kool maudit
Active Member
i guess this is kind of one for the older forumers, but having just been to toronto, one of the things that i grew curious about was what the city felt like when montreal was still the first city of canada.
toronto is now so much busier, so much more ambitious than my hometown that it's difficult to see. i know the wheels were in motion since the '30s -- manufacturing, u.s. branch plants, the stock exchange -- but until the 1970s montreal was still canada's metropolis.
they were so close for so long that there is little direct evidence that remains. it's the little things: the humble houses on palmerston above queen, the slight lack of ornate, joined walkups... but toronto is now infilling so rapidly and building so grandly that its pre-eminent status seems like it was always the case.
though i prefer montreal -- any anglophone who works in the media here is here for this personal reason, as toronto offers more opportunity -- i do love toronto, and that's why i joined this forum. i could easily live there, given the right job. i'm no blinded booster.
if anything, i could see how toronto may have once had a sparseness, a shabbiness that montreal did not (but we're still both plenty sparse and shabby, by world standards), but i doubt it ever lacked much in confidence.
i wonder, though, how montreal appeared to torontonians in those years -- was it something to aspire to, or a dead-end to avoid? was it a sibling?
the two are so alike and yet so different, and driving home on the 401 it is the tenements of saint henri that first drive this home, that first appear unshared.
what was it like in those days before the poles flipped?
toronto is now so much busier, so much more ambitious than my hometown that it's difficult to see. i know the wheels were in motion since the '30s -- manufacturing, u.s. branch plants, the stock exchange -- but until the 1970s montreal was still canada's metropolis.
they were so close for so long that there is little direct evidence that remains. it's the little things: the humble houses on palmerston above queen, the slight lack of ornate, joined walkups... but toronto is now infilling so rapidly and building so grandly that its pre-eminent status seems like it was always the case.
though i prefer montreal -- any anglophone who works in the media here is here for this personal reason, as toronto offers more opportunity -- i do love toronto, and that's why i joined this forum. i could easily live there, given the right job. i'm no blinded booster.
if anything, i could see how toronto may have once had a sparseness, a shabbiness that montreal did not (but we're still both plenty sparse and shabby, by world standards), but i doubt it ever lacked much in confidence.
i wonder, though, how montreal appeared to torontonians in those years -- was it something to aspire to, or a dead-end to avoid? was it a sibling?
the two are so alike and yet so different, and driving home on the 401 it is the tenements of saint henri that first drive this home, that first appear unshared.
what was it like in those days before the poles flipped?