The history of Bonaventure has been forgotten

Catherine Montambeault

Wednesday, September 6, 2017 23:24

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Wednesday, September 6, 2017 23:24

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The new entrance to the city of Bonaventure should have been put more in value the rich history that lies behind this sector of the south-west of Montreal, say historians.

Inaugurated on Wednesday, the Bonaventure Project has been designed to enhance the “industrial past and port sector”, said on the website of the project.

But in reality, the historical records are too few, consider Dinu Bumbaru, policy director of Heritage Montreal.

“There are streets with an extraordinary story who cross the boulevard Robert-Bourassa, including Nazareth, Wellington and Notre-Dame,” he stressed. We have been installing historical panels to explain it to people, or put a scale model of the neighborhood that has disappeared during the construction of the highway. “

Area shaved

This ancient district, it is Victoriatown, also called Village-aux-Oies. In the middle of the 19th century, the first to live there were irish immigrants temporarily housed. Workers, including those who have built the Victoria bridge, are then installed.

But towards the end of the 1920s, a part of the buildings has been destroyed for the construction of a bridge over the Canadian National railway.

In 1964, nearly 300 families were expelled when the district has made way for the Bonaventure expressway, a major access to the site of Expo 67.

“Unfortunately, the history of the city, it is a real challenge to make it pass in this kind of places,” says Bumbaru. We prefer to usher in a few exhibitions from time to time, to equip these places of historical panels. “

“This is not a solemn duty, but it is something we should do out of respect for those who preceded us, and also by a gift for future generations,” he adds.

Gilles Proulx, a lover of history, believes that the two works of art installed and the Bonaventure Project — the sculpture of human form, Source, and recalling a tree, Dendrites — could have been better chosen.

“It would have been the place and the time perfect to put a huge statue [of the founders of Montreal] de Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance, he said. But for this, it is necessary to have a historical consciousness, what we don’t. “