History
Twenty years after the founding of Ville-Marie (Montreal) by Paul Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve in 1642, he granted an area on the pointe Saint-Charles, extending into the St. Lawrence, to St. Marguerite Bourgeoys for agricultural use by the Congrégation de Notre-Dame. The sisters operated a sharecropping farm (métairie) on the land. From an area of about 30 arpents (about 10 hectares), the farm reached an area of 200 arpents (about 68 hectares) by the mid-18th century. The nuns built the Maison Saint-Gabriel, the only remaining trace of their farm and one of the oldest buildings in Montreal, on their property in 1698. Their farming activity only ceased altogether in the 1950s.
Until the mid-19th century, the area was chiefly agricultural. Urbanization began with the enlargement of the Lachine Canal (completed in 1848), as the transportation access and water power attracted industry to the whole of what is now the Sud-Ouest borough. The installation of railways and the construction of the Victoria Bridge (1854–1860) also attracted workers and spurred development. The then-owners, the Sulpician Order, divided the area into lots and auctioned them off starting in 1853, with the Grand Trunk Railway purchasing a large area for use as a railyard.
Numerous workers moved in, including numerous Irish immigrants as well as French-Canadians, English, Scots and in the early 20th century, the Poles, Ukrainians and the Lithuanians. Irish-Catholics and French-Canadians lived side-by-side in the Point, each community building its own Catholic church, also side-by-side on Centre Street: St. Gabriel's Church (completed 1895) and Église Saint-Charles (completed 1905). The Polish Community was given permission by the Archdiocese of Montreal to build a church on Centre Street between Richmond and Montmorency Streets, Église Sainte-Trinité which is still attended by the community from near and far. The Ukrainian Community also still returns to the Point to worship at Holy Ghost Parish on the corner of Grand Trunk and Shearer Streets. Today, Pointe-Saint-Charles is considered the heart of Irish Montreal, with street names like Rue Saint-Patrick, Rue d'Hibernia, Place Dublin, and Rue des Irlandais testifying to its heritage.
By the 1860s the area was a busy industrial neighbourhood, one of Canada's first industrial slums. Notably, the development on Grand Trunk Row (today Rue Sébastopol) introduced the stacked "duplex," based on British working-class housing, that would come to be so typical of neighbourhoods throughout Montreal. Building continued in the central Rushbrooke/Hibernia area until 1910.
The area straddled the Montreal city limit, and the part outside was set up as the village of Saint-Gabriel in 1874 and annexed to Montreal in 1887, becoming a city ward. In the early 20th century, Pointe-Saint-Charles was made up of two city wards: St. Gabriel, to the west, and St. Ann, to the east, which also included Griffintown and extended as far as McGill Street in what is now Old Montreal. The two were divided by the former city limit line, passing from the basin on the Lachine Canal just west of the St. Gabriel Locks to the riverbank just south of what is now the end of Ash Avenue.
Like the rest of the area around the Lachine Canal, the neighbourhood went into a long decline in the 1960s, caused by the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and sealed by the closure of the Lachine Canal. The destruction of Goose Village and the construction of the Bonaventure Autoroute further impacted the area. Still, the neighbourhood reacted to the difficult times by forming bands of social solidarity. For example, the Clinique communautaire de Pointe-Saint-Charles was founded in 1968 to offer health and social services to local residents; it inspired the CLSC model used throughout the province, while remaining an independent clinic with the mandate of a CLSC. Several social housing developments were built in the 1970s; today, some 40% of the housing stock in Pointe-Saint-Charles is social housing. The Montreal Metro reached Pointe-Saint-Charles in 1978 with the construction of Charlevoix station.
However, in recent years, the neighbourhood has undergone gentrification. The Montreal Technoparc industrial park opened in 1988 on the site of a former landfill and dump site between the neighbourhood and the river. The rehabilitation of the Lachine Canal for recreational use spurred the reclamation of factories along the canal for lofts and condominiums. However, this has brought its own pressures as to increased rents and cost of living. The tradition of social solidarity continues, with residents banding together in 2005-2006 to successfully oppose a project to move the Montreal Casino to the area.
Read more about this topic: Pointe-Saint-Charles
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)