For many people, the neighborhoods where they grew up and
spent their formative lives were not just places to live, but were also a state
of mind and an important way of life. This can be said of the three
southwestern Montreal communities of Griffintown, Pointe St. Charles and
Victoriatown, which was better known as “Goose Village”.
From the 1920s through the 1960s, these three working class
Montreal neighborhoods held a special place in the hearts of its former and
current residents. They were known for its strategic location near the Lachine
Canal, where many heavy industrial companies like Dominion Coal, the Canadian
National Railways (CNR), the Darling Brothers Foundry, Stelco, Sherwin Williams
Pains and Northern Telecom had their offices and plants located, and where many
of its residents found steady employment; it was where such landmarks like St.
Ann’s Church and the Victoriatown Boys Club were focal social gathering points;
and most important, it was where the idea of a close, tight-knit community was
well displayed amongst its hard-working residents, who were mainly of French
Canadian, Italian and Irish descent.
Although many of the factories of Pointe St. Charles and
Griffintown have been transformed into preppy condos, and Goose Village was
expropriated and had all of its buildings demolished by the City of Montreal in
1964, the original sense of community spirit has never left the hearts and
minds of its many former residents. And they have been fondly recalled in the
book Community and the Human Spirit.
The book is a collection of oral histories by 26 former
residents who made either Pointe St. Charles, Griffintown or Goose Village
their respective homes where they grew up, played, were educated and found
their professional callings. The common thread amongst these highly readable
oral accounts was that although they and their families didn’t always have much
as their counterparts in such neighborhoods as Westmount, NDG or TMR, the close
knit relationships they had with their neighbors, and how they looked after
each other in good times or hard times, gave them a sense of richness in their
lives that have never left them.
For example, there’s Eddy Nolan, whose love of boxing at the
Griffintown Boys’ Club earned him five Golden Glove championships, and later
turned his love of sports and community into something good, as he participated
in every Terry Fox Run since the beginning, and has raised over $200,000 to combat
cancer; there’s former Montreal Fire Department chief Joe Timmons, whose father
was a Montreal fireman starting in 1927, and was one of the firemen who fought
the tragic fire that was brought about by the crash of an RCAF Liberator bomber
in the middle of Griffintown in the spring of 1944, which killed the entire
crew of the plane, as well as eight Griffintown residents on the ground; and
there was Joe Berlettano, a virtual rock of the Goose Village community during
the 50s and 60s, who ran its Boys’ Club at the age of 18 and did so much good
for its residents – especially those who were in need – leading up to the
Village’s expropriation in 1964.
Coupled with a large selection of rare personal and archival
photographs, Community and the Human
Spirit is like a fascinating family album of wonderful memories and
heartfelt stories of three lost neighborhoods that made up the industrial heart
of Montreal for so many decades. And most important, it showed that the heart
of Point St. Charles, Griffintown and Goose Village were the people who made
their lives there, and showed a genuine care and affection for their
hardworking, honest way of life and the people whom they had the privilege to
call neighbors and friends.
(This book review originally appeared in the March 5, 2016 edition of the Montreal Times)
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