Little Burgundy: The Interwoven Histories of Race, Residence, and Work in Twentieth-Century Montreal

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44
Author(s):  
Steven High
Keyword(s):  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Central City ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Cities

Until the 1950s, most black men in Montreal worked for the railway companies as sleeping car porters, dining car employees, and red caps. The city’s English-speaking black community took root in Little Burgundy because it was close to Windsor and Bonaventure train stations. The area between Saint-Henri and Griffintown, north of the Lachine Canal, in the city’s Southwest Borough, was once known by many names. “Little Burgundy” was invented in the 1960s by city officials to describe their urban renewal plans for the area. If employment mobility was foundational in making this community, it proved just as central in its unmaking in the 1960s and 1970s. The shift from trains to cars and trucks had a two-fold impact on Little Burgundy. First, employment levels collapsed with the decline of passenger train travel, leaving many black men unemployed. Then the state built a highway through the neighbourhood to facilitate the mobility of mainly white suburban workers and consumers making their way to the central city. Next, the neighbourhood was “renewed” on a massive scale. What followed were years of dislocation and crisis. Much of the black community was dispersed as a result. It was no coincidence. The radical restructuring of North American cities disproportionately affected racialized minorities and poor whites. What was different here was that the area’s reputation for being the birthplace of black Montreal emerged after the community had been largely dispersed by urban renewal.

scholarly journals The Economic Aftermath of the 1960s Riots in American Cities: Evidence from Property Values

2007 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 849-883 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Collins ◽  
Robert A. Margo
Keyword(s):  
Census Tract ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Central City ◽  
Property Values ◽  
Residential Property ◽  
Property Value ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Cities

In the 1960s many American cities experienced violent, race-related civil disturbances. This article examines census data from 1950 to 1980 to measure the riots' impact on the value of central-city residential property, and especially on black-owned property. Both OLS and IV estimates indicate that the riots depressed the median value of black-owned property between 1960 and 1970, with little or no rebound in the 1970s. Census tract data for a small number of cities suggest relative losses of population and property value in tracts that were directly affected by riots compared to other tracts in the same cities.

scholarly journals The Optimism of Absence: An Archaeology of Displacement, Effacement, and Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Mullins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Projects ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University ◽  
American Cities

In the 1960s Edward J. Zebrowski turned the razing of Indianapolis, Indiana into a compelling show of forward-looking community optimism illuminating the power of displacement. When Zebrowski’s company toppled the Knights of Pythias Hall in 1967, for instance, he installed bleachers and hired an organist to play from the back of a truck as the twelve-storey Romanesque Revival structure was reduced to rubble. Two years later, the ‘Big Z’ hosted a party in the Claypool Hotel and ushered guests outside at midnight to watch as the floodlit building met its end at the wrecking ball (Figure 12.1). Zebrowski’s theatricality perhaps distinguished him from the scores of wrecking balls dismantling American cities, but his celebration of the city’s material transformation mirrored the sentiments of many urbanites in the wake of World War II. The post-war period was punctuated by a flurry of destruction and idealistic redevelopment in American cities like Indianapolis just as the international landscape was being rebuilt from the ruins of the war. In 1959 the New York Times’ Austin Wehrwein (1959: 61) assessed the University of Chicago’s massive displacement in Hyde Park and drew a prescient parallel to post-war Europe when he indicated that ‘wrecking crews have cleared large tracts, so that areas near the university resemble German cities just after World War II’. Indeed, much of Europe was distinguished less by ruins and redevelopment than demolition and emptied landscapes removing the traces of warfare that states wished to reclaim or efface; in the United States, urban renewal likewise took aim on impractical, unappealing, or otherwise unpleasant urban fabric and the people who called such places home (see also Ernsten, Chapter 10, for this process associated with the policies of apartheid in Cape Town). These global projects removed wartime debris and razed deteriorating prewar landscapes, extending interwar urban renewal projects that embraced the fantasy of a ‘blank slate’ as they built various unevenly executed imaginations of modernity. However, many optimistic development plans in Europe and the United States alike were abandoned or disintegrated into ruins themselves, simply leaving blank spaces on the landscape. Consequently, the legacy of urban renewal and post-war reconstruction is not simply modernist architecture; instead, post-war landscape transformation is signalled by distinctive absences dispersed amidst post-war architectural space and traces of earlier built environments.

