict with the USSR, one many suspected would quickly go nuclear. MacLennan refers back to this ‘sword of damocles’ constantly, in parallel with his character’s present, and Jerome Martell’s previous wife Catherine’s troublesome heart, afflicted as it is and growing weaker with each passing year. Catherine symbolizes much of the youthful hope and popular socio-political engagement of the 1930s, and here too I can only imagine what that must have been like. I would say we’ve always been a politically engaged city, but there is a politically-militant class here. Imagine what it must have been like when the general population was engaged to the same degree, when a worldwide generation of people were organizing to improve our collective well-being, in some cases with terrifying results.
I had never considered, for example, that the rise of socialism and fascism (and everything in between) during the interwar years was a kind of response to a generation’s loss of faith with the established order after the First World War. MacLennan traces the curve from popular engagement, the days when communists and fascists were organizing themselves in the streets of Montreal, when Lionel Groulx established his Blue Shirts, when Mussolini was painted into the ceiling of a Roman Catholic church in Montreal’s Little Italy (etc.) through the forced socialization and state-planning of the war years and then into the era of prosperity and ‘apprehended annihilation’ which followed. MacLennan describes the budding of a modern Canada – precocious, stronger than it appears, but perhaps like a teenager who matured too quickly, fundamentally unsure of itself despite its outward, largely aesthetic confidence.
The two focal characters, the male and female leads, are both bridges from the 1930s, when they were individually at their peaks and served as channels for hope and courage against a growing darkness. Between their, and the narrator’s, three points of view they collectively relate the coming of the darkest hour, something else I’ve had a hard time rapping my head around. Hitler came to power in 1933 and for six years the world assumed the worst was coming, and they were right. For six years he preached fascism and fascism grew in Europe. Alliances were formed, territories annexed. What I hadn’t appreciated was that Hitler presented himself as the Europe’s primary defence against Communism, and thus also the primary defender of Christianity against State Atheism. When he invaded France, it was (as the Nazis described it) to stop the spread of socialism and international communism, both of which were thought to be spread by ‘foreign subversives, immigrant terrorists’ etc.
Sound familiar?
Suffice it to say I have an entirely new perspective on the origins of the Second World War, and of the long-term implications of the Spanish Civil War.
MacLennan’s emotionally exhausted and existentially bankrupt early Cold War society leaves the great questions of an earlier generation unanswered, the negative implications of which are illustrated by the calamities that befall the three central characters after the doctor returns from the dead.
The insinuation is pretty straightforward – the past is going to catch up with us.
In any event, an inspired and probing book, and a profoundly Canadian book in the grand tradition, mixing social analysis and criticism, history, tragedy and relatable, personal Pyrrhic victories.
I remember when I first started coming downtown as a teenager (around the turn of the century) Le Faubourg seemed quintessentially Montreal – a large and often bustling urban market with a cosmopolitan food court integrated seamlessly into the urban fabric. It wasn’t a shopping mall even if it had a similar overall aesthetic on the inside, it certainly didn’t feel like a shopping mall from the outside. I appreciated it for integrating so many different functions into a single building, for the masses of people that always seemed to be in there, for how authentic it felt. A few years later when I commenced my studies at Concordia, the Faubourg was still a great place to grab lunch or to study between classes. In my youth, I considered the Faubourg a kind of ‘insider’s knowledge’; with so much of the urban core seemingly oriented towards tourists or suburbanites, the Faubourg seemed almost hidden in plain sight. For an individual who was looking for traces of sustainable urban lifestyles in what otherwise appeared to be little more than a rental ghetto, the Faubourg was a comforting reality – it meant real people still lived in a city I was told had been largely depopulated.
