He mentioned that the busiest day of the week by far was payday, on Thursdays, when workers would cash their cheques and come straight to the bar. One of the drunken patrons interjected to say that there were lineups in front of all the taverns on payday back then—“LINEUPS in front of TAVERNS!!!” he repeated for emphasis. “The 40s, 50s, they wouldn’t even let you in unless you had enough money.”
(This same patron felt compelled, as he watched me take notes from André’s stories, to assure me that “André Ouellet is the best waiter there ever was, and he’s never told a lie!” Later, however, he told me that Andre is the biggest liar in the history of St. Lawrence Boulevard….)

THE FOOD

Peter’s wasn’t just hopping at night, but was very popular at lunchtime as well. An old guy with crutches remembers that for lunch, “c’était pacté ici, tout plein, on rentrait même pas. Tout le monde avait juste une demi-heure pour diner, donc on n’avait pas de temps pour des petites bières—juste les grosses. On buvait deux grosses dans une demi-heure, et puis on retournait au travail.” [“It was packed in here, full up, you couldn’t even get in. Everyone only had a half-hour for lunch, so we had no time for small beers—only big ones. We’d drink two big ones in a half-hour and return to work.”]
There were (and still are) many legendary eateries on St. Laurent. Everyone’s eaten hot dogs at the famous Montreal Poolroom (established 1917, though the pool tables are long gone.) A long-standing lunchroom was the Domestic Cafeteria, which stood for decades immediately next door to the Monument Nationale. Both waiters and customers at Peter’s said they remember going there regularly for 25-cent meals.
At 3 a.m. in the 50s, there were easily 3 or 4 000 people on that block every night. Schwartz’s (the legendary birthplace of smoked meat) used to remain open all night back then, and catered to a higher-class crowd of heavy drinkers who would wander up there after closing time. The restaurants all did brisk business till at least 5 a.m. back then. André asked the guy at Schwartz recently why they now close at 2 a.m., and the guy told him that it’s not the same crowd anymore, the people who show up are too drunk, too young, too rowdy, and it’s too much trouble.

THE DRUGS

One old-timer (who’s 72 years old) told me a bit about the drug scene in the fifties and sixties. Speed was very popular, as were seconal, “goofballs,” opium and heroin. These were generally sold on streetcorners. Just as it is today, heroin was seen as extreme: it ruined a lot of lives, he said, and people were always wary of junkies. Hash was quite popular, and Carré St. Louis was where you went to get it. Between the 50s and 80s the Harris restaurant was a good place to go to get drugs. The scene at St. Louis Square lasted quite a long time, and I remember myself that even in the early ‘90s, it was a reliable place to score pot.
The same old-timer told me he took LSD once over 30 years ago, before it was made illegal, and still remembers it vividly. “C’était le plus beau voyage au monde, le plus beau voyage que tu peut faire”—“It was the most beautiful trip in the world, the most beautiful trip you could ever take,” he said.
Waiter André remembers a notorious character they called Monsieur Peanut, who used to take a lot of pills. He laughed while recounting a time when he came in looking for pills, and they sold him some capsules filled with flour. He downed them right there. “Il est revenu le lendemain, il faisait dur, et puis on lui a demandé comment ca été, il a dit ‘Parlez-moi pas, hostie,’” André laughed. “Il savait meme pas que c’était de la farine. Il est mort, pauvre Peanut, il est mort de ca pareil.” [“He came back the next day, looking very rough, and we asked him how it went. ‘Don’t even ask,’ he said. He didn’t even know it was just flour. He’s dead today, poor Peanut, the pills finally killed him.”] “Today,” he said, “it’s different, it’s very young kids who do the drugs and it’s PCP, mescaline, cocaine…”

THE CONVERSATIONS

As far as discussion topics at the bar went in the 1950s, there was, of course, the perpetual champion Montreal Canadiens, but almost as popular at the time was pro wrestling. Everyone at Peter’s agreed that a certain Carpentier, originally from France, was by far the best wrestler in Quebec history. Wrestlers were 95% French Canadian back then, though many of them wrestled in the U.S. and were very well-known there. Until it recently changed ownership, the 70-year old Coin Doré greasy spoon next door had faded black and white photographs of 1950s wrestlers lining its walls, many of them autographed. I always gazed at them while eating my hot dogs there: the whole style of the photos, the wrestlers’ names and their outfits richly evoked a past era. At the same time, it didn’t look quite so different from today’s wrestling, and if anything the grittiness, the absence of exaggerated grimaces, and the simpler attire made them look tougher than today’s wrestlers.

THE PROSTITUTES

André told me that the prostitutes worked a little differently back then: “Les filles volait les gars du bar, les amenait aux Touristes et puis elles les ramenait au bar après. Depuis 15 ans, quand les Nègres on pris contrôle de la prostitution du quartier, tout ca a changé.” [“Women used to steal guys from the bar, bring them to the Tourist rooms (hourly motel) and then escort them back to the bar after. In the past 15 years, since the blacks took control of the area’s prostitution, all this has changed.”]
Back then, the control of prostitution, not drugs, was the main point of contention between gangs. The East Side of the street’s prostitutes were controlled by the French, notably les Frères P——— (which, five decades later, André still feels compelled to insist that I not print their names.) The West Side was controlled by English-speaking gangs.
Christo told me about one memorable incident from 40 years ago, when a customer entered the bar with a woman, snuck into one of the bathrooms with her and soon after was shouting “Christo! Christo! Help me!” It turned out the “woman” was actually a man!
Most of Montreal’s bordellos and whorehouses back in the day were located on nearby streets, centering on de Bullion St. and stretching from Sherbrooke straight down to Old Montreal (back before the Ville Marie expressway, built in the ‘70s, cut all those streets off from Old Montreal.) The police were always busting whorehouses with much fanfare, to appease the churchgoing public and church-influenced media, only to let them quietly re-open afterwards. Some of the madams were high-profile local celebrities, often arriving at grand social functions in stretch limos. They all suffered their first major downfall in 1944, when the Commander of the Allied Forces said Montreal would be declared off-limits to all armed forces personnel if it did not eliminate prostitution (which was spreading so much syphilis to the soldiers passing through on their way to Europe that they were considered a security threat. New Orleans’ fabled Storytown, its own “red-light” district, suffered the same fate during World War I, when, as a port city funnelling soldiers to the front, the U.S. army ordered it cleaned up. This cleanup spurred an exodus of New Orleans’ “jass” musicians to Chicago and New York, where they eventually turned Jazz music into a worldwide craze.)
The rise of lawyer and moral crusader Jean Drapeau to the position of Mayor in the late ‘50s made life much harder for the madams and hookers of the area. After 100 years of inextinguishable vice, Drapeau took the extreme step of demolishing outright blocks and blocks of houses on adjacent streets. Fifty years later, some of the resulting empty lots are only now starting to get built back up, while large parking lots still dot the area between St. Laurent and St. Denis. With the explosion of private escort services in the ‘90s, a lot of prostitution moved off the streets, and what you still see in that area are mostly the grimmest, most desperate sex workers. Recent efforts at setting up a nearby zone where prostitution would be tolerated failed, since the zone would have been in residential areas further east. The natural place for a zone of tolerance is, of course, the corner of St. Laurent and Ste. Catherine, but business owners and developers with grand schemes are firmly against that— and they have much more power at city hall than the families living in residential areas.

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