Transformation in Jamaica, Grenada, and Haiti

Freedom Roots ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 281-318
Author(s):  
Laurent Dubois ◽  
Richard Lee Turits
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
State And Society ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Popular Classes ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the Caribbean saw multiple and dramatic political efforts to transform state and society. New governments sought to embrace popular classes as equal members of society as almost never before and to create unprecedented forms of equality, both economically and culturally. This chapter explores three such attempts at transformation: Jamaica under Michael Manley, Maurice Bishop and the Grenada Revolution, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s first government in Haiti. Unlike the Cuban Revolution, these leaders excited expectations for change within still mostly capitalist economies. Manley and Aristide led democratic governments, while Grenada sustained one-party rule. The outcomes of reform efforts in these three nations varied from enduring progress to poignant tragedy. The chapter explores the powerful challenges these new Caribbean governments faced, domestic and foreign, economic and political. It shows how after the English-speaking Caribbean gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s, their trajectories began to overlap with that of the older independent Caribbean, as national sovereignty made them suddenly more vulnerable to the region’s predominant twentieth-century empire, the United States.

A Right to Equal Education

Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 131-170
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Students With Disabilities ◽  
San Antonio ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
Equal Education ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter discusses the development of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence in the area of students’ rights during the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses in particular on the courts’ interpretation of equal protection in regard to school desegregation, bilingual education, and students with disabilities. The chapter argues that, during the 1970s, the Supreme Court dramatically narrowed its interpretation of equal protection, and in doing so, it limited the ability of advocates for students of color to pursue racial discrimination cases in court. The chapter discusses how advocates for non-English-speaking students and students with disabilities sought to use the Fourteenth Amendment to make claims on behalf of these children, who were sometimes excluded from schools entirely. This chapter also examines the San Antonio v. Rodriguez case, in which the Supreme Court rejected the claim that the Constitution protects a right to education.

Ideas of Reality: Antonio Dias between Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Milan

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-99
Author(s):  
Sérgio B. Martins
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
English Language ◽  
Arte Povera ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Global Art

Despite the fact that the growing reception of Antonio Dias (b. 1944) in the English-speaking world is happening under the sign of global art history, the trajectory of the Brazilian artist in the 1960s and 1970s actually suggests both a counter-genealogy and a counter-geography of the global. This essay explores this situation by recontextualizing Dias's emergence vis-à-vis the critical debate on realism and underdevelopment that marked the Rio de Janeiro avant-gardist scene of the mid- to late-1960s and involved writers such as Ferreira Gullar, Hélio Oiticica, Mário Pedrosa, Pierre Restany, and Frederico Morais. It subsequently argues that such critical terms simultaneously both change and remain crucial as Dias moves away from Brazil, first to Paris, late in 1966, and then to Milan, in 1968, inflecting the artist's recourse to the English language and his turn to painting as his preferred medium even as he began to circulate amongst artists associated with Arte Povera and Conceptualism in Europe.

scholarly journals Interfaith Dialogue and the Golden Age of Christian-Jewish Relations

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaakov Ariel
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Interfaith Dialogue ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The Relationship

Since the 1960s, remarkable changes have taken place in the relationship between the Christian and Jewish communities in the West. A movement of interfaith dialogue stood at the center of the developments, serving as a catalyst that helped to bring about reconciliation and improvement in the attitudes of Christians towards Jews. Beginning in the English-speaking world at the turn of the twentieth century, the dialogue between Jews and non-Jews gained more ground in the decades between the two world wars. The movement of interfaith reconciliation advanced considerably in the years after World War II and reached a "golden age" in the late 1960s and 1970s, when an unprecedented momentum for reconciliation and dialogue between the faiths flourished in Europe, America, Israel, and other countries. Despite occasional set-backs and while involving mostly members of liberal or mainstream groups, this movement helped to improve the relationship between Christians and Jews in an unprecedented manner and on a worldwide scale.

