Avonmore Avenue, June 2023

 

The renaming of Avonmore Avenue (it was previously called Milan Street) occurred on 7 May 1912:

La résolution du Conseil municipal de Montréal, à l'effet de changer le nom de la rue Milan en celui d'avenue Avonmore, donne l'origine de ce nom: «mot de la langue celtique qui signifie grande rivière». Toutefois, cette voie est très éloignée d'une grande rivière… 

                                                (from City of Montreal website) 

Previously, I've posted some photographs of the streetcar tracks still visible at the bottom of Avonmore Avenue, now where the tracks are is a lane and some of it is blocked off as people have extended their backyards. Avonmore is perpendicular to both Clanranald and Earnscliffe; Clanranald Avenue is on the west side and Earnscliffe Avenue is on the east side of Avonmore. My mother had many memories, one day she mentioned that when she lived on Avonmore a man followed her home, she phoned her father who was the captain at fire Station/Caserne 46 on Somerled Avenue, and he told her to stay in her apartment and lock the door, then he phoned the police. Another memory was of a woman who was killed by a streetcar that ran passed the Avonmore apartment building. Again, she phoned her father; we didn't see a lot of her father but he was often referred to by her. Finding these streetcar tracks was like being an archaeologist, it was to find a remnant of the past that was part of one's family history; you find the tracks and you say, "Aha! this is what she was talking about!" The tracks are still there, I doubt anyone will ever bother to remove them.

I always thought my parents lived at 5514 Avonmore Avenue but today, looking up addresses on Lovell's Montreal Street Directory, I see that they lived next door at 5515 Avonmore Avenue, apartment # 4. 

I also see that my cousin, Bob Morrissey, and his wife lived at 5485 Avonmore Avenue, apartment # 15, in 1967-68; Bob is the son of my Uncle Herb and Auntie Dorothy who lived next door to us on Oxford Avenue in the mid-1950s.

The old streetcar tracks are here; BTW, that's my brother and his wife in the centre
of the photograph, inspecting the old streetcar tracks and talking with someone who lives nearby.

1950s tram no.1932, line 50 on Girouard Avenue

Between Clanranald Avenue and Earnscliffe Avenue. The Northbound would turn right
on Queen Mary Road and head east. Sections of the track visible from Avonmore.

Avonmore Avenue, afternoon, 06 January 2015, facing where
Avonmore meets Clanranald Avenue

Avonmore Avenue, afternoon, 06 January 2015, facing where the old tracks are located



 

Avonmore Avenue in January 2015

“Can you take me back where I came from, brother can you take me back?”

Avonmore Avenue. This was my parents' first home after they married in 1940, they lived at Apartment #4, at 5515 Avonmore Avenue; it was their home for the next ten years. During this time they lived only a few blocks from my paternal grandmother's home at 2226 Girouard Avenue. That's how things worked in the old days, you didn't move far from where your parents and siblings lived, your parents didn’t live far from where their parents lived. You stuck together as a family but this isn't possible anymore. My parents lived on Avonmore; it is a short street, it is a crescent and easy to miss as you walk in this area. This whole area, including Avonmore and Clanranald, always felt like it was in the past, to walk there was to walk in the past, it a neighborhood of apartments built in the 1930s and 1940s and, for me, it always had a quality of those years; it was also Avon which is a Celtic word for “river”, and it always suggested to me a place of dreams and mystery, a place where the days and nights were long. And then, in 1950 when I was born, my father was told by his doctor “you can’t live in a 3 1/2 room apartment with two small children” and so we moved a few blocks and lived with my maternal grandmother on Girouard Avenue, and that’s where we lived until around 1953. It was after the war and places to rent were still difficult to find, and if you did find an apartment or a flat to rent you had to pay the landlord for the key, it was a way the landlord could make some money on the side. Then, around 1953, we moved to one of Hoolahan’s flats on Oxford Avenue where my father’s brother, my Uncle Herb, already lived and he helped get us a place at 4614 Oxford, just a few doors from where Uncle Herb and his family lived. The new place was spacious, hard wood floors, a fireplace, living room, dining room, three bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom, an unheated enclosed back porch, front and rear balconies, basement and garage. My God, it was (and still is) luxury living compared to the 3 1/2 room apartment on Avonmore that had a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, and a single bedroom. 

These photographs were taken on the afternoon of 06 January 2015.

