In pictures taken during its heyday in the 1950s, lower St. Laurent looks just like Broadway, lined with flashing signs, marquees, doormen and fancy cars. The famous Gaiety Theatre stood nearby on Clark and Ste. Catherine, where couples in fancy evening clothes (the only clothes they’d let you in with) would go and see Lily St. Cyr’s world-famous strip-tease act. All the patrons and staff of Peter’s that I spoke to had seen Lily St. Cyr perform (“well of course!” they all said. It would be harder to find a Montrealer over 60 who hadn’t see her than one who had.)
Back then, Christo had 18 employees working his tiny bar, with patrons often lined up 200 deep outside. People would come to the area from Rosemont, NDG, Lachine and other suburbs because until the mid-70s none of these municipalities permitted bars on their territory. The downtown area had quite the monopoly on bars for decades; in the 50s, only 125 liquor licenses existed on the entire island of Montreal. By contrast, Christo says that today, if you include restaurants, there are over 27 000 liquor licenses on the island. Consequently, business in many downtown bars declined in the late 70s, as suburbanites began drinking closer to home. (A few municipalities, such as Verdun, don’t permit bars to this day.)
Back in the day, it wasn’t unusual to have entire families go to the bars together. Christo remembered how an Irish family from Lachine, all 18 of them, would show up once a week, and get outrageously wasted. The dad would often end up having a fistfight with one of his sons, and have to take it outside. Christo also remembers many Slavs, Ukrainians and Polish people from Rosemont coming to drink at his bar back then.
In those days, many of the regulars were more particular drinkers than you’d see today. Christo remembers how one lady, a local secretary of the UN, used to come in every Sunday without fail and order one bottle of vermouth with a glass of hot water. The custom of the time was to serve patrons a whole bottle of whatever they were drinking. They could then pour themselves drinks at will, and would be charged the difference at the end of the night. (Bars in some U.S. states still serve liquor that way, and even let customers bring bottles home with them.)
Until the 1960s, the law regarding closing times was rigidly enforced. If you were caught open just once past closing time, you were padlocked the next day. During the Duplessis era of the 50s, closing time for bars was midnight. As soon as he was voted out in 1960, it was extended to 2 a.m. (It became the current 3 a.m. in the early 80s.)
The sudden loosening of laws was no doubt tied to the loss of Church influence on Quebec policy that followed the end of the Duplessis era (a cultural and political change termed the ‘Quiet Revolution’ by Quebec historians.) Church influence had been evident in many ways: for example, until 1960, no bars were allowed to open on Good Friday.
Of course, gambling parlours and after-hours bars operated clandestinely (or through police payoffs) on upper floors throughout the area. From 1952 to 1960, recounted the waiter at Peter’s, some of these cafés and nightclubs could get very very rough. Five musicians were machine-gunned to death at the Main Café in one night alone. (The Main Café “never closed,” but would merely clean up, throw out the bums and whores, and reopen after closing time. When I asked the waiter how they managed to do this if it was “strictly forbidden” at the time, he answered “Oh you know, a little envelope here, an envelope there”—“des petites enveloppes ici et la”— to the cops, of course.)
I heard different things about corruption and protection rackets involving Peter’s itself. To hear the owner tell it, there was never, ever any corruption of police, nor protection money to pay, nor any trouble with the mob at all, ever. (Of course, he’s owned the place for over 50 years and even if he admitted something like this occurred in the 50s he’d be confessing his own complicity.) The staff remembered it a bit differently. They did emphasize that this one cop, a certain Cartouche, was the best cop the area ever had. The whole block was on Cartouche’s beat, and he took no shit on anything, tolerated no rackets or corruption whatsoever. (If his beat included the blocks around St. Denis St., however, this contention would be hard to believe—see FP vol. 2 no.1, “The Rough and Rowdy Ways of Montreal’s Bar Scene in 1962” for details). Cartouche retired a long time ago and died in 1997. Until two years before his death, he would still pass by at Christmas and wish all the old-time club owners happy holidays. They all called him the Boss of The Main (“le Patron.”)
Longtime waiter André says that bartenders and waiting staff made 6 or 7 hundred dollars in tips per week back in the 50s and 60s. The boss would give them a paycheque, they’d cash it and give the money right back to the boss. He’d use their salaries to pay the busboys and the protection money. “Le loyer dans le temps était $60.00 par mois. On faisait ça dans moins d’une journée. Là, il faut travailler une semaine pour payer ton loyer.” [He explained that “rent at the time was around $60.00 a month, which you could make in a day. Today you have to work for at least a week to cover your rent.”]
Business wasn’t only good for waiters back then, he says. “Tout le monde travaillait. Là, la main d’œuvre est trop cher. Dans le temps, on faisait peut-être juste $1.00 par jour mais on la gardait à la fin de la journée. Il n y avait presque pas de taxes, ni d’impot, et tout coûtait beaucoup moins cher. Quelqu’un qui arrivait ici avec $20 dans ces poches pouvait se saouler, aller manger un bon repas après et retourner chez lui avec quelques piastres de reste. Dans le temps, on faisait $3 000, $4000 par semaine à la caisse. Là on fait ça juste dans les machines vidéo.”
[“Back then everyone worked. Today, workers are too expensive. At the time we may have only made $1 a day but we kept it at the end of the day. There were almost no taxes and no income taxes, and everything cost a heck of a lot less. Someone could come here with $20, get royally drunk, go eat a big meal after and make it home with a few bucks left over. At the time we would make $3 000 or $4 000 a week in bar sales; today we make about that in the video poker machines.”]

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