Anyways, prior to becoming an urban market in 1986, the Faubourg had been abandoned for several years after it ceased being one of the city’s first major downtown car dealerships (the Autorow – where fine McLaughlin Buick’s could be purchased circa. 1927). For a while in the 1970s, there was a plan to redevelop the Grey Nuns’ motherhouse (and quite possible the Faubourg as well though I’m not 100% sure) into a massive shopping and office complex similar to Westmount Square or Complexe Desjardins, a plan which was ultimately fought off by crusading architectural preservationist Phyllis Lambert. The conversion of the former car dealership into an urban market was a major undertaking as it involved both digging below the existing structure as well as building on top of it, in addition to completely remodelling the interior. The new Faubourg Ste-Catherine would be joined to a hotel (an Econolodge if memory serves) built at the southwest corner of Guy and Ste-Catherine Street (today it’s Concordia University’s Faubourg Tower Building), and featured a multiscreen cinema in the basement, in addition to a rooftop bar. Interesting note: the site of the Faubourg Building was once the location of Hector ‘Toe’ Blake’s Tavern, which would have closed in 1983. Also, the multiplex theatre in the basement closed and was converted into lecture halls (no shit!) in 2001, four years after Concordia bought the building to house the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema.
Neat, isn’t it!?
Back to the Faubourg’s mid-1980s renaissance. Conversions of this nature were fairly common in Montreal in the late-1980s through to the 1990s; other prominent examples of this kind of ‘integrationist’ approach to rehabilitating the urban environment would include the construction of the World Trade Centre and Intercontinental Hotel in the Quartier Internationale, the Alcan headquarters, Promenades de la Cathedrale and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, though the widespread rehabilitation of traditional Montreal triplexes and former industrial space throughout the city during this time is the single overall best example of the phenomenon. After a thirty year period (from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s) of demolition and new construction, Montreal changed course and began trying to do more with what it already had.
I wonder if this move wasn’t done in anticipation of Concordia buying the building to turn it into some kind of a student centre? I remember when I was a member of the Concordia Student Union back in 2005-2006 there was a lot of talk about this proposal, as a member of the Board of Governors ran the company which owned the Faubourg at the time. The school was insistent that the new Faubourg would have commercial rental properties facing Ste-Catherine and that the students would get the rest of the space, though the students wanted the entire space and didn’t want storefronts as part of the deal. It all eventually fell through, but the damage was done.
As it stands today none of it seems to work at all.
And here’s where I see an opportunity.
I think the Faubourg should revert back to being an urban market, but not as it once was. Rather, I think the city should purchase it and redevelop it was a public market, much in the same style as the Atwater or Jean-Talon markets.
And here’s why it’s in the city’s interest to do so: thousands upon thousands of new residents will soon be pouring into the new condo towers going up but a few blocks east of the Faubourg and they need an ‘urban market’ to go along with their ‘urban lifestyles’. I can’t imagine how a public market at the Faubourg could possibly lose money.
What’s killing the Faubourg now is excessively high rents and an illogical renovation which has left the building careening headlong into abandon. If the city buys the building outright for the express purpose of converting into a market, it can reset rental rates to more appropriate levels, encouraging sustainable business development.
But the city can’t go it alone and would need some kind of a ‘strategic partner’. Concordia is the logical choice given it’s ownership of the Faubourg Building and the Grey Nun’s Motherhouse immediately to the south, which is itself currently being transformed into student housing.
Hundreds of hungry students living next to a market…
Perhaps I’ve got a smidge too much time on my hands…
In any event, here’s my very own Montreal transit fantasy map. This is the mass transit system I’d like to see for my city, ideally within the next twenty years but hey, much sooner would be great too.
Concerning extensions, I’ve used the existing AMT commuter rail network, including the soon to be completed Train de l’Est going towards Mascouche (indicated by the thin magenta line) and have added a possible route that, much like the Train de l’Est, shares part of the AMT’s Deux-Montagnes line. The turquoise-coloured line could potentially provide a third commuter rail line to the West Island, relieving the already congested and over-burdened Deux-Montagnes & Hudson lines and providing service almost as far as the Fairview Pointe-Claire shopping centre (though, admittedly, there’d be a lot of work to do to actually connect what remains of this branch with the shopping centre and it’s key bus terminus). Because so much of the Hymus Branch cuts through the Pointe-Claire industrial sector along Highway 40, it’s possible that a kind of ‘express’ service develop here (as there wouldn’t be much point developing stations between a potential terminus near Fairview and where the Hymus Branch links up with the Deux-Montagnes line). Alternatively, I suppose it wouldn’t make much difference if a train station were simply built where the line currently ends and STM buses connected it with Fairview’s bus terminal, but I digress.
