No Place More Suitable

1) Samuel de Champlain founded his famous habitation at what's now Quebec City in 1608, but continued to be on the lookout for other places where French settlers could also make their homes in the New World. Late in the spring of 1611, he journeyed up the Saint Lawrence River to where Jacques Cartier, in 1535, had been stopped by the Lachine Rapids. There, from the Iroquoian village of Hochelaga, Cartier had climbed the wooded eminence he called "le mont Royal." It was the name that, a little modified, would eventually be applied to the city it one day would overlook and the island where it stands. During his 1611 expedition, Champlain, like Cartier, would also halt at the fearsome rapids, which he called le Grand Sault Saint Louis. And, two years later, well into the writing of his Voyages, we can imagine him reflecting with satisfaction on the passage where he describes discovering, on that island, point de lieu plus propre for settlement. Here, following John Squair's translation, is how Champlain spent about two weeks near the rapids:

I examined the country very carefully, but after looking everywhere found no place more suitable than a little spot ... which we named Place Royale, at a league's distance from Mount Royal.

2) [The] very day that Cuvillier and Aylwin's advertisement appeared, a major fire struck Notre Dame Street, home to their auction house, and the surrounding neighbourhood. The jail, near today's city hall, the Collège de Montréal, housed in the former Château de Vaudreuil on Saint Paul Street, and many houses were among the structures destroyed. But out of the ashes, some remarkable opportunities arose. We see the results today. The most important was Place Jacques Cartier. As urbanist Jean-Claude Marsan of the Université de Montréal has related, the square owes its existence to "a neat, speculative deal." About six months after the fire, a pair of wheeler-dealer merchants named Joseph Périnault and Jean-Baptiste-Amable Durocher bought the ruins of the Château de Vaudreuil and its extensive grounds for about £3,500. Then, "with calculated generosity" as Marsan has put it, they presented the city with about a third of the land on condition that a public market be established there. The offer was quickly accepted, whereupon Périnault and Durocher immediately subdivided the remainder of the tract into seven building lots. They set the price high, calculating that proximity to the new market would make the lots especially attractive. Sure enough, all seven lots sold within two days. "Périnault and Durocher had made a small fortune," Marsan concludes, "and Montreal had a new public square."

3) He was one of the best known men in Montreal, though not as Charles McKiernan. Throughout the city, indeed elsewhere in Canada and into the United States, he was hailed as Joe Beef, and there was ample reason for his fame. Joe Beef's waterfront saloon was as remarkable a Montreal landmark as, in its own way, Notre Dame Church or the palatial, brand new Windsor Hotel. Booze was served, of course, but so was food, and if a man couldn't pay for what he ate, that was all right with Joe. Those with money might enjoy great lashings of beef, bread and tea; but those without could still count on a bowl of soup. Each day at noon, hundreds of down-and-outers might line up for a handout. There were rooms upstairs where the poor could stay for next to nothing. In winter, Joe would send one of his men through the nearby streets to pick up any drunks trying to sleep it off in the snow.

4) Few things proclaim Montreal so unmistakably as the illuminated cross on Mount Royal. It was erected in 1924 by the Société Saint Jean Baptiste as a "perpetual monument to the faith of Canada." Yet the cross might never have been built had another project for the mountain gone ahead thirty-six years before. In April 1888, city council received a petition from prominent Catholics led by Archbishop Édouard-Charles Fabre. It asked that land be set aside at the summit of Mount Royal for a huge statue of the Virgin Mary. This was not the first time that something monumental had been urged for the mountain. In 1867, French sculptor Louis Rochet proposed that a statue of Jacques Cartier be placed there. City council turned him down. Rochet tried again in 1874 and again was rejected. That same year on June 24, Saint Jean Baptiste Day, Reverend Alexandre Deschamps preached a sermon in Notre Dame Church calling for a cross on the heights of Mount Royal. It would be a deliberate echo of the far more modest cross that Paul de Maisonneuve, Montreal's founder, raised on the mountain early in 1643 to thank God for preserving the infant settlement from a disastrous flood. This proposal, too, came to naught, perhaps an ill omen for Archbishop Fabre.

