The Keystone of the Neighbourhood: Gender, Collective Action, and Working-Class Heritage Strategy in Pointe-Saint-Charles, Montreal

In 1973, in the deindustrializing, impoverished Montreal neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles, neighbourhood activists—normally preoccupied with jobs, housing, and food security—made the fate of an 82-year-old fire station their top concern. Pointe-Saint-Charles was the proposed site for a new highway construction: le Projet Georges-Vanier. If built, this artery would have sliced the working-class community in half, destroying the fire station as well as a much-loved public park, and displacing about 140 families in turn. In their organized resistance to this plan, Comité Action-Boulevard recognized and mobilized around the fire station as the keystone without which the plan could not proceed. This article situates an important but under-studied moment in Montreal’s preservation struggles in the pivotal early 1970s. It proposes this story as a powerful illustration of the idea that heritage is not an object but rather a social, cultural, and political process, and considers the fragility of collective memory about how this building was saved. Part of that fragility arises from a conundrum: the women who were largely behind this action worked collectively under organizations rather than under their own names, as individuals. The action to save the fire station coincided with a period in the neighbourhood’s history in which women were gradually emerging from restrictive gender norms. In searching for the complete story of how the community of Pointe-Saint-Charles saved their fire station, I have encountered a partial, but compelling story of how the women of an impoverished neighbourhood took power over their own built environment, activating what Iain J.M. Robertson calls a “heritage from below.”