Morgan's Department Store

Here we are back in the 1940s. A full service department store like this is a thing of the past; the other day I saw an Amazon truck make two deliveries within five minutes on the same street, everyday I see Amazon trucks cruising our streets making deliveries, and how many deliveries does The Bay (formerly Morgan's) make on the same streets? None. Even The Bay trucks, or Eaton's trucks, are a thing of the past. 

Now we get in the Time Machine of photography and find ourselves in a different world, downtown Montreal, decade of the 1940s, pre- or post-World War Two. 

Photo taken between 1930 and 1940; this is Morgan's Department Store
before they added an extension to the rear of the store; this original 
building was called Colonial House

A winter day in the 1940s, Morgan's seen from
the entrance area of Birk's jewelry store

Furniture department display

Cosmetic department

A fashion show

Looks like the basement; now the basement leads to the Metro

Fashion department

Santa's visit

Morgan's, 1940s

A fabulous Christmas display on the store's exterior,
seen from Philips Square

The organ grinder outside of Morgan's Department Store

Here is the final memory of going downtown with my Auntie Mable. It is the organ grinder in front of Morgan's Department Store who I remember from one of those Saturday afternoon trips. I am still trying to find the passage in which the organ grinder is mentioned in a poem by Louis Dudek. 

This Morgan's Department Store was also called Colonial House, that would be the original building as shown below, not the newer wing attached to the rear of the store. Morgan's was founded in 1845 and sold to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1960, this flagship location became La Baie in 1972. Morgan's was the first large department store in Canada; it was also the first large Montreal department store to move to Ste. Catherine Street in 1891 and our commercial downtown area grew from that time on. 

The store is bound by Ste. Catherine Street, where the organ grinder stood outside of the store, Aylmer Street on the east, and Union Street on the west. What also interests me is Phillip's Square, across Ste. Catherine Street from the store, and the location of the original Arts Association of Montreal, later the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 

There used to be a plaque commemorating Jefferson Davis's visit to Montreal, he stayed at the home of John Lovell, and the plaque was on Morgan's exterior wall on Union Street where Lovell's home had been located; Davis stayed at Lovell's home in 1867; the plaque was removed in 2017.

It seems that a twenty story condo and office building will be built on top of the old Morgan's building.

Morgan's Department Store, 1960s; Union Street and Ste. Catherine Street

Pushing his organ outside of Morgan's on Ste. Catherine Street West

The organ grinder in front of Morgan's

I am told he lived in a shed in Chinatown

Cartoon by John Collins

The organ grinder in the background

A Saturday Afternoon Downtown

I wrote a poem about going downtown with my Auntie Mable, the poem was published in A Private Mythology (Ekstasis Editions, 2015). 

Downtown Montreal, around 1955; Morgan's in the background, 
Christ Church Cathedral behind the streetcar on the left

A Saturday Afternoon

 

Outside the main doors

of Morgan’s Department Store

facing Phillip’s Square, an organ grinder

played music that Saturday afternoon downtown

with Aunt Mable. I was a child in the late 1950s

with my aunt, walking beside her, window shopping, 

eating turkey and mashed potato dinner

at Woolworth’s basement lunch counter

then buying pastries upstairs as we left to walk along             

Ste. Catherine Street. You could list the beggars you

saw in Montreal back then, the woman with one

shoe off, the shoe hidden behind her,

and the chauffeur-driven black car

that would pick her up,

or so we heard… or the old woman,

scarf tied under her chin

and the tin can of yellow pencils she sold.

Then, Eaton’s, Simpson’s and Morgan’s

were the big department stores,

now it's boutiques, restaurants, crowded streets,

strip joints and bright lights.