5) In comedy, timing is everything, and Mrs. John Buckland would surely have appreciated the moment. One of the great comic actors of the Montreal stage, she had pre-empted the Gazette's report of her grave illness by inconveniently dying the day before.

6) Thompson was cashing in on a fad then at full throttle in the United States. The cakewalk itself - high-stepping while bending backward, hands waving, then allowed to fall - had grown out of shows that black slaves had put on for their own amusement in which they parodied the ballroom manners of their white masters, and the prize for the best display was a cake. By the 1890s, in an ironic twist, the cakewalk had crossed over into mainstream white society. Public dances, even into the 1920s, would feature contests in which couples would promenade extravagantly across the stage, each hoping to - well - take the cake.

7) The Gazette was one of seven major newspapers then in Montreal, four English and three French, and none of them disturbed the Lord's Day by publishing. "I am passing a Sabbath in a city where there is no seven-day-a-week paper, and Sunday is the day omitted," Hall noted. "There is a weekly Sunday paper here of very modest proportions, but the clergy certainly have no reason to complain of the Sunday newspapers of Montreal detracting from devotional exercises." The city now boasted a population of perhaps 250,000, of whom about 175,000 were French-speaking. For the doubtless unilingual Hall, however, it was the minority that caught his eye - or rather his ear. Consider this odd linguistic observation: "From the frequency one hears the ejaculation 'Scotch' as a sort of time-of-day greeting, one might almost imagine a considerable portion of the population hailed from the land of The Bonnie Briar Bush." For all his flippancy, Hall was enjoying himself and was sorry to return home. "Montreal is glad I am here," his report concluded, "and so am I. Scotch!"

8) Bitter cold had come early that winter - which, in one way, was a blessing. The low temperatures promised the annual ice harvest would be a good one. Surrounded as we are by electric refrigerators and freezers at home, coolers in our supermarkets and air-conditioning everywhere, it's easy to forget what a challenge it used to be to cool ourselves, our food and anything else. The challenge was met in Montreal by half a dozen or more ice companies whose crews would be dispatched to the frozen Saint Lawrence as soon as conditions were right. That winter of 1903-04, cutting began four days after Christmas and, thanks to slightly milder weather early in January, was proceeding rapidly. Not only did that early cold snap mean ice two feet thick could be on the market a week sooner than usual, the Gazette reported, but in addition light snowfalls and strong winds had kept the frozen surface of the river free of snow. "There is very little snow frozen on the surface of the cubes, which glisten in the sun like emeralds."

9) Millie de Leon was loving it. When a policeman in the audience stood up, marched on stage, and made to arrest her, she planted a kiss on the officer's cheek, "which," the Gazette recorded, "was much envied from the front rows." Millie, also known as The Girl in Blue, was a famous American burlesque queen. Her original stage name had been Mlle. De Leon, but the raucous world of burlesque soon ensured that the fancy French honorific would become the no-airs first name Millie. She knew exactly how risqué she could be, and delighted in going just a little further. Often she'd throw a garter to the audience, even invite a man onstage to remove it himself. She had been known to forget to put on her body stocking before appearing. Late in April 1909 she was packin' 'em in at the Theatre Royal on Côté Street with her dancing, which we described as "a combination of the Salome and the houchee couchee." It was too much for Police Chief Olivier Campeau, though he could not go to the theatre himself to enforce decency. He was too well known and knew that, if he turned up, "the more peppery parts" would be "eliminated out of respect for his feelings." He sent a Constable Lepage in plainclothes instead.

10) By the following weekend, the [zoot suit riots] had generally calmed down, however, though not the search for what had caused it in the first place. Surely part of it was sex. Perhaps one too many zoot-suiter had cut in on a sailor, or vice-versa, in some dance hall or night club. Testosterone was not in short supply, on either side. Consider, too, the servicemen's resentment of boys virtually their own age having it easy in civilian life. Too many in uniform had suffered in real battles already, and with the invasion of Europe just getting under way, vastly more would soon fall in combat. And let's not forget the extravagant zoot suits themselves, surely an affront to those in more sober military attire. "The pants of the zoot suiters flare out at the top," one Montrealer told the Gazette. "Sailors' pants flare out at the bottom. So, it's just natural that they clash."