A Canadian Family

Smile For The Camera 11th Edition – Brothers & Sisters

               Sister to sister we will always be

             a couple of nuts off the family tree!

Originally a strip of three photos - we divided it up!

This is a photo of me and my sister about 45 years ago at the Ville Lasalle Mon Mart department store near Montreal, Quebec.  It’s one of my favourite photos because it reminds me of how exhilarated my sister and I felt when our mother gave us permission to go to the store all by ourselves.  In the mid 1960s kids didn’t hang out in malls or department stores but we had special permission that day because we needed to shop for our mom’s birthday present.

After paying for  my mother’s present (a white cotton baby doll negligee with large multi-coloured polka dots) we headed for the exit, but then we noticed an Instant  Photograph machine so I dropped 25 cents into the metal slot and we slipped behind the curtain to have these pictures taken. We were both wearing our elementary school uniforms. My younger sister had the stiff navy blue tunic of a junior student while I wore the navy blue skirt and starched white shirt of a senior.   It was a  perfect finish to a perfect day!

In the 1960s Ville Lasalle was a booming suburb of Montreal but it was still less developed than the  neighbouring city of Verdun, so there was a lot of excitement in the air when department stores like the Mon Mart and the Miracle Mart  opened up. The Miracle Mart was in the Lasalle Shopping Centre  and it was on “our” side of the Lasalle Aqueduct on Champlain Blvd. This was where new neighbourhoods were sprouting up so they had plenty of customers.  My favourite thing about the Centre was the  Le Quick fast food bar. As children we very rarely ate out and there were no fast food chains in our area, so grabbing a bite at Le Quick was a real treat!  There was also a Steinberg’s grocery store. Our family  loved  Steinberg’s because they had a little rotisserie where we could buy fresh Bar-B-Que chickens and sauce. That was quite affordable for middle-class families and my mother brought one home each Saturday for lunch.

Claude Leduc has beautiful before/after photos of Montreal's retail landscape. Click on GroceryMania link below.

The Mon Mart closed decades ago. Part of the reason might be that  it was located on de la Verendrye Boulevard and the surrounding area was not built up at that time. In fact, even though I loved the store, I have to admit that the building and its large parking lot looked kind of isolated – and even bleak in the middle of the winter. This might not have mattered so much except that it was directly opposite the Lasalle Shopping Centre which had a livelier, more modern feel to it. 

If you visit Lasalle today, you’ll still find the Lasalle Shopping Centre but the Mon Mart, Miracle Mart and Steinberg’s have all disappeared into history.

For more photos and info on Quebec vintage supermarkets, 

grocery and convenience stores please visit

Grocerymania’s Flickr Photostream

Smile for the Camera 11th edition

is hosted by footnoteMaven.

Related Posts:

“… To Scan A Poem From A Shopping List” pt.1

“… To Scan A Poem From A Shopping List” pt.2

Carnivals etc.!

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February 28, 2009 - Posted by Evelyn Yvonne Theriault | . | blog carnival, Lasalle, Quebec