A Canadian Family

Genealogy, Family History & Vintage Postcards

Growing Up In Ville Lasalle, Quebec (1950s/60s)

This vintage black and white postcard of the Mercier Bridge Cabins (Villa du Pont Mercier), first caught my eye because I grew up in the Montreal suburb of Ville Lasalle – and because of the odd telephone number (ELwood 0148) in the top right hand corner.

LasalleCabins

My family moved to Ville Lasalle in the late 1950s. It was still relatively undeveloped. There was no Lasalle Hospital, Civic Centre or high school! As a matter of fact it was a few years before the first big department stores opened. It was quite an adjustment for us to leave a third floor walkup in a French-speaking, Catholic neighbourhood of Verdun and settle down in a modern little bungalow in the predominantly English-speaking, Protestant neighbourhood of Riverside Park but many young families were making the move because it seemed to be a great place to raise children!Rotary

One of the first things my parents did when we first arrived was to teach me and my sister our new telephone number – Dominic6 – 7025. The prefix made it easier for us to remember the number and it also instantly told you where someone lived. I remember that my friends in Verdun had the prefix POntiac. The prefix was always a word based on two letters of the rotary dial – in my case DO stood for the numbers 36.I found a great online resource about heritage telephone numbers and in a section called Montreal telephone exchange geography it says that DOminic was in use from 1959 until the early sixties. The ELwood Read more »

October 27, 2009 Posted by | . | , , , , | 10 Comments

Bridges Over The St-Lawrence River(1): Honore Mercier Bridge, Quebec

This is an interesting set of 2 postcards of the Honore Mercier, one of several bridges that connects Montreal to the South Shore. This bridge passes over both the St-Lawrence River and the St-Lawrence Seaway. Note the vivid colours and handpainted flowers on the second version!

I believe this photograph is taken from the shore of what is now the borough of Lasalle looking towards Kahnawake (aka Caughnawaga) and Chateauguay. I grew up in Lasalle in the 50s/60s and have been living in Chateauguay since the 90s.

Chateauguay is full of people whose families came from Lasalle and Verdun.

Vintage Postcard of Honore Mercier Bridge, Ville Lasalle, Montreal, Canada

Honore Mercier Bridge, Ville Lasalle. A Canadian Family Vintage Postcard Collection

Reverse of Honore Mercier Bridge, Vintage Postcard Read more »

August 3, 2009 Posted by | . | , , , , , , | 5 Comments

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.

monmart1

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

brothers-and-sisters

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 | . | , , | 4 Comments