Updates from December, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 23:32 on 2024-12-28 Permalink | Reply  

    A nice series of before‑and‑after photos of city scenes from La Presse photographer Hugo‑Sébastien Aubert.

    Wondering about the caption on the last one: “Un autobus de feu la Commission de transport de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal (CTCUM), ancêtre de la STM, se dirige vers l’ouest, rue Craig, devenue depuis Saint‑Antoine.” No year is given for the photo, but the Communauté urbaine de Montréal (and thus the CTCUM name) began in 1970, and I’m certain that photo’s from an earlier date. Earlier names for the transit commission are listed on this Wikipedia page.

     
    • Nicholas 02:29 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      Kate, I think you’re right this couldn’t have been CTCUM, but MTC or CTM, probably the latter.

      The two buses in the photo were put into service in 1946, based on the serial numbers and the incredible resource of the CPTDB Wiki, which was the Montreal Tramways Company era, surely continuing onto CTM. Unfortunately it doesn’t have an end date for either, but 24 years is a long time, though not impossible.

      Second, the bus stop signs suggest earlier as well. This STM history page has a number of photos with bus stop signs. The kind in the La Presse photo, a hollow circle with a cross in the middle, are found in a 1953 STM photo, but by 1956 they have replaced the signs with a solid disk. (Obviously it may have taken some time to replace all the signs, but for such a prime location downtown, you’d think it’d have been done quickly, not a decade and a half.) Go back to 1943 and you can find a photo almost identical to the La Presse one (same location, same St Hubert line, same sign), just a few years earlier.

      I’m also reliably told the clothes look early ’50s.

    • bob 07:42 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      You can just make out “Tramway” on the sign in this better version of the photo, so ti was the time of the Montreal Tramway Company. And the image name seems to indicate it was taken in 1943.

      https://www.stm.info/sites/default/files/histoire/hb2_1943_3-943-002_bus_acf_ligne_saint-hubert.jpg

      And here’s the color scheme:

      https://www.stm.info/sites/default/files/histoire/hb2_1947_s5-10.3_bus_twin_coach.jpg

    • Kate 09:49 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      Wonderful research from both of you. Thanks!

    • carswell 11:34 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      Were the CTCUM and the MUCTC the longest French-English mirror-image acronyms ever in common use in Montreal?

    • Kate 12:32 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      They definitely beat MUHC and CHUM.

    • Kevin 19:30 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      MUHC and CHUM are two different places.
      It gets even more confusing if your doctor tells you to come to MUCC (Medical Urgent Care Clinic).

    • Kate 20:22 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      Kevin: true, but they are a kind of mirror image, conceptually.

      I tried to work out if CIUSSS has a reverse version, but it doesn’t. Is CIUSSS the longest acronym in common usage here?

    • Joey 20:56 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      Tied with CNESST.

    • Kate 22:01 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      Ah yes, the TSSENC!

  • Kate 17:07 on 2024-12-28 Permalink | Reply  

    A warning of freezing rain is in effect till Sunday. There’s a thin precipitation and a nasty greasy feeling on the sidewalks Saturday afternoon, not quite icy yet, but not a great walking surface either.

     
    • jeather 21:48 on 2024-12-28 Permalink

      I found walking very difficult and slipped a bit and wrenched my knee. But not as bad as they said it would be, and I guess it will all melt away.

    • Kate 09:50 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      It’s foggy on Sunday morning but I don’t see the ice we’ve been warned about. I hope your knee isn’t seriously injured!

    • jeather 09:56 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      lt twinges but I am not concerned, thank you.

    • MarcG 09:58 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      Air quality is pretty trash for anyone thinking of going for a jog with their crampons.

    • Kate 10:56 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      Super foggy around here at 10 am Sunday, and it rarely gets like that here because this is practically dead centre on the island.

    • Ian 18:43 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

      Despite the air quality I saw a bunch of boneheads jogging up the middle of Hutchison this morning, which struck me as a terrible idea given the poor visibility.

