Located about one kilometre southeast of downtown Montreal’s skyscrapers, the 67-hectare neighbourhood known as Griffintown was once a cradle of Canada’s Industrial Revolution. More than a century ago, factories appeared along the Lachine Canal, whose formidable rapids had stopped French explorer Jacques Cartier during his search for a northwest passage to China.
During its heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries, “the Griff,” as residents called it, was home to a diverse population made up largely of working-class families. Decades later, worn down by social and economic change, the neighbourhood nearly became a ghost town. At the dawn of the 21st century, however, Griffintown rose again and developed into an upscale urban district. Today, condominium towers stand alongside fashionable bars, restaurants and cafés.
When the fortifications surrounding Old Montreal were finally demolished in the early 1800s, the area to the southwest—formerly a seigneury—was destined to become the city’s first suburb. Irish merchant Thomas McCord had already obtained a 90-year lease on the land. While McCord returned to Ireland on business, an unscrupulous associate took advantage of his absence and illegally sold the property to Mary Griffin. She subdivided the land and had the first roads and low-cost housing built.
McCord was eventually compensated after a bitter legal battle, but the neighbourhood kept the name Griffintown.
Many of its earliest residents helped build the Lachine Canal. Launched in 1825, this enormous project provided work for a steady influx of immigrants, most of them Irish. That influx became a flood after the Irish famine of the 1840s forced millions to seek a better life in North America. Griffintown’s new residents helped dig and widen the canal so it could accommodate larger ships carrying goods from the flour mills, foundries, breweries, sawmills and textile factories clustered along its banks.
The neighbourhood remained predominantly Irish into the 20th century, but the Great Depression placed severe strain on families. Later, the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 signalled the end of commercial traffic on the Lachine Canal.
In 1963, the administration of then-mayor Jean Drapeau declared the area strictly industrial, meaning that residential properties could not be rebuilt if destroyed. Construction of the Bonaventure Expressway for Expo 67 physically divided the neighbourhood, accelerating factory closures and the departure of Griffintown’s remaining families. The population fell below 600.
Fortunately, visitors can still see a row of 19th-century brick houses that once sheltered neighbourhood residents. On the north side of de la Montagne Street stands a series of red-brick townhouses built in the early 1880s, with mansard roofs, dormer windows and carriage entrances that once allowed horse-drawn carts into the rear courtyards. Yet these homes were overcrowded, poorly heated and unhealthy. In 1846–1847, six thousand residents of Griffintown and the area just south of the Lachine Canal died of typhus and were buried in a mass grave marked by a three-metre engraved stone near Victoria Bridge.
In 1852, a fire destroyed half the city. Flooding from the St. Lawrence River also regularly submerged the streets beneath several metres of water.
Across from the townhouses is a triangular park that once formed the community’s social and spiritual heart. It is the former site of St. Ann’s Church, which opened in 1854 as the city’s second Catholic church. The closure and demolition of St. Ann’s in 1970 is considered by many to have dealt the final blow to the community. Only a few remnants of its walls survive, and park benches face the place where one of Montreal’s oldest churches would stand today.
Very few of the neighbourhood’s factories survived. The oldest is the New City Gas Company building at Dalhousie and Ottawa streets. Built in 1859 of brick and limestone, it burned coke to produce the gas used to light Montreal’s streets. The building has a distinctive roof and walls punctuated by simple, elegant buttresses. John Ostell, one of the architects involved in the original structure, also designed McGill University’s Arts Building in 1837.
Two blocks southwest, a Royal Air Force Liberator bomber crashed while flying to England, killing fifteen people. Nearby is the Griffintown Horse Palace, a stable built in 1860 that long housed horses used for Old Montreal carriage rides.
No visit to Griffintown would be complete without seeing the Lachine Canal, whose development now focuses on recreation rather than commerce. A 12-kilometre paved path follows the canal from Old Montreal through Griffintown to Lachine in the west. The locks, restored in 1990, have been open to pleasure craft since 2002. Along the canal banks, visitors can still see mushroom-shaped mooring bollards once used to secure boats.
This article appeared in the April–May 2017 issue of Canada’s History.
Pierre Home-Douglas is a freelance writer based in Montreal.