| News release – March 2005 |
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Warehouse-stores
take their
rightful
place
in history
These days, regular readers of the
Old Montréal Web site are noticing enriched content added
to records in its Heritage Inventories—and more
is to come over the next few weeks. Much of the new material
is devoted to the heritage neighbourhood's warehouse-stores,
which were designed essentially to serve the wholesale trade
and manufacturing and, from 1850 onward, began to replace
the existing store-residences.
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Wide-ranging study
For the past three years, Joanne Burgess,
a professor of History at Université du Québec à Montréal
(UQAM), has been heading up a research project on the warehouse-stores
of Old Montréal, thanks to a major grant from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and joint financial
support from both the Québec Ministry of Culture and Communications
and the city of Montréal.
Hundreds of warehouse-stores were built in
Old Montréal between 1850 and 1880, representing hundreds of thousands
of square metres of usable floor space. More than two-thirds of these
buildings are still extant, eloquent reminders of the profound changes
to commercial practices that occurred in Victorian Montréal. To grasp
the importance of those transformations, one has to consider that
they had repercussions all across Canada. Montréal's new commercial
spaces and the new commercial practices of the day were tightly intertwined. |
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Professor Burgess's research has already
resulted in a number of papers and other publications, among them
an upcoming paper at the annual symposium of US/ICOMOS this May.
Her current project also helped enhance a chapter of the book Old
Montreal: History Through Heritage (2004). More publications
are forthcoming. The official Old Montréal Web site's Heritage
Inventories, which helped to inspire the project, will of course
remain the main, indispensable tool for making available the raw
data on individual buildings and, potentially, for presenting a
global summary.
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Links, links everywhere
Users are invited to view the three examples
listed below, which give a good idea of the impact this type of
research can have on inventory records.
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Besides exploring the links between history and architecture presented in the
building records, users also won't want to miss the hyperlinks to records on
building designers and owner-builders, which in turn lead to other fascinating
links. All of the work completed in the past few decades has been utilized, and
several detailed records have already been created for the site by historians
Guy Mongrain and Luc Carey. The latter, with assistance from Yannick Gagné,
has also completed a painstaking process of data collection and produced a number
of valuable preliminary analyses. More recently, the setting up of a research
team at UQAM has stimulated further research within a broader analytical framework.
Annie Beauchemin, Isabelle Bisson-Carpentier, Amélie Gagné, Jean-Sébastien
Landry and Muriel Lassagne continue to work on the completion of the records,
under the direction of Prof. Burgess. Not all of the records will, over the short
term, match the richness of content of the examples presented here, but the essential
historical data for each will be consolidated and many links to historical figures
added.
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