  • Kate 17:01 on 2024-12-28 Permalink | Reply  

    Nick Rizzuto Jr was gunned down exactly 15 years ago on Upper Lachine Road. TVA’s investigators claim that Frederick Silva, the gun‑for‑hire that’s been singing like a canary, has admitted he was involved in the murder of Ducarme Joseph to avenge the death of Rizzuto Jr. They don’t say exactly what “le rôle qu’il a joué” was, but there are only so many ways you can be present when a gangster ends up dead.

     
    • Kate 16:27 on 2024-12-28 Permalink | Reply  

      A question coming rather late in the day is what to do with our remaining classic cinemas.

       
      • Ian 16:39 on 2024-12-28 Permalink

        Regret the tragedy of the cineplex that destroyed them?
        A few years back I happened to be in Los Angeles and stopped by a lovingly restored cinema in Westwood. It was a terrible movie, but wow, what a space. I had forgotten how beautiful real theatres were.

        For a while my physio was in the gym on Metcalfe that used to be a cinema, I remember seeing movies there but even then the murals and vaulted ceiling were covered up. I was sad to see it finally get torn out for condos.

      • DeWolf 13:46 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

        Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if more of the neighbourhood cinemas had stayed in business. There are a lot of them around town and they would have added a lot of life to the street, the way the Beaubien cinema does now. I live close to St-Denis/Bélanger, where there used to be the Rivoli and Le Château. It’s kind of a nothing corner today — the Rivoli is now a Pharmaprix and Le Château is an evangelical church — but it must have been pretty hopping back in the day.

      • Kate 16:04 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

        It’s a similar problem to the churches. Big buildings, hefty bills for heating and maintenance – tax too, for the cinemas –, and both facing declines in attendance.

      • Ian 18:53 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

        For a long time repertory theatres kept those spaces going but the studio distribution system & VHS rental pretty much killed the business in the 90s. When I was a teenager in Hamilton there was a rep theatre around the corner form my house that had a double bill of Eraserhead and Liquid Sky at midnight pretty much every Saturday. They even had matinees where they would run a full set of vintage newsreels, serials, and cartoons befor a classic black and white B movie. You can’t find half that stuff anymore to buy, rent, or download – though to be fair Youtube has a a LOT of old movies, but mostly bad quality.

        When I first moved to Montreal there was a place on St Kitty, Cinema de Paris, that used to run old movies all the time, both French & English. I’d go watch French films to beef up my language skills. First time I saw Les Enfants du Paradis and many other French language classics was there. For art movie rentals there was Boite Noire – and again, many of those films you just can’t find anymore.

      • Kate 20:19 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

        I saw the most classic films at Concordia, not in a grand old cinema. I wasn’t a student at the time, but anyone could go to the Hall Building screenings for maybe two bucks. I think the programming was done by Serge Losique (who’s listed in Wikipedia with the birthdate of 1931 but, as yet, no death date). Don’t know why they stopped – maybe that was decreased demand, too.

    • Kate 12:26 on 2024-12-28 Permalink | Reply  

      Two guys have created a nice bedroom inside an abandoned building belonging to the city, on the Lachine Canal, as a demonstration of what could and should be done for the homeless.

       
      • Kate 12:18 on 2024-12-28 Permalink | Reply  

        CTV has a possibly useful list of changes in tax brackets, official charges and so on, coming in 2025.

         
        • Ian 16:39 on 2024-12-28 Permalink

          Death and taxes, yo.

      • Kate 10:41 on 2024-12-28 Permalink | Reply  

        A dangerous strain of bacteria called BGNPC has been infecting hospital patients in Quebec, and killing one out of ten.

        Meantime, tuberculosis is back.

         
        • Uatu 15:46 on 2024-12-28 Permalink

          Last time we had a MRSA outbreak at the old Vic was during Fatty Barrette’s austerity measures and they cut a whole bunch of housekeeping positions. For example they expected one person to clean an entire floor in an 8hr shift. But I’m sure our top gun of health care won’t repeat the mistake for short term savings by repeating the same mistake. Right? Lol.

        • Ian 16:41 on 2024-12-28 Permalink

          Well, putting Couillard in was seen by some as an attempt to let a medical professional take a stab at health services instead of lawyers. To a large extent, Legault was seen as a chance for businessmen to take a stab at it.

