Growing Up In Montreal's Mile End Neighbourhood in the 1960s

It was a magical period in my life, of which I have many fond memories. I write about them to share with you what I sense was a golden period in my life, a feeling I would like to recover in some way.

I lived in many areas of Montreal before moving to Toronto in 2012, including Cote-des-Neiges, Snowdon, Cartierville, Ville-St.-Laurent, Hampstead and Dollard-des-Ormeaux. While I enjoyed aspects in each place, some more than others, Mile End remains my favourite neighbourhood. Always. Forever. This is a continuation, of some sort, of last week’s post, Leonard Cohen’s Montreal Will Always Be Ma Ville.

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“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
—Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986)

The Park Avenue YMCA (ca.1915), also called The International Y, on Park Avenue and St.-Viateur, situated in the heart of Mile End, is where my brothers and I went to summer day camp in the mid-1960s. It was enjoyable and, to boot, completely cost-free to our parents. Photo by [Musée McCord, MP-0000.841.7]

I am 66 years old. I am as much a child of the 1960s as I am of the 1970s. No, I was not a hippie of flower child. I did, however, meet quite a few such progressive people in the 1960s, while growing up in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, then a working-class area made up of mostly of immigrants and relative newcomers like my father. It was the 1960s, a time of upheaval and change, and these changes did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. I absorbed them all, all of the lessons. This remains my baseline, my point of comparison, my vantage point of viewing how well and healthy the world is—my world. Our World.

When we speak of Mile End, we speak of a certain area, which people have in their minds ideas of the boundaries. I will go with what the City of Montreal defines Mile End, as a neighbourhood within Le Plateau borough, with the boundaries as the following: “Le Mile End s’étire de l’avenue du Mont-Royal à l’avenue Van Horne, entre les rues Hutchison et Saint-Denis.” So, Mont-Royal to Van Horne going north and Hutchison to St-Denis going east. I grew up on Parc near Mont-Royal, so I was living on the south-western edge of Mile End, in a perfect location near the mountain and a large park.

I remember that the neighbourhood then had a large Greek presence, especially after the military coup d'état in Greece in 1967. I remember my parents talking about it, but I was too young or too uninterested to understand. What I did notice was that many of our neighbours were Greek, and I learned a little Greek, including many swear words. I had made friends with a boy a year older than I was. I probably knew how to swear in many languages, including in French and in Yiddish.

I also had friends of Chinese and Scottish descent. I also remember there were also Ukrainian, Polish, Italian, French-Canadians and English Canadians. My mother called it “A League of Nations.” Such was the neighbourhood and I loved it, especially the mountain and the large park next to it, Fletcher’s Field.

Parc Jeanne-Mance, which was formerly named Fletcher’s Field, with Mont-Royal, “the mountain” in the background. It was our playground, the green grounds, woods, trees and fields where I heard the birds sing and where I fed the chipmunks and squirrels. Photo by Simon Law; Wikipedia

My parents had a small grocery store, where the store was in the front and we lived in the back. There was me, my fraternal twin brother and my older brother and Mom and Dad. And a number of cats, who lived with us through the years. I remember only Betsy, who was my favourite. There was a bonus as a child to having a family store, such as receiving either a candy bar, licorice, chewing gum or some small snack cakes, and sometimes potato chips (but never soda pop). None of us were overweight; we were on the slim side.

We also got used to seeing so many wonderful characters come in to the store, such as “the Coke guy",” who would come in to the store in the evenings, when he and my father would talk politics, a bottle of Coke in one hand and a rolled up cigarette in the other. Being there and watching and listening, I was learning about various kinds of people from different backgrounds. This informed my thinking about people from an early age, cheering for the underdog. I was a non-conformist since as long as I could remember, and living in Mile End shaped such thoughts and feelings. That my father was a socialist also worked in that favour.

There were also my favourite places to go to, such as Dusty’s Restaurant (closed in 2012 after a fire) on the corner of Mont-Royal, the newspaper kiosk (gone) on the other corner, where I bought the daily newspaper (The Montreal Star, closed in 1979) on my way home from school, for lunch, for my family and also my weekly comic book passion. I could never forget the joy in going to Arena Bakery on the corner of Mont-Royal and St.-Urbain, where my father and I would go before closing at 11 pm on summer evenings to buy discounted bread and onion rolls and the ladies would throw in some sticky buns for my brothers and I—a real treat at the time.

There was LaFayette Pizzeria (exists but moved), which I already wrote about, on Villeneuve and Jeanne-Mance, where I tasted pizza for the first time; and Dairy Queen across the street, where I met Jolly Jellybean (aka Ted Zeigler, a Montreal kids’ favourite) and had my first banana split, a real expensive treat at the time. Usually it was a vanilla cornet; sometimes a vanilla one dipped in chocolate. There are the many delicious hot bagels at St. Viateur Bagels that we ate, usually one hot out of the wood-fired oven; there was also the Regent Theatre on Laurier, where my brothers and I would sit for kids’ movies on Saturday afternoons for 50 cents; and the visits with my father to the City & District Savings Bank (becomes Laurentian Bank in 1987), where I opened my first bank account and to Pascal’s Hardware (founded in 1903; closed in 1991) at the corner of Bernard.