In a similar vein, I’ve prolonged the Green Line from Angrignon west through LaSalle to intersect the AMT’s Candiac line, providing an intermodal station right after the bridge, while the Orange Line has been extended north by two stops in Saint-Laurent with a new terminus at an intermodal station at Bois-Franc on the busy Deux-Montagnes Line (which currently accounts for 45% of the AMT’s passengers). The Yellow Line has also been extended to alleviate congestion on the Orange and Green lines that pass through the CBD. The new Yellow Line would have a station at (or near) the Bonsecours Market to provide better access to the Old Port and Old Montreal and would terminate at McGill rather than Berri-UQAM, with stops on Prince-Arthur (near St-Laurent in an effort to revitalize the pedestrian mall), Parc & Pine (to access the mountain, Parc Jeanne-Mance, Molson Stadium etc.) and somewhere along Milton to open up the McGill Ghetto.
And then I added the purple line along Pie-IX boulevard, running from Montreal North to the Olympic Stadium, with a transfer station where it intersects the Blue Line, and an intermodal station connecting to the AMT’s Mascouche line.
In addition, using the Mount Royal Tunnel to get the Blue Line to the city, and building a new line under Pie-IX, have both been on the drawing board before (in fact, the official STM map from about 1980 to 1990 portrayed the Pie-IX line as the inevitable next step as a dotted white line).
Perhaps the most unique component of this transit map is the inclusion of a possible surface light-rail route, as indicated by the thin red line on the map, but in this case as well, I’m not exactly starting from scratch. Given that the new Champlain Bridge is supposed to have an LRT integrated into it, and that the most likely route from the bridge to the city is up the Bonaventure Corridor, I figured such a system could theoretically make use of much more of this city’s existing rail infrastructure.
This would effectively turn Place Bonaventure into a major transit hub, linking the city’s two main train stations with the heart of the RÉSO and further becoming the main terminal for a potential light rail system.
I look at this map and I see the potential for a city that is much better connected to itself, evolving past our current model which is effectively only designed to move commuters at two different rates of operation and along two different scales of distance. The system I’ve envisioned is designed to connect as much of the city as possible to high-speed, high-capacity mass transit, while further permitting a greater amount of the most heavily populated part of the island to exist within a well-defined ‘high-access’ zone. With eleven intermodal stations, more of urban Montreal becomes accessible to suburban commuters, which in turn could provide prospective suburban home owners with many more options to choose from.
And in the city, well, imagine a system such as this along with more buses, reserved bus lanes and even bus rapid transit (BRT) replacing traditional bus routes.
Would anyone living in downtown Montreal really need a car with such a system?
Ultimately, and regardless of cleaner, more fuel efficient or otherwise electric engines, congestion is still going to be a major concern. We have to realize that our street system was designed, for the most part, in a horse-drawn era in which mass transit was the norm for everyone. Our roads aren’t really built to handle the number of cars currently using them and this is why it costs so much to repair and maintain them each and every year. Removing cars and (simultaneously) improving our public mass transit system is in my opinion the only logical way forward for our city. It wouldn’t just be good for the environment, but would be good for our pocket books as well.
In any event, something to think about. Please comment!
A loyal reader posted this photograph in response to a question about where one can find archival street scenes of Montreal. The McCord Museum has the famed Notman collection, which provides an incredibly fascinating glimpse into the lives of Montrealers, and what their city looked like, around the turn the 20th century.