scholarly journals Pressure and violence: Housing renovation and displacement in Sweden

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 631-651 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Baeten ◽  
Sara Westin ◽  
Emil Pull ◽  
Irene Molina
Keyword(s):  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Private Housing ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Right ◽  
Housing Estates

Based on interview material relating to the current wave of housing renovation in Swedish cities, this article will analyse the profit-driven, traumatic and violent displacement in the wake of contemporary large-scale renovation processes of the so-called Million Program housing estates from the 1960s and 1970s. We maintain that the current form of displacement (through renovation) has become a regularized profit strategy, for both public and private housing companies in Sweden. We will pay special attention to Marcuse’s notion of ‘displacement pressure’ which refers not only to actual displacement but also to the anxieties, uncertainties, insecurities and temporalities that arise from possible displacement due to significant rent increases after renovation and from the course of events preceding the actual rent increase. Examples of the many insidious forms in which this pressure manifests itself will be given – examples that illustrate the hypocritical nature of much planning discourse and rhetoric of urban renewal. We illustrate how seemingly unspectacular measures and tactics deployed in the renovation processes have far-reaching consequences for tenants exposed to actual or potential displacement. Displacement and displacement pressure due to significant rent increases (which is profit-driven but justified by invoking the ‘technical necessity’ of renovation) undermines the ‘right to dwell’ and the right to exert a reasonable level of power over one’s basic living conditions, with all the physical and mental benefits that entails – regardless of whether displacement fears materialize in actual displacement or not.

A COMMENTARY ON THE EARLY DECISIONS OF THE CARIBBEAN COURT OF JUSTICE IN ITS ORIGINAL JURISDICTION

2010 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 761-778
Author(s):  
Adrian D Saunders
Keyword(s):  
The Bahamas ◽  
Caribbean Community ◽  
Anglophone Caribbean ◽  
Court Of Justice ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Caribbean Court Of Justice ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
British Colonies

The Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas (‘the RTC’) is an attempt on the part of a group of Caribbean States to respond in a collective manner to the pressing challenges posed by the forces of globalization and liberalization. The RTC seeks, inter alia, to deepen regional economic integration through the establishment of a Caribbean Community (‘CARICOM’) including a CARICOM Single Market and Economy (‘CSME’). The States in question—Antigua & Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago—are for the most part former British colonies that gained their independence in the 1960s and 1970s. The RTC signals yet another important step in the tortuous path taken by these Anglophone Caribbean States ‘to avoid the looming threat of marginalization’1 following the failure in 1962 of the West Indies Federation.2 Significantly, this latest step is being taken side by side with the non English speaking civil law States of Haiti and Suriname thereby adding a new and interesting dimension to the integration process.

Urban Renewal, Public Housing and the Racial Shaping of Atlanta

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald H. Bayor
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Central City ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Business Activity ◽  
Downtown Area ◽  
Motivating Factor ◽  
American Cities ◽  
The City

A number of American cities experienced urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s. Historians and others who have chronicled the urban changes of those decades have cited economic redevelopment as the motivating factor in the rebuilding of the downtown and the relocation of the black population from that area. For example, Carl Abbott in his analysis of Sunbelt cities noted that “the rebuilding of downtown districts was intended to secure two related economic goals.” The first was to make the city more appealing as a center of investment and business activity as opposed to competing cities; the second was to enhance the downtown area in light of suburban development which might attract business away from the central city. Clarence Stone-in his study of Atlanta's renewal also indicates the primacy of economic factors as the motivation for rebuilding the city's downtown and uprooting the black population.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document