Winter in Montreal 1910. Looks like Westmount.
Now, in my last installment of Flo in the City – my novel in progress about a young girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ I gave mother Margaret yet another thing to worry about.
Marion tripping under a streetcar in the city.
The point I am making is that the middle class is by design the worrying class, as their position in society is more precarious – and offers less certainty (more options) than the upper or lower classes.
City streets at that time were chaotic. Big city streets, anyway. You can find film footage on YouTube that illustrates this fact. The British Film Institute has some amazing footage. Edison took some films too which have been preserved.
From what I have read, in the summer, the big city smelled, but mostly of horse manure.
Now, because I didn’t bother to ask people who were alive in 1910 what it was like in the winter, I had to do research.
This year, 2009/2010 in Montreal, we’ve had little snow, a drought in fact, less than Philadelphia had, in fact, but the two winters before that we saw heavy duty snowfalls, in 2007/2008 almost a record. (The record was in 1971, when I was 16. I have pictures of me in front of my suburban house, in the tall narrow path my father dug out of the giant drift in front of my house. In Hudson, where my husband lived, the neighbour came home by Helicopter the day of the storm. I recall plowing up to my waist down the road the next day, which was mild, to buy my mother cigarettes.)
So, in the last two years, the streets were a mess most of the winter, even though our city has a crack snow removal team that works day and night after snowfalls to remove the snow. The snow is not only ploughed, it is trucked away. They used to dump it into the river, now they dump it at designated areas, creating these giant, filthy mountains.
My husband, Marion’s grandson tells me that his mom, Marion’s daughter, told him that ‘in the old days’ snow banks could be so high in Montreal they were like walls on either side of the street, so that pedestrians walked in a kind of ice corridor between street corners.
My father in law, born in Westmount in 1920, says they rolled the snow on the streets in winter, so that the sleighs could pass. Sleighs were fast and silent, that’s why they were equipped with bells, to warn pedestrians of their presence.
He said they had ploughs too, for the sidewalk and the street, horse-drawn of course.
How did streetcars get through the snow? He didn’t remember.
But I just had to do a little surfing to figure it out. Some cities used human shovellers to clear the way for streetcars and sometimes the drifts were so high the streetcars were hours behind schedule and some of them were abandoned in drifts. But there were clearly special street cars equipped for snowploughing in Montreal. I found indications for such vehicles online.
(During the Depression, well-dressed businessmen worked as shovellers on St. James Street, in the financial district. “Will shovel for food.”Famous pictures exist of this.)
About car 5
Num/Owner/City: 5 Montreal Tramways Montreal
Builder: Peckham
Date Built: 1910
Num Trucks: 2
Truck Type: Peck 14-B6?
Num Motors: 4
Motors: GE-80
Controls: K-28
Brakes:
Compressor: D1EG
Length: 37′
Weight: 50,000
Height:
Seats: 0
Ends: 2
OpenClosed: closed
Roof: flat
Structural: composite(?)
Type: work snow plow,rotary
Guidebook: 45,51
Comment: +2 GE80 motors for plow blades \
I go this from Bera.org Take a Trolley Back in Time. This website claims that Montreal had a streetcar running in the early 60′s, long after American cities had stopped using them. Hmm. I never saw a streetcar. I only saw ‘archeological evidence’ of them, when the pavement would peel back revealing tracks…I was born in 1954 but I remember the early sixties, a bit. It seemed to me that downtown Montreal was all dug up. I was frightened when scaling those boardwalks placed over gaping holes in the terrain. (It gave me nightmares.) It is true that Montreal in the early 60′s was experiencing a building and infrastructure boom.
My grandfather was Director of City Services in the 20′s in Montreal. He would have known lots about how city streets were maintained in winter.
