In 1989, three years after a family trip to Vancouver for Expo 86, my father took me to Montreal, the place of his birth, for a family wedding. I recall driving through Ontario and arriving in Quebec, a place I’d only known through my father’s stories and the images of Bon Homme I’d seen in a Men Without Hats music video and my French class. We arrived in Montreal late in the evening on a summer evening, and I can recall my father cursing the traffic and pointing out the cross atop the Mountain. We spent a week in Montreal, and my father took me to Schwartz’, where I had my first taste of the smoked meat sandwich that he claimed would change forever how I thought about sandwiches.
My father’s Jewish family lived further up, just off of St. Laurent, in a mostly Greek neighbourhood. I wouldn’t be able to locate my Grandmother’s home today (she passed away in the early 90s), but I would be able to tell you the little pleasures I experienced there. Italian Ice cream in Little Italy, street fairs and a sense that here was a city that, like Winnipeg, came alive in the summer after that long, desperate period of winter hibernation. My grandmother’s best friend was a Portugese Catholic woman whom she had met some years ago, she lived on St. Viateur and brought me along one day to buy some groceries at a local deli, buying me a strange pomegranate soda pop for my accompanying her. Days later, we left, and while I remember wanting to leave and return to my playmates in Winnipeg (summer camp was just around the corner), I do know I enjoyed that city a lot more than I would let my father know.
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And more recently, how have I experienced it? I moved her two years ago, from Winnipeg, and encountered The Main as most university students in this city do – an extended watering hole with occasional restaurants that provide the infrastructure for all after school periods of recreation. But it’s certainly more than that, there’s a long-standing linguistic divide in this city, and most people name St. Laurent as the border – a French population to the East, an English population to the West… That dichotomy seems a little too simplistic for me, especially as St. Laurent is a street, or an area rather, characterized by a variety of ethnic groupings – Portuguese to Jewish to Greek to Italian to Chinese (in the south) to Polish. Montreal represents, more than any other city in Canada, with the possible exception of Toronto, the Trudeau-ean legacy of multicultularism. A mixture of groups and interests and populations that melds and merges, but manages to remain with a distinct identity. Neither Balkanization or the Melting Pot process of our neighbours to the South, St. Laurent is a vibrant and alive example of the cosmopolitan sense of urbanity that is often lacking or severely atrophied in other cities throughout North America, with their vast kilometres of suburban sprawl. Cities like Vancouver may have large and yes, vibrant ethnic communities (notably the Asian population), but the large expanses of space, and the planning of the city, allows recent immigrants to ghetto-ize themselves in a far more effective manner than immigrants to Montreal ever could.
St. Laurent can be read as a linear text of the immigration waves that hit Montreal – beginning with Old Montreal to the South, carrying on through Chinatown, past the entertainment district, into the Portuguese areas and on to neighbourhoods dominated by Greek families and into Little Italy. Each group came and established themselves along this main artery of the city, nudging up against each other in daily life, managing their own communities while contributing to a larger civil society.
I experience St. Laurent as both a link to a past of more rigidly established divides between ethnic communities, and as a foreshadowing of a bright and beautiful cosmopolitan city experience (the kind urban planners salivate over) that I hope will shape the revitalization of the North American city throughout the 21st century.