          Maybe we could vote in a humanist someday.

      • Kate 10:22 on 2024-12-28 Permalink | Reply  

        La Presse profiles Gino Chiasson, who runs the downtown cleanliness brigade.

         
        • Kate 10:15 on 2024-12-28 Permalink | Reply  

          CBC has a brief video answering the question what happened to food trucks? with the answers we all know – too much official control, and fancy rather than fast affordable food.

           
          • DeWolf 12:52 on 2024-12-28 Permalink

            Street food should be inexpensive and it should provide a leg up to small entrepreneurs. Cities around the world are full of successful restaurants that started as a little stall on the street. As usual we did it all backwards and only allowed established restaurateurs to run food trucks.

            But there’s an interesting wrinkle to the story. When many boroughs loosened their terrasse regulations in 2021, they began allowing restaurants to cook food outdoors. Over the summer, Social Club on St-Viateur took advantage of this to set up a sausage and sandwich stall almost every weekend, and on St-Hubert there’s a Mexican deli that has a big flat-top out front to cook meat for tacos, which you can buy for cash right on the street, even in the middle of the winter. Another Mexican mini-market down the street does the same for people selling tamales and other snacks.

            It’s like a regulatory back door to having street food as it’s meant to be.

          • Ian 16:51 on 2024-12-28 Permalink

            There’s a couple of places like that in Jean Talon market, too.

            The food trucks really were pathetic, like 12 bucks for a crappy tiny “lobster roll” that was just a miniature pollock salad guédille with a couple of sad shreds of pickled onion or an 8 dollar “fusion” bao the size of a cue ball twith a thimble of pulled pork buried deep in its doughy heart that tasted like nothing whatsoever, etc.

            There’s not many cities in the world worth visitng that don’t have street food. Even Toronto has chip trucks that sell poutine. Of course our naysayers like to claim it’s a public health issue but for real, it’s the restaurant lobby not wanting anyone to be on their turf. That said …if some sit-down restaurant can’t compete with some guy with a cart selling falafel pita or poutine in the park, well… they aren’t a very good restaurant.

          • Roman 21:40 on 2024-12-28 Permalink

            Street food would be a fantastic addition to Canada, and Montreal. It’d be so awesome! Street food is my favourite way to eat anywhere in the world. I literally got sick less eating Thai street food than I was eating at proper sit down restaurants in some European cities. Agreed that food trucks in Montreal are totally pathetic.

          • Kate 23:24 on 2024-12-28 Permalink

            That’s because Drapeau hated them, along with newspaper kiosks and other sidewalk paraphernalia.

          • jeather 23:32 on 2024-12-28 Permalink

            He’s been dead for twenty five years and out of politics for forty, we could have fixed it if we wanted to.

          • Kate 13:28 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

            Maybe, but it explains why we completely lost that bit of our food culture, which we did have at one time (for example). If food trucks had been allowed to continue and evolve, we wouldn’t have had to reinvent them in the unsatisfactory form we have now.

          • DeWolf 13:51 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

            Drapeau represented a certain strain of autocratic fussiness that is still very much present in Montreal. There are a lot of people who would be appalled by the idea of real street food, not for any good reason, just because they think it’s messy and disorderly and somehow wrong.

          • Kate 17:46 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

            On the other hand, a thing I’ve read about existing in both the US and UK that I don’t think we’ve ever had here in Montreal is the ice cream truck. Maybe it’s that they’d only be a viable business proposition for half the year or less?

          • JP 18:45 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

            When I was visiting family in Toronto (not a suburb but Toronto proper) in the summer in the 90s, there was an ice cream truck that passed by regularly…as a kid it was definitely something that struck me as a difference between here and there.

          • Ian 19:02 on 2024-12-29 Permalink

            I’m from Ontario, lived in Toronto for 5 years and yeah they only run in summer. Most of them seemed to be run by the same distribution company, they had all the same stuff. And the same creepy ice cream truck music haha

            In Hamliton we didn’t have ice cream trucks in most neighbourhoods but there were Dicke Dee’s three wheel bicycles that teenagers would drive around as a summer job, not unlike the ones you see in Parc Mont Royal.

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