Reflections: Montreal Life

To get an appreciation of Greenfield Park today, it is necessary to look back nearly one hundred years to 1911, the year the municipality was founded. At that time all the land was either used for agriculture, abandoned or overgrown with bush. Montreal, only five miles away across the St. Lawrence River, was booming. Immigrants were hoping for better than the when they arrived in Canada, often from crowded British cities, but they frequently ended up settling in poor, polluted and cramped industrial neighbourhoods like Pointe St. Charles and Griffintown.

Most Montrealers believe that all of the Irish immigrants to our city arrived at the time of the Irish Famine in 1847, when in reality the ancestors of many of our present day Quebec citizens of Irish descent likely arrived decades before this terrible event.

Around 2005, Peggie Hopkins, a real estate agent in Point St. Charles, was offered an opportunity to act in a play at Westmount’s community theatre. She had no previous acting experience, but thought that the chance to act might be a new and interesting adventure.

Before long, she was infected with the “theatre bug” and was thinking about starting a local English-language community theatre in Point St. Charles. Of course, the big question was, “how do you start a community theatre?”

Do you remember what you were doing at 2.00 p.m. on Thursday, February 12, 1959? I do. I was standing in the arrival area at Windsor Station in Montreal -- head high, eyes wide open, senses tingling, and feet on Canadian soil (well ok, so it was really concrete). The other boat-train passengers had all gone their various ways, and now I was alone. For one brief moment of panic, I wondered what on earth I had done.