The History of Mile End, Montréal

The Montréal neighborhood of the Mile End has, in recent times, become known as a very trendy and popular area to live in, with a high concentration of creatives. This neighborhood has transformed tremendously from when it housed a large working class immigrant population and was Montréal’s garment district. In my powerpoint tour I seek to show this change as well as the factors leading to this neighborhood’s gentrification. I believe that the Mile End is a neighborhood that has been constantly changing to accommodate its different inhabitants and, as a result, has become uniquely cosmopolitan. 

In my project I will be focusing on analyzing how this neighborhood has transformed and been gentrified in the later part of the 20th century to present day. However, I would like to discuss the historical background of this neighborhood first. With a picture of the Montréal Hunt Club from 1859, I intend to show that this neighborhood was largely rural land on the outskirts of the city until its growth beginning later in the 19th century. The implementation of the streetcar in the 1890s became a large cause of this growth. In the article, The Politics of Transportation Services in Suburban Montreal: Sorting Out the "Mile End Muddle" 1893-1909, Christopher Boone writes how streetcars expanded the city and made the Mile End into an early suburb. According to Boone, the Mile End was strategically important in connecting the opposite sides of Mount Royal via streetcar. Boone writes that, after the implementation of streetcar into the Mile End, the neighborhood’s population rose from “3,500 to nearly 11,000” from 1892 to 1901. This made the Mile End the “the fastest growing

suburban municipality in Montreal” at the time. During the twentieth century, Montréal grew tremendously in population due largely to immigration, with many settling in the Mile End. The film, Our Street Was Paved with Gold allows a look into the Mile End in 1973. The film contains footage of the neighborhood at that time and interviews with residents who describe the Mile End of their childhood and how it’s changed.  In the film, there is an emphasis on the high concentration of immigrants living in the area and how different groups of people have come and gone from the area. Our Street Was Paved with Gold shows the Mile End at a time when the garment industry was still active and much of its inhabitants were still relatively new to Canada. In the article Mile End History: Prologue, Yves Desjardins writes about how different groups of immigrants had come and gone as well. Desjardins writes an account of his father’s stories of growing up in the Mile End as well as his own experience growing up in a Laval and then, as an adult, choosing to move back to his father’s old neighborhood in 1973. Desjardins explains how, until its more recent gentrification, the Mile End acted as a “gateway”, writing, “However, for nearly a century, Mile End was first and foremost a transitional area: a point of arrival for several generations of immigrants for whom leaving the neighbourhood – which they associated with their first impoverished years in the country – was often the primary goal.”. Therefore, the neighborhood has taken on many different characteristics, with its inhabitants each leaving their mark and adding levels of character and history. 

In the later half of the 20th century to present day, the Mile End has experienced gentrification and a growing creative scene. In Materiality and creative production: the case of the Mile End neighborhood in Montreal, Deborah Leslie and Norma M Rantisi explore this neighborhood’s more recent transformation, with an emphasis on the large number of creatives that have made it their home. Leslie and Rantisi describe that the low rent and newly free industrial buildings that were previously used by the garment industry attracted artists after the neighborhood experienced an economic depression in the 1980s. Leslie and Rantisi write that, by the 1990s, the neighborhood was quickly starting to be gentrified. Leslie and Rantisi also explain that the arrival of the game development company, Ubisoft in 1997 was another large cause behind this transformation as it now is “the largest employer in the neighborhood”.

In Is There Such a Thing as Montréalology? Pierre Filion describes that, due to its unique historical and linguistic position in North America, Montréal experiences a “cultural self-reflexivity”. Filion then writes that the “resulting feedback loop between the media and life in Montréal accounts for a political scene that distinguishes Montréal (and Quebec as a whole)”. Due to the changing nature of the Mile End (especially from the mid 20th century to the present), it has become increasingly cosmopolitan and, as a result, has largely been able to avoid these divides that exist in the rest of Montréal. In The Fragmented or Cosmopolitan Metropolis? A Neighbourhood Story of Immigration in Montreal, Annick Germain describes this phenomenon, writing, “While adjacent Petit-Plateau became the heartland of a francophone cultural avant-garde inspired by the Quiet Revolution, Mile End remained an in-between space, a little haven of peace in a city often troubled by linguistic and political tensions, where a number of extremely diverse groups found themselves embracing the cosmopolitan mode of indeterminacy and multiple belonging that doubles as attachment to the district.”. 

Although the Mile End has been constantly changing, it has also constantly been diverse and, therefore, has not really belonged on either side of the political and linguistic divides that exist in Montréal. This has allowed the neighborhood to develop a very unique identity and purpose within the city.

Bibliography

Boone, Christopher G. "The Politics of Transportation Services in Suburban Montreal: Sorting Out the "Mile End Muddle" 1893-1909." Urban History Review / Revue D'histoire Urbaine 24, no. 2 (1996): 25-39. Accessed October 20, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 43559851.

Desjardins, Yves. "Mile End History: Prologue." Mile End Memories. January 06, 2014. Accessed October 20, 2020. http://memoire.mile-end.qc.ca/en/histoire-du-quartier-mile- end-prologue/#foot_text_2355_3.

Filion, Pierre. "Comment: Is There Such a Thing as Montréalology?" Anthropologica 55, no. 1 (2013): 87-92. Accessed October 20, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24467376.

Germain, Annick, and Martha Radice. "Cosmopolitanism by Default: Public Sociability In Montreal." In Cosmopolitan Urbanism, 112-29. London: Routledge, 2006. Accessed October 20, 2020.

Germain, Annick. "The Fragmented or Cosmopolitan Metropolis? A Neighbourhood Story of Immigration in Montreal (La Métropole Fragmentée Ou Cosmopolite? Une Histoire De Quartiers De L’immigration Montréalaise)." British Journal of Canadian Studies 29, no. 1 (2016): 1-23. Accessed October 20, 2020. doi:10.3828/bjcs.2016.1.

Our Street Was Paved with Gold. Directed by Albert Kish. Canada: National Film Board of Canada, 1973. Accessed October 20, 2020. http://www.nfb.ca/film/ our_street_was_paved_with_gold/.

Montreal Hunt Club at Mile End Road, Montreal, QC, 1859. 1859. McCord Museum, Montreal. In McCord Museum. Accessed October 20, 2020. http://collections.musee-mccord.qc.ca/ en/collection/artifacts/MP-1978.29.8§ion=196.

Rantisi, Norma M., and Deborah Leslie. "Materiality and Creative Production: The Case of the Mile End Neighborhood in Montréal." Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 42, no. 12 (April 15, 2010): 2824-841. Accessed October 20, 2020. doi:10.1068/a4310.