8. The Main: Portrait of a Neighbourhood

By Edward Hillel

I came across Edward Hilel’s The Main quite by chance, really.  My daughter has known her BFF since daycare. BFF’s parents are now separated, but they have a circle of friends who regularly hang out at Parc du Bullion, drinking beer and McAdams cider.  They’re comprised of parents from the neighbourhood and/or people who frequented the Parc JM softball games and/or the dep on Duluth and Clark.  

 

Hubs and I are not super social with them, but we’d sometimes hang out there when the girls are together, and the BFF’s parents would often bring their charcoal grill and host BBQs to celebrate a family member’s birthday.  This last time, we got together for a Sunday Easter egg hunt at the park. 

Long-haired Craig showed up and brought along a hardbound book of black and white photographs  titled The Main, which immediately piqued my interest, though somehow the book ended up in Olman’s hands first.  While he was flipping through the pages, Craig was saying how he'd just found it on the street - someone was apparently moving and left a bunch of stuff on the sidewalk.  I remarked how the book was in such good condition and what a nice find.  Craig seemed very pleased. When I finally got to leaf through the book, I admired the slice-of-life photos of Plateau life circa the mid 1980s with St-Laurent Boulevard, aka The Main, as the anchor.  And how fitting that we're all situated in the Plateau!

I mentioned how I love black and white street photography, and how this book reminded me of Robert Frank’s work.  Why hadn’t I heard of this book before?  Craig asked if I’d ever seen a Diane Arbus exhibit, and I was hell, yes, back in 2003 when SFMOMA held a major retrospective of Arbus’ work.  I remember this well because that was when I first spent the Christmas holidays with my future parent-in-laws and was just getting to know them.  One morning after breakfast, we were in the kitchen discussing what we’d do that day, and it was brought up that we’d all go see the Diane Arbus Revelations show at SFMOMA.  I literally gasped out loud.  OMG!  I was a big admirer of Arbus' work, had never laid eyes on her original prints before, and there was a major retrospective of her work and my in-laws want to go see it?!  These are my people!

I also mentioned that the Musee des Beaux Arts had a Diane Arbus exhibit recently, but Craig kind of waved it off as it was so small.  He had seen her show in New York several years ago. Anyway, when I got home later that day, I looked up The Main, which seemed to have languished in obscurity and has been long out of print.  On AbeBooks, I found the same hardbound edition in great condition at a Westmount bookstore (that only had an online presence) for $30 USD with $10 shipping.  It arrived about a week later.  I now have my own copy of The Main, which is in slightly better condition than Greg’s.

The Main was a marvellous time capsule of my neighbourhood that doesn’t really exist anymore due to the inevitable societal shifts and gentrification.  The Plateau used to be known as a working-class neighbourhood of immigrants, namely Jewish, Portuguese, and Greek.  Rent was cheap, and due to its central location, the Plateau was also a haven for university students, artists and musicians.  It’s most famous residents were Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen. Even back when I first visited the Plateau in the 1990’s there was already some gentrification taking place.  It wasn’t until Ubisoft moved into the Peck Building and the sudden rise of local indie bands like Arcade Fire did the Plateau/Mile End become a “hot” neighbourhood.  

Over the years, many of the original residents have moved on, either to the suburbs or more affordable areas.  The rent and housing prices have driven many artists away.   But there are still traces and fragments here and there.  Portuguese rotisseries and restaurants still abound, and the bagel shops and Jewish establishments like Cheskie’s and Beauty’s remain steadfast institutions.  But it has lost a lot of its original working-class roots and artistic edginess, becoming a well-to-do area that attracts French nationals and affluent professionals.

A couple of summers ago, my daughter had a big yard sale, and these Portuguese ladies came by to chat with me, saying they used to live in our apartment years ago.  They now live in the West Island, but they love to come back to their old neighbourhood to shop (they had just come from le Patisserie Lawrence V.).  Sure, there are still older Jewish, Portuguese and Chinese residents here, but many, like these ladies, have moved to the suburbs over the years.

