Article content The Plateau today isn’t the Plateau I grew up with. I was living in Mile End in the 1980s and that neighbourhood is technically part of the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, but anyone who knows anything knows Mile End is its own micro-hood. Back then, it was working class and very ethnically diverse — Italians, Portuguese, Hasidic Jews and French-Canadians — and it was beginning to attract students and artsy types.
But it wasn’t really the Plateau then and it isn’t now. It became the indie-music/coolster hub early this century, and now it’s mostly a mecca for tourists and well-to-do professionals who like living in a trendy neighbourhood. Forty years ago, I’d walk east of Mile End to the Plateau, and back then it was still not that different from the ‘hood described in the plays and novels of Michel Tremblay.
Working-class, French-speaking, salt of the earth. In the ’80s, if you were on Mont-Royal Ave. east of St-Denis St.
, the chance of hearing anything in the language of MacLennan was about as likely as finding a Parti Québécois minister singing the praises of the Rockies and the beauty of Canada. Recently, I strolled down Mont-Royal Ave. E.
, which is closed to car traffic for the summer, and I heard loads of conversations in English. Of course you also hear a lot more French being spoken by folks born on the other side of the Atlantic, and it sometimes feels like if you’re immigrating from France to Quebec, you have no choice but to move .