Process: Griffintown sladdakavring

UNESCO designated April 18th as the International Day for Monuments and Sites in 1983. Heritage Montreal, in collaboration with ICOMOS Canada, brought together several partners to highlight this year’s theme, the Cultural heritage of water in Montreal. Parks Canada put on a conference about the Lachine Canal National Historic Site at Brasseurs de Montréal. While on the guided tour of the canal and its basins, admittedly a cold and wet experience as it rained buckets the entire time, I discovered that The Canada Jute Company used to occupy the building situated at 1744 William Street, which was built in 1889. Specializing in the making of industrial bags in jute and cotton, The Canada Jute Co. was incorporated in 1882 and amalgamated into The Canadian Bag Company in the 1900s.

The proximity of the Ogilvie Flour Mill on rue des Seigneurs (built in 1890, and later occupied by Montreal Woolen Mills), prompted me to wonder if Canada Jute Co. provided the mill with jute bags for its flour and middling products? A material that is considered a waste product along with the bran, middlings or weatlings (in French, remoulage or issues), is obtained in the commercial wheat milling process and was commonly used to feed livestock as a high-protein supplement.

 

Lake of the Woods Tongue Rug, c. 1930 Reverse view of the burlap bags from Lake of the Woods Milling Company Ltd.

 

At first, I wondered if there was a Griffintown connection to my sladdakavring? Did The Canadian Bag Company fabricate the middling bag that is stitched on the back of my tongue rug? Upon further investigation, I realized that it is more plausible that the maker of the rug simply lived on a farm or maintained a small stable on their property because Ogilvie Flour Mills only bought Lake of the Woods Milling Company in 1954, while the tongue rug is dated around 1930. It will be difficult to determine the origin of the rug given that middlings were sold all over Canada and the United States to feed livestock.

When I first settled down in the Sud-Ouest in 2007, I walked the Griffintown and Point St. Charles Heritage Trail to explore the area. Hailing from an industrial city in Northern Ontario, I've always appreciated the singular beauty of 19th & early 20th century industrial architecture. I’ve been walking and biking through Griffintown on a daily basis as I started working at the Board of Montreal Museums Directors.

 

 

Curious about the area's architecture, I consulted McGill University's Industrial Architecture of Montreal website. The BMMD building situated at 333 Peel and William was once the garage of the William Dow Brewery Co., built in 1929 by the architect Louis Auguste Amos.

 

Engraving: Commercial trademark of William Dow & Company, Montreal, India pale Ale John Henry Walker (1831-1899) © McCord Museum

 

I also recently stumbled upon a heritage study of 55 buildings in Griffintown — residential housing, institutional, commercial and industrial buildings — on the Committee for the Sustainable Redevelopment of Griffintown website. Planification détaillée du secteur Griffintown: analyse du cadre bâti was produced by the consulting firm Patri-Arch (Martin Dubois and Catherine Séguin with David B. Hanna and Atelier B.R.I.C.) for the Bureau du patrimoine de la toponymie et de l’expertise du Service de la mise en valeur du territoire et du patrimoine for the City of Montreal in March 28, 2007. I decided to create a map using the study’s heritage sites as a starting point, in order to find my bearings while on my meanderings to and from work.

 

View Griffintown Heritage Buildings in a larger map

 

It was fascinating to see the transformations over time: from the photos taken during the study's 2006-2007 time period, to the Google Street View photos taken in 2009, to seeing the actual sites now, two years later, on my daily walks. I was frankly relieved to see that all the sites were still in existence with all the construction sites in the area. One of the study's suggestions was to design a series of informational plaques for these heritage buildings, a timely idea especially with all the recent real estate developments; from the well-known landmarks to the more modest dwellings, it is important to remind the passer-by of the varied history of this neighbourhood. The study certainly opened my eyes to the area’s industrial past and the key historical figures who helped shape the community.

 

Griffintown Police Station no 7, The Griffintown Tour by G. Scott MacLeod, 2001

 

I also found G. Scott MacLeod's website The Griffintown Tour, which showcases a series of drawings of key sites in Griffintown, namely Police Station no 7 situated at 219 Young Street. Built in 1875, it is now used as a rehearsal space for the Centaur Theatre Company. I recently enjoyed a guided tour of the building. Urban Occupations Urbaines, in collaboration with the Centaur Theatre and Heritage Montreal presented Alison Loader's Ghosts in the Machine, an inquiry into the death of Mary Gallagher. I was impressed on many levels by this work.

I found the site-specific nature of her work a key component to the multimedia installation. The historical signification of the building for the Irish population at the time and the "residue" of a 135-year-old space added to the experience: the creaking of the floorboards, the smells and the general atmosphere. I appreciated the fact that there were multiple entry points, that is, each person would have a different experience based on their vantage point of the projections; each person, depending on when they entered the installation, would experience the narrative differently as there was no beginning nor end to the audio loops. One was free to creep up to see an image on the cylinder, to walk around the distorted projections or to simply sit down and listen. The imagination of the visitor — his or her ability to fill in the gaps — is another important component of this piece. The image of a nude figure with an axe for example, becomes a skewed image of some sort of animal galloping in a monstrous manner. Closer investigation is needed to determine what one is looking at or what one is hearing as the audio of the three circular areas overlap. The piece is interactive in that it demands work; visitors need to spend time with the installation to put together the pieces, to reassemble the bits of information that they are hearing and seeing. This process of reconstitution mirrors the multiple points of view at the time on the crime (the beheading of Mary Gallagher) as well as the societal biases around women and class that came to corrupt the justice process in finding her killer.

It would be interesting to have a permanent exhibition of Lauder's work in Griffintown much like the Silophone project in the Old Port.