Notman was king instagrammer of his time, in a certain way of thinking.
The photo above is of His Majesty’s Theatre, once the city’s premier theatre and host to some of the city’s first major opera companies and regular performances of chamber music. It had a capacity for 1750 people and two balconies, and over time would host a wide variety of performers, including Sergei Rachmaninoff and Paul Robeson.
Now can you guess where this important landmark once stood?
In any event I thought it was at the very least a neat coincidence.
But what really struck me about the photo on top was the trees.
Big badass oaks and elms and maples growing taller than most triplexes, and enough of them to make it seem as though some roads disappear off into the woods.
I look out my back window onto the alley, a typical Saint Henri alleyway, with trees climbing ever skyward, dwarfing the brownstones below them. In winter I can see to the end of the block. In summer I can’t see further than the end of my building, for everything else is masked in green.
Today there are parts of the city where great trees will likely never grow again, for large buildings stacked too close together block out necessary sunlight. Even on a street as wide as McGill College, the trees planted twenty years ago are all sickly looking; many have been removed outright.
I think we’d be wise to take a long look at these old photos and ask ourselves whether we could afford to be a little greener. Not just for aesthetics, there are practical reasons to want to do this, chief among them to increase the quality of the air we breathe and to provide a bulwark against seasonal flooding. Each tree, each patch of green acting like a sponge and a vent at the same time.
There’s been a bit of buzz lately concerning both the future of the Olympic Stadium and the possible return of the Montreal Expos, two of my favourite subjects, incidentally. There’s a lot of information floating around so I figured I’d try to reign it all in, so to speak.
First, as to the Expos, the news is that a lobby group called the Montreal Baseball Project, led by former Expo Warren Cromartie, has released a feasibility study conducted by Ernst & Young, and with the support of the Montreal Board of Trade. Their opinion, based on the study’s results, is that a return of Major League Baseball (herein MLB) is indeed feasible.
As Mr. Cromartie puts it, baseball needs two things to survive: history and numbers. I’m in total agreement as to the historical component – baseball has been a popular pastime and spectator sport in our city for well over a hundred years. The sport itself is derived from traditional games played in the United Kingdom (namely, rounders and cricket) and, given our city’s proximity to the United States and our shared cultural experience with the Northeastern States in particular, it should come as no surprise that baseball has significant historical roots here. The more recent history is perhaps the most significant. Montreal is where Jackie Robinson, the first African American to break the ‘colour-barrier’ in the MLB got his start. We are the city of Canada’s first MLB team, the Montreal Expos, and for most of the team’s life they played in a futuristic and comparatively massive indoor stadium, perhaps the single most unique stadium in MLB history.
We made a run on the pennant in 1981 and fielded perhaps our greatest ever team in the tragically abridged 1994 season, the one many Montrealers still honestly believe we would have won.
According to Mr. Cromartie, we now have the numbers too. The whole project is estimated to cost over a billion dollars, of which about half would be to acquire an existing MLB franchise (the Tampa Bay Rays are rumoured to be the preferred pick, given their poor performance and financial issues in that city), while the other half builds a new baseball stadium somewhere ‘within two kilometres of downtown Montreal’. A 36,000-seat capacity stadium would be required and the report indicates favouring the Fenway Park (home of the Boston Red Sox) model (which is to say about the same capacity and integrated into the urban environment). Locations currently being studied include the Wellington Basin, the Montreal Children’s Hospital and a parcel of land adjacent to the Bonaventure Expressway. The existing Olympic Stadium (former home of the Montreal Expos) and the old Blue Bonnets site are also being considered.
Key to the success of this plan is that the public chips in $335 million, which according to the findings of the report will be paid back to the (assumedly) provincial government within eight years. Further, the report indicates projected tax revenue, largely from the salaries of the players, over the course of the next twenty-two years.