In any case, I recognized so many familiar locations via Hillel's photos.  This one with the woman sitting by the Virginia Woolf portrait is the alley where I live!  Where that chain link fence used to be is our parking area. 

There was one photo taken from the lobby interior of what was then known as the Peck Building, but the portico entrance looked familiar, and I thought how much it looked like the Ubisoft building.  The text mentioned that the building was located on the corner of St-Laurent Blvd and St-Viateur - so I was right!

 

There were many great street photos:  one with Charcuterie Hongroise (still going, but for how much  longer?) and Charcuterie Fairmount (RIP).

Berson & Sons Monuments, one of the oldest landmarks on The Main, was replaced by an ugly new condo building about a decade ago.

Author/artist Edward Hillel himself has evolved into a multi-disciplinary artist based in New York now.  While I was googling him, I realized I had missed out on a very cool 2017 exhibit at The Museum of Jewish Montreal right in the Plateau!  It included never-before-seen contact sheets - all the negatives that did and didn't make the cut for the The Main.

The St-Laurent merchants' association commissioned Hillel, now based in New York, to return to the Plateau and create a new series of colour photos documenting the boulevard, 30 years after The Main was published.  Apparently, Hillel was gratified to find some of his old haunts still intact.

Argh!!  If only I had known about this back then!  What a missed opportunity!  

1. Our Lady of Mile End

By Sarah Gilbert 

I'd first heard of Our Lady of Mile End via FB -- by seeing a friend flag that she was going to attend the book launch event at the D&Q bookstore.  I learned later she was actually good friends with author Sarah Gilbert, not to mention she'd also highly recommended that I read the book.  So when I was at D&Q to do some Christmas shopping, I decided to purchase a copy so as to support a local writer and fellow neighbour, even though I didn't know her personally.  I’ve lived in the Mile End for about 15 years while Gilbert has lived here since she was a university student in the 1990s. 

A bit of background about the author:

 

Gilbert started writing about Mile End while on maternity leave in 2008.  “I took a lot of walks with my daughter, and often I was pushing the stroller very slowly to get her to sleep,” she explains. “I got to observe my surroundings in detail.”

The immediate result was Mile Endings, a blog that recorded the people and places affected — for better or for worse — by the neighbourhood’s ongoing gentrification. It found an enthusiastic audience.

 

So it made sense for Gilbert to eventually segue into short stories about the neighbourhood she loves, and the collection became Our Lady of Mile End.  Already loving the cover illustration – Mile End residents "airing out their laundry" on multiple clothes lines strung between the neighbourhood's signature triplex buildings -- I was very much looking forward to reading the collection, assuming the stories would cover a various cross-section of intersecting lives of my fellow residents.

 

First up was “Material”, about a young artist, Alice, who cleans apartments in the Mile End for a living.  The story begins with Alice taking a shower at her client’s place.  Since she lives at her warehouse studio along with other artists, and it’s located in an industrial zone, the building isn’t fitted with kitchens and showers, and the Y was closed due to renovations.   In any case, Alice’s client comes home unexpectedly, surprised to see that Alice had used her shower.  Ok, so far an interesting situation that reflects the gentrification of the Mile End, which not that long ago, used to be very affordable for artists and musicians, but rising rents forced many move to cheaper areas.  Interestingly, Alice is a textile artist who likes to collect castoffs from her clients, namely the lint that collects in the dryer, to use in her artwork.  However, before anything of substance could take root in “Material”, the story was over after a few pages.  

 

The next story was “What If”, about a woman named Meg who left the back door ajar while WFH alone inside her apartment.  When she goes into the kitchen, she finds a strange man peering into her refrigerator.  He had splotches of blue pain all over his shirt and acted rather nonchalant about his appearance.   Since her bf was involved in theatre, for some bizarre reason, Meg assumed that Jason sent a friend over to perform some kind of prank on her, because why would a robber act like he’s just dropping by her place?  Later, after talking to her friend, Meg learned a bank heist had occurred in the area and one of the robbers fled the scene while the police went in search for him.  Meg realized that the man who was in her kitchen and used her bathroom was probably the bank robber!

