15 June First MBC Historical Tour
June 15 Montreal Bicycle Club Historical Tour
A.T.Lane has been working on a cycling tour of places important to the history of the MBC, concentrating on the years from about 1878 (founding of the MBC) to 1900 (waning of cycling craze). He described the route and main locations in a recent posting of his dry run of the route,
He is hoping that this tour will be presented regularly, to help initiate new members into the MBC, and perhaps be of interest to other members of the public. These minutes refer to the first public presentation of the tour, and notes events/locations not mentioned in the dry run minutes.
The tour started at 9 am at Shaika Café, with Daisy Greville and Alfred Wesley Sherritt taking the tour with A.T.Lane. We than went to the Westmount Athletic Grounds, the first point of the tour. Daisy is a member of the community gardens at the track, and she showed us her plot.
At the site of the founding meeting of the MBC, we met the current owner of the building.
He bought the house in the mid 1980s, when it was pretty dilapidated. He has done extensive improvements on the building, including restoring the main window, which was missing the lintel, sill, and vertical side pieces, along with some of the larger blocks below the window. He found the parts on the site of a house being demolished, and then integrated them into this house.
He is also responsible for the flowers around the house, along the lane at the side of the house, and around the city trees near his house. This work was the reason that the lane was declared a Ruelle Verte, the only one in the area, for which he is very proud. The sign is placed on a rear addition to the house, a space he now uses as his music
He said that his records show that the house was build in ????, several years after the founding meeting in 1878. So it is unclear now whether the records are not quite accurate, or the original house was replaced in the interval.On our way to the next tour stop, we paused to admire the mobile sculpture,
at the southwest corner of the Hall building at Concordia University. We were debating whether it was motor or wind-driven – it’s the wind.
This is a better picture of the presumed view from the top of the CDN hill than was shown in the dry run log.
The MAAA building on Peel Street is undergoing extensive renovations. If you look at the very top of this structure, just under the peak, you can spot a bas-relief, only part of which is visible through the I-beam support structure. One can catch glimpses of the top of a wing, similar to the MBC logo (the MBC was one of the founding groups of the MAAA, in 1881). But maybe it represents the top of a wing of the MAAA logo of that era? Hard to tell until the I-beams come down. Daisy left the tour at this point, which halved the tourist count.
We spotted a great blue heron at Place des Bassins, on the Lachine Canal.
This section of the canal had only received water days earlier, due to extensive refurbishment of the banks of the canal for several years now.
The pedestrian bridge near Atwater market has only just opened as well.
In Verdun, Wellington, near the site of the former Velodrome, has been turned into a pedestrian area.
We stopped under the St. Lawrence Bridge (http://montreal-history.com/resource/3308), built in 1886 by the Dominion Bridge company. Some of the names that can be made out in this photo are familiar to many Canadians.
Final thoughts. A.T.Lane has done an admiral job putting the history of the MBC into a lovely bicycle route. He was able to answer most questions. His introduction gave an overview to the tour highlights so that one could see their relevance when we arrived at each tour stop.
I would like to see a bit more emphasis on the historical/social/cultural aspects of cycling in this period in general, and in Montreal in particular. A.T.Lane did touch on some of these, mainly in response to questions. There is a need for better visuals to be used. Some of the visuals were postage-stamp size – they should be at least post-card sized. A break for snack or lunch should be included. The tour was over 5 hours long and a break should be anticipated.
Comments
Post a Comment