If this is accurate, as sports writer and broadcaster Dave Kauffman put it, all governments should get into the stadium-building business. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in our own city with regards to the Olympic Stadium, this sometimes doesn’t quite work out and winds up costing the taxpayers a ridiculous sum (i.e. the billion dollars already spent by Quebec taxpayers on the existing stadium which formerly hosted an MLB franchise for 28 years).
But assuming that this report is accurate, is there really a market for baseball in our city, today?
I’m of the opinion that there can be a market for just about everything, the question is how well it’s marketed.
Permanence is the real issue – how do you get the team to stay? How is interest maintained?
Montreal benefits from two particular pro-sports success stories. First, and perhaps most obvious, is the Montreal Canadiens, the single most successful professional ice-hockey club in the entire world and one of the most successful pro-sport franchises of all time. The second, and perhaps a bit less obvious example, would be the Montreal Alouettes. The Alouettes prove that a pro-sport franchise can be resurrected successfully in Montreal, and further still that 1) downtown stadiums don’t necessarily have to be ‘downtown’ and 2) that recycling an old stadium helps engage the public with the historical aspects of the team.
In sum, people like ‘getting their history back’.
Both the Als and the Habs play up their history as part of their respective ‘raisons-d’etres’ (an admittedly ridiculous and self-fulfilling premise; “we’ve been around for a long time, and thus that’s why we’re here and you need to like us” – but who cares how silly it is, it works more often than not); the resurrected Expos could do the same for the same purposes, and this, in conjunction with the rush of enthusiasm sure to greet any professional club, would sustain interest at least for a little while.
But neither the province nor the city can get into the business of running a ball club, and if this project starts losing steam in a few years, neither should bail out the team. The team is the business, and thus it is their business to market the hell out of the themselves, popularize the sport locally, ingratiate the public by getting heavily involved in philanthropic pursuits and form the necessary strategic corporate partnerships to alleviate as much of the burden as possible from the taxpayers. In other words, it’s going to take more than simply promising to repay the start-up capital in eight years to truly gain the public’s support.
In addition to certain public-confidence-winning efforts I already mentioned, I would argue strongly in favour of provisions, such as for the creation of a trust financed through a portion of ticket and concession sales, which could in turn be used to support various public initiatives. This $335 million investment would be a lot more palatable if what it produces eventually gives back to the people that made it happen in the first place. If an ‘Expos Trust’ was able to finance specialist medical equipment for a hospital, or provides for the construction of a new homeless shelter, or finances the creation of a school, the potential fan base increases. Moreover, civic engagement with the team increases too, and that’s good for all interested parties.
Though this report is encouraging, there are still many obstacles in the way.
All this said, I think the Montreal Baseball Project should be open to using the Olympic Stadium at least for a while as it drums up interest. We should start with exhibition games and move forward from there, but we shouldn’t wait until the stadium is built to field a team. The Alouettes used the Big O while Molson Stadium was being renovated for their explicit use, so why not follow their lead. Furthermore, if the Expos work out some kind of deal with the STM (again, much like the Als have), then special shuttle buses could help make the Big O a lot more ‘accessible’ than it currently is.
I realize as I’m writing this that I don’t have any space to write about the Big O and its potential future, so I’ll save that for another post.
Until then, just remember these key facts in case you need to debunk any of the popular theories surrounding the Expos. This is a city of naysayers, and I think both Mr. Cromartie and the MBP have a point to be made, but I don’t want them to be drowned out by what effectively amounts to little more than low morale.
1. Baseball ‘works’ in Montreal and has ‘worked’ here for more years than not. The Expos have been gone for a decade, this is true, but they existed for 35 years prior to that. Before them the Montreal Royals existed from 1897-1917 and then again from 1928 to 1960. Ergo, the ‘gaps’ without baseball average about a decade and since 1897 we’ve only been without baseball in this city for 30 out of 116 years.
3. We lost the Expos due to bad management and taking the fans for granted, not because there’s no love for baseball here. Even the protracted dispute over Labatt Park didn’t sink the club (but putting so many eggs in an undeliverable basket didn’t help).
