THE FUTURE

There is no reason to assume that the strip around St. Laurent and Ste. Catherine will not gradually become hot once again, even without grand reconstruction schemes. Already, one run-down former theatre has been converted into a successful nightclub: Club Soda. It manages to coexist with the strip bars and greasy spoons quite well (despite some rumoured efforts by its owner to gradually shut these neighbouring businesses down.) Unlike back in the day, there is more than enough room for several “hot” strips of nightclubs in the city—there is already Crescent St., a few stretches of St. Denis, upper St. Laurent, the gay village, and many smaller trendy areas in the suburbs. Our recent period of heavy construction and zero vacancy rates means the city’s population is only going up, which means there’s little risk of there being a shortage of customers for new and old bars anytime soon. In fact, many of the same people who moved away to the suburbs in the ‘70s and ‘80s are now moving back to live downtown.
Some landlords such as Christo have a different opinion, though. He would like to simply demolish the whole block and build it up 12 stories as the zoning allows. He currently owns every building on the block except for the Monument Nationale and the Montreal Pool Room. He doesn’t have any sense of nostalgia for the buildings, and dismissively says “the wood’s all rotten in them” and they’re all at least 125 years old. He mentions with obvious jealousy how Club Soda’s owners— already private millionaires, like Christo— received a lot of government money to relocate and renovate across the street.
For a long time, he owned only this building (which also houses the businesses next door) but he’s since acquired many others from Hydro-Quebec, which had purchased most of the block in 1978 when planning an expansion of their headquarters. They were going to demolish everything except for the Monument Nationale, build the whole block up to 28 stories (as high as the current H-Q building) and have the complex connect to the H-Q headquarters via tunnel. The city had agreed to change the zoning only up to 12 stories for this project, and it is this zoning change that’s given Christo the idea of going up 12 stories with his scheme. He wants to build condos on all the upper floors and keep the street level commercial, but with fancier businesses than the ones that are there now. He doesn’t seem to think much opposition would arise against the demolition of the block, although he was wary enough to have me assure him I wouldn’t write anything negative about his plans. One building adjacent to the Monument Nationale has recently been demolished, with only the façade remaining. (The façades for a three-mile stretch of St. Laurent have been designated historic, so if he builds his 12-story scheme he would have to keep the three-story façades pasted onto the front.)
In the meantime, Christo’s son is considering opening a nightclub in the building housing Peter’s. (He’s worked at CFCF-12 for 20 years, and is now its vice-president).
Christo’s plans for the block change “month by month,” but during my last visit there the waiter told me he was close to finally buying the Montreal Poolroom. When I told the waiter there was no way the Poolroom would give in and close, he pointed to my shirt and said “Would you sell that shirt for $15? No. For $1000? Of course. That’s how it goes. We all have a price at which we’d sell the shirt off our backs. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t sell that cheap shirt for $1000.” The waiter called the group of investors planning this scheme “la gang de Grecs” (a ‘gang of Greeks’) and when I asked him if he thought Christo might have a sentimental change of heart in the end, he gruffly said “Christo’s a multimillionaire, he spends all his time in Florida, not here. It’s all about the money, nothing else.”
When I spoke to Christo about the plan, he said he figured about $25 to $30 million was needed to carry it out. He’s talked with the city and the government about getting financial help, and made it obvious to me when I spoke with him that he wouldn’t mind if for some reason one of the old buildings collapsed in the meantime and took the rest of the block down with it.
Christo maintains that the police in the past few years have cleared away “98%” of the “bums”, and it’s true that you aren’t so aggressively panhandled around there anymore. There are still lots of characters in the area, though, and I for one don’t consider that to be such a bad thing. Perhaps no other single block in Montreal has shown more resilience than this one, and maintained a similar look and feel for so many decades. My dad remembers it this way, and so did his dad.
At the turn of the 20th century, the “cleaning up” of prostitution in the area was a major issue; a century later, it still is. It is sad that heroin and cocaine seem to have usurped hash and pot as the drugs underage kids buy in the arcades there, and certainly there are many sad cases to be seen at any given time in the establishments on this block, but by now it should be obvious that any large city will have this kind of thing in it. “Cleaning it out” really only means moving it somewhere else. As the nearby families said when opposing the plan for a prostitution district in their area, why not leave that stuff where it is now, instead of moving it all into our backyard?
Yet after talking to Christo, I wondered whether it was my place to pass judgment on the old bar-owner’s grand plans. He’d run this place for 50 years, and has perhaps always dreamed of making something more out of it. I guess my problem is that it’s a block of genuine Montrealness, increasingly surrounded by generic stuff you can see in any other city. The corner of St. Laurent and Ste. Catherine will no doubt keep changing in years to come, but it should do so organically, bit by bit, as it has all these years, and not by being totally levelled for the sake of another questionable mega-project. So often in history, things get destroyed or changed just as people start to realize how much they mean to them. In the case of this die-hard strip, I think Christo would get much more for it if he remained patient for the day when the stories, legends and sentiments come clearer to light, and add a recognized value to the area that can’t be measured in dollars.

