History
The street which opened around 1860, was originally in the form of a crescent, and was located just north of Dorchester Boulevard.
The first bar on Crescent Street opened in 1967. Prior to that year, the street was home mainly to professional offices. The first bar was the Sir Winston Churchill Pub, a discotheque owned by Johnny Vago a Hungarian immigrant who once participated in the Cuban Revolution. Vago's discotheque, originally known as the Don Juan, was first located on nearby Stanley Street. It relocated to Crescent after his property was expropriated to build the Montreal Metro. Vago eventually ended up owning many bars on the block, although has since sold his businesses.
Given the success of the first establishment, other restaurants and bars would settle in the mid-1970s.
Crescent Street merchants formed the Crescent Street Merchants Association in 1998 to promote the street's businesses.
Beginning in the early 2000s, the Crescent Street Merchants Association have organized activities related to the city's sports and entertainment events. The most popular event is the Grand Prix Festival, which takes place each year at the time of the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix in June.
Read more about this topic: Crescent Street
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
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“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)