5515 Avonmore Avenue is on the right

5515 Avonmore Avenue

At the Medical Arts Building

The Medical Arts Building

23 August 2023

Old photo of Medical Arts Building, corner of Sherbrooke Street West
and where Guy becomes Cote des Neiges Road; photo from the 1920s.

Located on the corner of Guy Street and Sherbrooke Street West, the Medical Arts Building is still a location for doctors and other professionals. Many years ago I went to a meeting of the Theosophical Society of Montreal in this building; it was a small office with many shelved books wrapped in brown paper dust jackets. I was there to hear a lecture on the teachings of J. Krishnamurti; you might know that when Krishnamurti was a child he was discovered by Leadbetter, a friend of Annie Besant and a prominent member of the Theosophical Society in the early 1900s. The discovery was prescient and Krishnamurti went on the become one of the most important spiritual teachers of the 20th Century. 

    Recently, I was on the tenth floor of the Medical Arts building and looking out of the window, looking west along Sherbrooke Street, I noticed buildings that are important to my family. There was the Grand Seminaire (the College de Montreal), formerly run by the Sulpician Order that still owns this and other properties, for instance, Cote des Neiges Cemetery, on the Island of Montreal. My two great great uncles, Fr. Martin Callaghan and Fr. James Callaghan were educated at le College de Montreal and they both went on to prominent roles in the city; for instance, Fr. Martin was the first Montreal-born pastor at St. Patrick's Church; Fr. James was pastor at St. Ann’s Church in Griffintown. Fr. Martin and Fr. James are buried at the crypt below the church at the Grand Seminaire de Montreal. A third brother, Fr. Luke Callaghan, was the man who saved  St. Mary's Hospital when its survival was in doubt. Fr. James and Fr. Martin are buried in the crypt under the large chapel at the Grand Seminaire de Montreal; Fr. Luke is buried at Cote des Neiges Cemetery.

Above photos 23 August 2023

    Across the street from the Grand Seminaire is the Masonic Temple, where my grandfather and uncle were both Masons.  It is a magnificent building and I haven't caught that magnificence and size in these photos.

Above photos 23 August 2023

    Near here, almost next door to the Masonic Temple, is the Heffel Art Gallery with its Joe Fafard statue of "Emily Carr and her friends" outside. Very nice! We are all Emily Carr fans.

 

    Then, a few blocks west, still on Sherbrooke Street West, I could see the Mother House where my mother attended secretarial school. She completed her diploma at the High School of Montreal, it is still located on University Street but is now dedicated to art education, and then attended the Mother House. This was a popular secretarial school in the past and the girls got good jobs upon completion of their studies. My mother worked for a jeweler located in the Hermes Building; the family that owned the business invited her to their summer cottage, which my mother's protective father did not allow, and they asked her to stay working for them when she announced she was leaving to get married in 1940; she always spoke with fondness about this family and her years of working for them.

    And finally, across the street from the Mother House is where my son lived while he attended Dawson College (which now occupies the buildings of the Mother House). During the 1997 Ice Storm, my mother stayed with my son at his apartment in this building; I was in Vancouver during this time. When I returned home at the end of the Ice Storm the grounds of Dawson College were strewn with broken branches and broken trees. 

 

  

    This is what I mean by living in a community and the community giving back to you a sense of belonging, of history and remembering the ancestors and listening as they speak to you, of having a place in society that began with your ancestors and history and respecting the ancestors by remembering them and honouring what they did for society and for you in particular. I say "God bless them all!"

 

Night view of the twin towers, College de Montreal; around 2011

Just to conclude, this stretch of Sherbrooke Street West, from Atwater to Guy Street, is one of the places where I've always parked when downtown; usually I can find a parking space here; but it is also a street that I like to walk along, a street of apartment buildings and offices and historical buildings and people out walking to work or walking their dogs. Here is something of what it looks like.

Note: everything is years ago now, but years ago I visited an acupuncturist with a friend and when the Asian doctor heard that we were poets he said that one of his patients was Artie Gold; that must have been mid to late 1990s. Located in the Grosvenor Building, 1610 Sherbrooke West, north-west corner of the street.

My grandfather, John R. Parker

My grandfather, John R. Parker, and his bride, Bertha Chew; photo
taken in Blackburn, Lancashire.