 

This made me recall a fairly exciting news story some years ago about an armed bank robbery attempt which involved a police car chase, then the car crashed, a male suspect fled the scene and was still at large in the Mile End.  The police had cordoned off the entire area as they scoured the alleys and yards in search of the fugitive.  This happened back in 2016, but Gilbert re-situated the event six months before the pandemic, a time when no once visited people’s homes anymore.  “There was no possibility of strangers, no surprise encounters.”

 

Long after the blue paint-splotched man left her home without incident, and Meg realized she was put in a potentially dangerous situation, she got turned on as she recalled her chance encounter, hence the title “What If.”   This made me groan inside (not in a good way), and made me wonder whether Gilbert had this very same "what if" fantasy, ie. “what if a fugitive bank robber ended up hiding in my apartment?”  I didn't want to read about the author's sex fantasy, FFS!  Gimme some stories about people's real lives!!

 

By this point, I was getting a little wary.  I don’t read short stories often, but I know they can be wispy vignettes and fleeting sketches of life, yet taken together as a whole, they could form an over-arching idea, held together by common themes, etc.  This was kind of what I was hoping for in Our Lady of Mile End.  But after reading a story, it would leave me feeling unsatisfied, like consuming bland consommé for lunch instead of something more filling.  

 

There was one recurring character who appeared in several stories. Evelyn the English college professor first appeared in an early story “Introduction to College English” in which she gets into a conflict with a student named Maya.  The story delves into each person’s POV of the other, and ends up with Evelyn writing a nice reference letter for Maya.  

 

In “The Visit”, Evelyn is at her Mile End apartment when she gets a phone call from her brother Dominiq who had just arrived at the airport for a spontaneous visit.  She convinces him to meet her at her chalet in the Laurentians, so most of the story is about her and her brother having fairly mundane conversations about their lives.  At the end of the story, we find out that this visit as fabricated and all in Evelyn’s head as her brother never made it out to see her.  In reality, he had been diagnosed with late stage cancer and died a few weeks later.  Not only was the story barely had anything to do with the Mile End, it was a wish fulfillment fantasy.  The story ended with a “—for Bart” so it seemed to have personal relevance for Gilbert, at least.  And Evelyn Wilson seems to be a kind of cipher for the author as they are both English professors who live in the Mile End?

 

Another lacklustre story was “Green Eyes”, about a young woman named Amber somewhere four hours north of Montreal trying to hack tree-planting.  I couldn’t remember if her character had appeared in an earlier story, but this was yet another story that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Mile End except for one paragraph:

     The Park Avenue grocery store where she’d worked for two university summers would be busy by now, with lines of shoppers snaking up to her cash… There had to be more to work than being a human robot. 

     She got the tree planting idea from a friend of a friend who was selling his bags and shovel.

Why couldn't the story be about her experience working at the checkout line instead? Personally, I wasn’t all that interested in reading about Amber tree-planting in some remote area of Quebec, even if she happened to work at the PA Supermarket.  I felt cheated somehow!

 

“Catch” was the final story in the collection based on a rather sensational incident of an attempted kidnapping of a teenage girl in adjacent Outremont.  Again, I remembered the news coverage of the incident and fortunately, the girl was able to escape unscathed.  Gilbert’s story used all the major facts from the incident:

“The girl, who is a minor and whose name is protected by a publication ban, was walking to her friend’s house Friday afternoon when a motorist pulled up beside her at St-Viateur and Durocher Sts.

The man identified himself as a police officer and said he had to arrest her because she was a suspect in a drug deal. She was handcuffed, placed in the back of the car and blindfolded, she told the police.

After screaming for several minutes while the man was driving, she managed to open the door and fall out onto the street.

