Goodbye sleaze...hello snooze

The lower Main, centered around the intersection of St. Laurent and Ste Catherine streets, has a gloriously hedonistic history as the heart of Canada’s Sin City.

Its sleazy roots slither back to the 1700s-early 1800s, when there was a wall around the city, which comprised what is now Old Montreal. St Laurent Boulevard led to the main city gate (which is how the street got its nickname of "The Main"), and the strip heading north from the port became the natural breeding ground for bars, brothels and opium dens.

Montreal’s continuing reputation as a playground for Americans looking for a booze-drenched, sexy good time was cemented during Prohibition in the 1920s-mid 30s. Sailors would stroll up from the port to the lower Main to… well, drink and swear like sailors… and treat themselves to the hookers who, at $2 a go, were twice as pricey as the harbour girls… and presumably worth it.

Ye Olde Partytown!

Through the 30s and 40s, Montreal was one of the continent’s fastest growing cities. With its easy access by ship, its European flavour, and its reputation as being bountiful with forbidden fruit, it attracted naughty epicures from around the world and across Canada.

During the day, the lower Main was the domain of textile workers. But when the factories closed and the sun set, it would transform into a neon-lit realm of longshoremen, bookies, sex tourists, pickpockets, drag queens and the artsy demimonde. There were all-night vaudeville cabarets and seedy repertory theatres where the dark and isolated balconies, rather than the movies, were the main attraction. There were strippers and live sex shows that featured women going at each other with dildos. There were brawls and knifings and drunks passing out in the streets.

The 40s and 50s were the glory days of the jazz and burlesque scene, with clubs featuring big name acts like Eartha Kitt and Louis Armstrong. Legendary striptease artist Lily St Cyr, whose shows ran the creative gamut from frolicking in bubble baths to pretending to make love to parrots, loved performing here. Her fame and popularity provoked an outcry from the morality squad, led by the Catholic clergy, which declared that when she performed “the theater is made to stink with the foul odor of sexual frenzy” (oh… so, like a dance club at 3am?) and led to her arrest for indecency (she was acquitted).






Lily St. Cyr rose to international fame as the star of Montreal's Gaiety burlesque club. She is reputed to be the role model for Marilyn Monroe's breathy sex goddess persona.

Cab Calloway steaming up the Chez Maurice.







The city would occasionally attempt to rein in the ‘hood’s licentiousness to appease the city’s moralizing prudes, but there was a covert understanding that the libertine playground added something special and valuable to the city’s character. In 1944, the mayor shut down dozens of brothels in reaction to an epidemic of STIs in nearby military bases. Tourism plummeted, proving the economic value of vice. The party resumed.

The strip in the 50s

The 1960s begat the Quiet Revolution and the birth of the Separatist movement. The echos of the post-war boom peaked with Expo ’67; by the early 1970s, Canada was in an economic slump partially triggered by an oil crisis. With shipping trade dropping off, and with the violence of the October Crisis prompting the exodus of Anglos and big business out of the province, Montreal lost its place as one of Canada’s most successful cities, and began to slide into disrepair.

As the years clicked by, the lower Main lost what glamour it had enjoyed as the epicentre of the city’s nightlife and diversity, becoming dominated by barflys, pimps and hookers, drug dealers and addicts, biker gangs and thugs. The bohemians moved north up the hill above Sherbrooke; the university drinkers moved west to Crescent Street; and the non-straight crowd moved east to establish the Gay Village.

As the 2000s rolled in, the area fell into the sights of those riding the uptick in urban redevelopment that had wiped out the legendary “3 bedrooms on the Plateau for $150/month, heated, with a free dime bag of pot from the neighbours downstairs as a signing bonus” apartment bargoons, and saw cookie-cutter 1-bedroom condos for 200-grand popping up like some kind of obscene human-hamster alien mushroom livingpods.

As the revamp of the Quartiers des Spectacles around the Place des Arts kicked in, the impulse to extend the blandifying makeover to the lower Main intensified.

In January 2008, the city announced that Angus, a non-profit development corporation, would start demolition on a mega-million revitalisation project that would include a 12-storey office building for architects, video production and design companies; fair-trade shops with organic, local produce; and independent cafes, bars and bookstores.

While the idea of an “eco-friendly showcase of art and socially response retail” sounds hippietastic, there are those who aren’t buying the suspiciously utopian vision. Dinu Bumbaru, Policy Director of Heritage Montreal, summed it up with: "St. Laurent is one of the most significant heritage streets in the city. It's a sinful place, but it's a soulful place too. We run a risk of sanitizing it."

Former home of the Montreal Pool Room, which opened in 1912. By the 80s, the pool tables were gone, but the place was still renowned for its for its cheap steamies, fries, and draught. This spring, as the building began to seriously fall apart, the business moved across the street. Without the cachet of its historically shambolic atmosphere, which featured stone floors worn down by a 100 years of tipsy traffic, the new place has the same bland atmosphere as the Lafleur's fast-food chain a half block away.

Johnny Zouboulakis, owner of the Cleopatra strip club, is a stubborn holdout, refusing to sell, and fighting expropriation. With a 2nd-storey cabaret featuring transvestite and fetish shows, and as the only venue that hires dancers of any age, shape and size, his club is the last vestige of the spirit of inclusiveness and diversity that made the area special. "What I love about the Main is there was always room for everybody, any political affiliation, any religious affiliation. It didn't matter, as long as they had good intentions," he has said. "But now there is no room for Cleopatra."







Oui! Nous avons des strip teaseuses!

Although the city is busily ripping up the intersection of St. Laurent and Ste. Catherine, the redevelopment scheme as been temporarily shelved, probably due to the latest economic downturn, and because of lobbying by those who resist the idea of gentrifying the strip's character into oblivion.

As the shuttered buildings wait in limbo, the artistic underground has stepped up to celebrate a legacy of boisterous anarchy by turning it into a gallery of street art.

Established venues like Club Soda, the Metropolis, and Foufounes Electriques guarantee that the area will remain a night life hub, but its pretty much a given that all traces of the strip's rough and edgy past will be smoothed over and homogenized.

That's progress... I guess.

Since its birth as an indoor skating rink in 1884, the building that houses the Metropolis was a theatre, a porn cinema, and a discotheque, before being converted into a live music venue in 1997. With a capacity of 2,300, its big enough to have showcased on-their-way-up-to-stadium-status acts Beck, the White Stripes, and even (gulp) Coldplay… and small enough to provide fairly intimate access to popular less-than-mainstream bands like Arctic Monkeys, and Nick Cave + the Bad Seeds.

Founded by a trio of artists in 1983, The Foufounes Electriques – or “electric buttocks” – got its name from its owners’ fondness for exhibiting their painted arses in old tv sets.

Starting out more as an artist’s hangout than an official bar, this sprawling multi-level club established itself as a centre for underground music and arts with its infamous for its “peinture en direct” events (where local and international artists would create paintings on canvas, on people, or on the walls), DIY fashion shows, barbecues and sideshows. Musical acts have ranged from punk, to reggae, to industrial, to hip-hop, with past shows including Nirvana, Mudhoney, William S. Burroughs and Marianne Faithfull.

The Fouf hosts the Under Pressure Graffiti Convention every August; the evidence can be seen in the streets and alleys around the club.