I don't like to admit that I never liked my maternal grandfather but I didn't; maybe I was afraid of him. Where does a child get his likes and dislikes for people? And after all of these years like and dislike don't have much relevance; now I have a new respect my grandfather. My grandfather, John R. Parker, died in 1964 when I was fourteen years old; almost sixty years earlier he and his wife came to Montreal from Blackburn, Lancashire, by way of New York City where he lived for a while in the Bronx with his paternal uncle, William Parker. In New York City my grandfather worked driving a streetcar; one day someone tried to rob him, this would have been around 1910, and my grandfather jumped from his streetcar and chased the man; my grandfather was also a boxer and he easily subdued the thief. One day I was driving my mother to Central Station where she would take a train to Toronto, this was in the early 2000s; at a street corner we were passing she said this was where her father had seen a man robbing a woman and he had chased and caught the man. 

Like many other women my mother loved and admired her father; I mention this because men like my grandfather are becoming rare, the masculine is under attack in North America; men like my grandfather are dinosaurs now. My grandfather could level wooden floors, build a balcony on their home, he could do things that needed doing and he provided for, protected, and looked after his family. When a man followed my mother home, after she married in 1940, she phoned her father and he was at her apartment a few minutes later; when there was a streetcar accident near her home it was her father she called. 

There are other anecdotes about my grandfather. My grandfather was a fireman, first in the early 1920s at the Central Fire Station in Old Montreal, later he was the captain, at Station (Caserne) 46 on Somerled Avenue in Montreal. His brother, Thomas Herbert ("Bert") Parker, was at Station 11 in downtown Montreal; Bert was also a captain. There was a history of feuding in my mother's family; my father's family, the Morrisseys, didn't feud, they all seemed to get along with each other, they were happy Irish-Canadians and stuck together; they loved each other, and we all loved my grandmother who was the center of the family. As for the Parkers, my grandfather didn't talk to his brother Bert for thirty years and he missed his mother's funeral because they were fighting. I have no memory of meeting my Parker grandmother, Bertha Chew Parker, who died in 1957 when I was seven years old, but I have this one anecdote. My grandparents gave my mother $5.00 a month (or was it a week?) to help with expenses after my father died in 1956, $5.00 meant something back then; when she would visit them her mother would say to her father, "Don't forget to give Hilda her money."   

Grave of my great uncle, Thomas Herbert Parker, who died
on 27 December 1965; buried at the Protestant fireman's section at Mount Royal Cemetery.

Victor Parker, the youngest of the four Parker brothers,
and who was mentally handicapped; in Montreal. 

As I said, one of my grandfather's brothers, Thomas "Bert" Parker, became a fire man like my grandfather. And there were two other brothers, one was William and the other was Victor who was the youngest. I think it was William who worked in security at Dorval airport after he retired. Sometimes I would visit my grandfather's home at 2217 Hampton Avenue; one day there was smoke in the flat and soon the fire engines arrived; I heard the captain laughing and commenting that there was no fire, he said my grandfather just wanted his chimney cleaned by them for free. 

One day my grandfather told me that when he was a boy, and still living in Blackburn, he was hungry and killed a chicken and roasted the bird on an open fire in a lane. The Parkers were not wealthy, his father had died when he was a child. I think, for him, marrying a Chew was to marry up as the Chews were a big family and owned property, they were builders and landlords. The Parkers had been publicans--they were publicans at the Yew Tree Inn in Blackburn--and farmers; my grandfather's father could speak, I was told, several languages. 

Another story my grandfather told me was that when he first became a fireman he was told by the captain of the fire station to clean the metal buttons on the harnesses of the horses that pulled the fire engine. He was at Station One, the old Central Fire Station in Old Montreal. When he finished cleaning the buttons the captain told him to do it again, he had missed the buttons on the underside of the harness where they wouldn't be seen, except by the captain; I think my grandfather may have protested but was told to do it right. This seems like a fairly minor anecdote but while many anecdotes seem minor they all help to bring family members to life, and we remember them for these stories. Another anecdote, a minor one, is my grandfather telling me that when you wrapped a parcel in a box to tie the knot on a corner and it would hold better. Any family memory is better than none, even minor ones like this. 

Central Fire Station

At the Central Fire Station, photo taken in the 1930s,
my grandfather is on the far right.

At Station (Caserne) 46, John Parker is the second from the left,
early 1940s. 

Montreal Memorial Park (now owned by Urgel Bourgel), St. Laurent,
Plot A 501, Grave no. 676. Parker. Bertha (Chew) 1884-1958 John Richards (1887-1964)

Montreal West Train Station