A witness took a photo of the suspect’s licence plate as he sped off. Police arrested the suspect about an hour later on Montreal’s north shore…”

 

In Gilbert’s story, there were also a few witnesses, with the focus on a busybody woman named Irene, who kind of took charge of the situation.  She spoke to the police and seeing that the girl was in shock, and recognizing a nun who was living at the nearby Carmelite convent, she got an idea.  Irene approached the nun and asked if the convent would be willing to harbor the traumatised teenager until a family member arrived.  I think this is where Our Lady of Mile End gets its title from.

 

It’s clear that Gilbert drew some of her inspiration from local news articles over the years and tried to weave them into her stories.  The author didn’t seem to have any real connection to the kidnapped girl.  Nor did she seem to know anyone who may have had a run-in with the “sexy” bank robber.  I was left disappointed that Gilbert didn’t draw inspiration from actual locals, who either lived or worked in the Mile End.  What were their stories, I wondered?  I’m sure former bookseller SW Welch had many interesting stories about his colourful customers.  Pretty much all the characters Gilbert’s stories were white, Anglo, with similar socio-economic backgrounds.  Gilbert definitely followed the adage of writing what she knows.  With what she didn’t know, she got from news stories of bank heists and attempted kidnappings.  So rather than stories about actual insiders, it felt more like they were written by someone looking from the outside in, which is not so different from her early blog observations.

 

A good example is the third last story, “The Word”, which once again features Gilbert’s alter ego, Evelyn Wilson (Gilbert taught literature at Dawson College).  This time, Evelyn is trying to conduct a post-pandemic zoom class with her students.  She decided to read aloud a poem that had the n-word in it, thus promptly losing control of her class as it deteriorates into arguments about whether saying the n-word is racist or not.  Part of the story is also told from the POV of the student as the n-word was overheard by his younger brother and his mom, as they live in a small apartment.  The student and his family aren’t white, but their racial background isn’t specified.  This was the only story that featured people who weren’t white.

 

The student observes Evelyn as she vainly tries to defend herself:  “I read the words in the poem so we could examine the context in which Shire uses the n-word and see her specific purpose for doing so.  To clarify, I was not, I am not, using the n-word myself.”

 

In any case, the class was a failure, and a few days later, Evelyn runs into this student, who was visiting the area with a friend (he doesn’t live in ‘affluent’ Mile End).   The story makes it clear that Evelyn, despite being gray and frumpy, lives a privileged life (we should note that she also has a chalet in the Laurentians, as noted in “The Visit”.) and strongly hints that Evelyn has some thinking to do.  

Gilbert once again, probably got the idea for “The Word” as the use of the n-word in academic settings has been a hot button issue in recent years about whether freedom of expression can trump the freedom of being othered felt by various minority groups.  There have been media coverage of teacher and professors in Quebec and Ottawa being cancelled because they dared utter the n-word in front of students.

 

Again, like many of the stories, the theme was only lightly dealt with as the stories are limited in length.  I very much wanted to like OLoME, and at first it really looked like something I could relate to.  But most of the stories were unsatisfying or rather meh.  The Montreal Guardian described the collection as “warm-hearted and well-meant” which to me, is code for “safe literature”.  If I was a writer, I'd hate it if a critic described my fiction as "well-meant"!  I don’t mind if the stories are about ordinary people, like myself, but the content of the stories felt limited in scope and somewhat solipsistic in that it didn’t capture a diverse cross-section of the Mile End.  In hindsight, I should’ve just borrowed the book from the library instead of spending $20 on it!

Book 17 – A Fine Ending

By Louis Rastelli

I remember seeing copies of Rastelli’s book on display a couple of years ago at Expozine, the annual small press/comic/zine fair held in a church basement near where we live. I wasn’t curious enough to shell out the 13 bucks for it back then, but I sure didn’t hesitate when I saw it going for $2 at my fave thrift store Chainon. I learned later that Rastelli actually co-founded Expozine, and he was also involved in launching Distroboto, the network of converted cigarette vending machines that sell artwork, comics and other neat stuff all over the city. So Rastelli is a bit of a fixture in the local arts community, the kind of all-encompassing guy who’s dabbled in a little bit of everything. A Fine Ending is his first novel, which is a fictionalized account of his experience living in the Plateau as a struggling young musician.