There was two other important places: the library at the corner of Mont-Royal and L’Esplanade, right across the park, and where I discovered stories that fed my imagination. And my school, Bancroft Elementary School (on St.-Urbain near Mont-Royal), which was opened in 1915 and is still going strong. I loved going to school each morning, a seven-minute walk. Often, my friend Watson W. would join me on the corner of Jeanne-Mance and we would walk and talk together. There are so many fond memories I have of Bancroft School, such as receiving a commemoration coin for Canada’s centennial in 1967; for being chosen as both a gate monitor and fire monitor in Grade 6; and for hearing The Sound of Music record played for the first time on a record player, with the memory of the sun streaming in through the large windows on a glorious Spring Day in 1965. “The hills are alive with the sound of music” and “Do-Re-Mi.” I can still recall Julie Andrew’s magnificent voice and the joy it brought to a seven-year-old.

At the heart of it all is the mountain, Mont-Royal and Fletcher’s Field, now called Parc Jeanne-Mance. One Sunday, my family and I were on the mountain, at Beaver Lake, as we usually were on such a glorious summer day. It was July 20, 1969. I had my trusty red transistor radio, Made in Japan. It was 3 p.m. and the news came on. It said the Apollo 11 mission was about to land on the moon. I left my family and rushed home, arriving at around 3:30 p.m. I turned on the TV; I had time to spare. At 4:17 p.m. ET, my older brother and I watched on TV and heard the words from Neil Armstrong, “The Eagle has landed.”

This was a moment in history. Later that night our whole family along with the world watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon (at 10:56:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time), and heard the words known around the world. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." It was a moment in history and I knew it.

I was 11 years old that summer; I had been following the “Space Race” since the ill-fated Apollo 1 mission, in 1967, killed all three astronauts—Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee—on the launchpad. The moon missions were one reason I went into engineering. That and reading Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, fuelling my over-active imagination.

There was a lot going on then living in Mile End to keep that imagination flowing. I am not suggesting, however, that my life then was idyllic, serene and without angst or problems; that would be a wrong assertion to make and not at all true. It was, however, a time where I carried a lot of hope and optimism. I also carried positive energy and excitement for the future filled with so many possibilities and so many potential paths. People had Hope. It does not seem that way at all for the youngesters today. It does not seem as if they have many possible paths and journeys. There are much less choices and more fears about making mistakes. It seems more despairing than hopeful.

Now, I want to end with a story about meeting some hippies, which was not too difficult back in the 1960s. It was the summer of 1968. The Beatles were hot and so was the weather. Upstairs from us on the second floor of a dual triplex—with a shared courtyard in between the buildings—moved in a group of long-haired hippies. I do not remember how many, but there were a lot, boys and girls. They were cool and fun and used to come to our store to buy things. I became friendly with one of them; I was 10; he was a young adult in his late teens, perhaps 20, 21.

He asked if I was interested in learning how to strip and restore furniture. I was. So, this is what I did for a few weeks when I had some free time. Strip and refinish a piece of furniture. It was some kind of cabinet. We used a chemical solvent, a putty knife and then sandpaper to remove the finish and then applied varnish and shellac. No one wore masks, because we did not know then about the health dangers of chemical solvents. I enjoyed the experience and “rapping” with someone older. It was very common then to talk to strangers. I did it all the time.

I don’t remember being warned then to not talk to strangers. Stranger Danger was not part of our lexicon. Were there “strange people” then? Yes, there were and, we made up stories about them with our imaginations, like the witch down the street who put spells on people. Or the war veteran who said “bombs away” while walking the back alleys. There were a generation of men then who then had “shell shock,” and now would be designated as having PTSD. We generally stayed out of their way. The results of war are the same regardless of terms used.

Typical Back Laneway in Mile End. Ours was similar, except the clotheslines were inside an enclosed courtyard. We played both in the courtyard and in the laneways. Cars and people used the laneway, called ruelles in French. At last count (2020), in Montreal, 443 are now ruelles vertes, or green laneways, which give it a different feel altogether—one that I would enjoy. I wonder what the birds and squirrels think.Photo by Chris DeWolf, Spacing

Yes, it was different times. It was generally good times, chiefly because it was a childhood devoid of exhausting programming & child management so common in later decades. Instead our lives were filled with a parental hands-off approach, where we learned to build independence with lots of adventure, discovery and imagination. Can you imagine anything better?

So, why did we move out of such a wonderful neighbourhood? It was not by choice. Sadly, when a fire destroyed our home in February 1970, we were forced to move out of the area (Our father saw this as an opportunity to move closer to his friends). It was a shock and a great loss to me, one that I felt for a long time. I might write about that fateful winter day, one that did affect the trajectory of my life, in a future post.

The ache for home, what Maya Angelou says “lives in all of us,” resonates as a vibrating truth in my life, and all the more so recently, as I delve into my own past. I will end now with Julie Andrews singing “The Sound of Music,” as I imagine myself in that classroom almost 60 years ago, with the sun streaming in and the song of Andrews’ voice touching me ever so sweetly:

Merci et à bientôt.

Born at 315 ppm

Now at 425 ppm