The Grand Trunk Railway spared no expense to build this opulent head office building, inaugurated in 1902. From 1821 to 1825, labourers from Griffintown were employed in the digging of the Lachine Canal. Irish immigrants began to settle in Griffintown around 1815. The area was variously known as the Nazareth fief and the Récollets suburb before 1804, when Mary Griffin, wife of a soap-factory owner, acquired the lease and set about to subdivide the land and plan streets. Outside the wall lay one of the city’s oldest suburbs, a former seigneurial property owned by the Hotel-Dieu nuns and leased for farming. The city’s western wall, torn down between 18, was located here, adjacent to the Old Port. McGill Street is the boundary between Old Montreal and Griffintown. Go south along Victoria Square and turn left on McGill Street. Charles at the Victoria Square metro station, at the western edge of Old Montreal. Start your exploration of old Griffintown and Point St. A number of historic sites and buildings survive, however, and it takes only a little effort to conjure up a sense of the past while strolling through the streets. In the 1960s and 1970s, Griffintown landlords demolished many of the original workers’ rowhouses after the area was rezoned, forcing long-time tenants to move away. The old factories along the canal are closed today. Charles’ mixed Irish, English, Scottish and French-Canadian inhabitants shared their neighbourhood with Ukrainians and Poles who emigrated to Quebec in the early 1900s. Until the neighbourhood was partly bulldozed in the 1960s to build the Bonaventure Expressway, Griffintown was at the heart of Montreal’s Irish community. Where the harbour, the canal and the railway joined, Irish and French-Canadian families weaved their homes into proud and vibrant working-class communities. Griffintown and “the Point” grew up round the hub of Montreal’s vast sea-to-rail shipping system. Charles, furnished much of the brawn that fueled the city’s industrial growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ann’s ward, which included Griffintown and the eastern part of Point St. This Heritage Trail walking tour leads to landmarks and points of interest in two of Montreal’s oldest working-class neighbourhoods, upon streets inhabited by builders of the Lachine Canal, the Grand Trunk Railway and the Victoria Bridge.
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Here they laboured on the docks, in local foundries, brickworks, soap factories, breweries, flour mills and train yards.
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Some who survived the journey settled where they landed, on low-lying land at the edge of the St. Thousands died of typhus in fever sheds along the harbourfront. Charles were Canada’s first industrial slums, home to Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famines and generations of their descendants.Īt the height of famine in the 1840s, as many as 30,000 Irish immigrants arrived in Montreal each year.