I was sort of curious about this book because it takes place in and around Montreal’s Plateau as the 1990’s were drawing to an end. I remember visiting Montreal in the summer of 1991 as a fresh-faced high school grad. The Anglos were getting the hell out of dodge, “Á louer” signs were everywhere and it was possible rent a sweet apartment for $200 a month or less. This was back when the Plateau was still considered a working class neighbourhood and beer n’ weed were sold openly at Parc Mont-Royal during the Sunday tam-tam. It was also the best time for non-French speaking students, artists and musician to be living in Montreal, as you could live pretty well on next to nothing since there weren’t a lot of quality jobs going around.

But I also had my trepidations embarking on this novel, as it’s also been described as “a timeless portrait of the spirit of bohemia” and “a warm-hearted account of an artistic community’s defining years.” Ugh. Thankfully, A Fine Ending wasn’t as annoying as the blurbs made it out to be and turned out to be a very unassuming account of the life of a thoughtful, happy-go-lucky twenty-something guy. Rastelli did do a good job in capturing the vibe of that time and his novel is punctuated with interesting descriptions of old landmarks and establishments. Highlights include a first-person account of the ice storm that hit the city in winter of 1998 and the discovery of an abandoned warehouse called the Darling Foundry and the subsequent raiding of its contents.

The parts that most affected me most, unsurprisingly, were the ones about the cats. Cats appear throughout the novel as a kind of litmus test of variable morality and hypocritical values that can be so infuriating in certain people. Rastelli obviously loves kitties and he writes about looking after his friend’s cats while they’re away on tour or taking his cat Bindy for autumn walks in the park. But he also depicts some heartbreaking passages about cats dying needlessly, not due to any blatant cruelty, but from neglect and indifference from self-absorbed twenty-somethings and drug-addicted roommates. You have a feeling those horrible stories were probably all too true.

My only real complaint is the lack of any discernible style in Rastelli's writing, which has a straightforward expository manner but comes across as rather bland. Though the tone is colloquial, there is little in the way of certain turns of phrases that marks a novel with a distinctive voice. Perhaps this was done consciously, to make the story more universal, or perhaps this has something to do with Rastelli being a fully bilingual Montreal native. Here’s a sample:

“I’d recently grilled my own parents for stories from their past, and told Rick about how much more clearly I could imagine the old city from these first-hand stories than I could when reading about it in books. They explained how, in the days when there were still more horses than cars, every few blocks, on the main streets, there would be cisterns full of water for the horses to drink from. When my dad tried to get my mom to remember a particularly large cistern on the corner of Sherbrooke and St. Laurent, I was able to picture the scene perfectly – all these horse-drawn carriages would have been idling right where that big gas station now sits. “

It's an interesting passage about Montreal's past but it also feels like reading a journal entry from an educated European who writes in perfect English, but English isn’t his first language. Which is kind of ironic, considering that Rastelli consciously omitted any Francophone presence, even going so far as to not mentioning the 1995 referendum. Rastelli explains:

“…the fact is that our circle was overwhelmingly anglophone. I used to joke that it was impossible to meet anyone who was actually from Montreal. It was when the Plateau started becoming a melting pot of other Canadians. I can hardly count the number of people I know here from Halifax, Winnipeg, Victoria. In a way that serves the story well, because it keeps it more universal. It's obviously very strongly tied to Montreal, but other cities and artists' scenes aren't terribly different - cheap rents, fairly typical cliques of people."

A Fine Ending was enjoyable, but it’d probably only interest those who are curious to get a feel for what the Montreal scene was like in the 90’s or for those who were actually there and would like to rekindle a bit of nostalgia.