THE CHARACTERS

An old-style rooming house sits on top of Peter’s, consisting of 38 bedrooms with shared bathrooms. Most of the men who live there (and only men live there) survive on old-age pensions or welfare. There’s a live-in janitor who, along with most of the tenants, is a regular at Peter’s. Another rooming house sits in the building next door.
I have yet to spend a half-hour at Peter’s alone before one of the old-timers drags me into some conversation, or at least starts talking nonsense at me. For the residents of the rooming houses, Peter’s is their living room. Here are some of the stories they told me.

The Old LSD Guy

The old LSD guy remembers when Sherbrooke St. ended at Viau St., until 1947 when they extended it to the end of the island. He worked clearing the way for the extension and for new roads, making 50 cents a day and working 12 hour days. He later worked for over 20 years as an orderly in a hostpital. He’s now on crutches and says “j’ai passé ma vie à aider les gens, là c’est mon tour de se faire aidé et puis ça aide moins.” [“I spent my life helping people, now it’s my turn to be helped and there’s less help than there was.”] I asked him if hospital conditions are better now or worse than back in the day. He looked at me like it was a no-brainer. “Il laisse mourir les gens dans les corridors dans les hopitaux. J’ai jamais vu ça, des gens qui se fait soigné dans des corridors.” [“They let people die in hospital corridors now. I’ve never seen that before, people being treated in corridors.”] Before universal health care arrived in 1970, he claims you could still go to the hospital, and if you had no private insurance they would treat you anyway. He remembers this to be particularly true during the days of the Asiatic Flu in the 1950s, which had been brought over by troops returning from the war. We agreed that it was surprising that no worse epidemics have occurred in the past decades, given the much more frequent international travelling that goes on. Still, he cited the recent mad-cow and flesh-eating diseases as examples of similar, though smaller, things.
He went on at length about the sad state of hospitals today, mentioning that a nurse he was just speaking to the day before had worked there 25 years and never dreamed it could get this bad. As with many elderly people, the ongoing health care crisis is their major concern, their main conversation topic, and they feel enormous resentment that some kind of experiment or game is being played with it now, when it is really a matter of life and death for them.

Guy Boisvert

I spoke with Guy Boisvert a number of times when visiting Peter’s. He was a toothless old guy who’d work his gums when he wasn’t speaking loudly, and was always ready to rudely interrupt anyone who he thought was talking shit. I fondly remember hanging out with him and the other cronies in the afternoons following the funerals of Maurice Richard and Pierre Trudeau a few years back— he’d seen Richard play many times in the 50’s, and though he officially hated Trudeau because he was a federalist, he had to admit they don’t make leaders like that anymore.
Often Guy’s 45-year-old son would be drinking with him. His son bore an eery resemblance to him, especially when both would bring the large 50 bottles to their lips at the same time.
Guy was born March 9, 1925. Guy’s mother had moved to Quebec from Detroit, and was from an old, old French Detroit family: both his great and great-great grandparents were born in Detroit (which obviously was once a very French town, hence the name, and the names of cars like Cadillac, Coupe de Ville etc.) His mom came to Montreal in the 1910s, and died at age 82 in 1979.
When he was growing up in the Depression, he left school to work at 14 like everyone else. He picked carrots in the farms of St. Leonard for 50 cents a day, working twelve hour days, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. “On en a mangé de la marde,” he says. “On poignait ce qu’on appelait des feuilles de patates dans les champs, on arrachait ça pis on déjeunait avec ça le matin.” [“We ate our fair share of shit, let me tell you. We used to pull what we’d call ‘potato leaves’ out of the ground in vacant lots, and that was our breakfast every morning.”]

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