#viger square

“While Cherrier might have been anticipating the way that Montreal would grow in the coming decade or two, the more distant future existed beyond the realm of imagination. Unbeknownst to her, the land donated during the summer of 1818 would become central to the project of creating an orderly Montreal for centuries to come. Périne-Charles Cherrier’s vision of a bustling marketplace on the urban periphery was just the first in a succession of ideas about how a few hundred square feet of land could be used to foster public order.....While Cherrier might have connected public order to a carefully regulated marketplace, the elites governing the city in the second half of the nineteenth century reconsidered this space as something that could be designed to more explicitly cultivate the manners and behaviours of the city’s burgeoning working class. This shifting strategy demonstrates that, in the half century that separated the donation of the land to the magistrates charged with governing Montreal and its redesign as a lush Victorian pleasure garden by the municipal government in the 1860s, the city’s civic elites had rethought issues around public order, the urban landscape, and social relations in some meaningful ways. It was through modest civic projects such as the management of this land that civic elites were able to communicate their vision of a modern, orderly society. This overarching concern about public order did not form in a vacuum. It was cultivated by broader debates and discussions about civic governance and authority, which are addressed throughout this collection of essays. The spectre of resistance and unrest was never far removed from the imagination of the often-anonymous civic officials charged with the task of remaking this parcel of land over the course of the nineteenth century. While on paper the donation of the land was treated as a routine transaction, it must be interpreted as a political act, made in the context of the emergence of an engaged Canadien political elite that was slowly coalescing around the Parti canadien, the faction that represented the interests of Lower Canada’s French-speaking community in the Legislative Assembly. Sectarian and linguistic tension loomed over public life in the city. While the movement for democratic reform that would play such a significant role in fuelling the outbreak of political insurrection in the 1830s remained in its infancy, the vigourous strain of British chauvinism that had been reinvigorated by the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars was the cause of a growing tension between Montreal’s two major ethnic communities by 1818. It is worth speculating that Cherrier was being mindful of her family’s standing in the city’s social, cultural, and political elite. 

Although her late husband was an artisan who won a seat in Lower Canada’s Legislative Assembly late in life, the Cherrier family had moved in elite circles since the French regime, and the success of the family’s next generation – with son Denis-Benjamin Viger and nephew Jacques Viger each becoming prominent figures in colonial public life – suggests that they possessed an aspirational streak. In the documents pertaining to her donation and the subsequent meeting of local officials to discuss her terms, there is no mention of the decision to bestow the name of her husband’s family on the property, but it was immediately acknowledged in official documents as Viger Square. In a city where the growing number of parks and squares frequently bore the name of British colonial officials and members of the royal family, having this public space named in honour of a Canadien family must have felt like a coup for Cherrier and the entire Canadien community. A desire to foster public order was not unique to Périne-Charles Cherrier. The connections that she was drawing between public order and the common good were shaped by ideas that had been circulating across the Atlantic world since the Enlightenment. These discussions connected a group of reform-oriented elites that stretched across the city’s deeply contested partisan and sectarian divides. This reform impulse was also inter-generational. The project of creating an orderly urban landscape and public culture would consume politically engaged elite Montrealers for the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. It was a disparate project, and many were engaged in only a single manifestation of it. At its core, however, was the notion that the disorderly impact of the social change being fuelled by mass migration, urbanization, and, eventually, industrialization could be effectively and liberally managed to foster a genteel and orderly social order. 

This project encompassed institutional responses, such as the expansion of popular schooling and the reform of policing, social responses like the temperance movement, and innovative ideas in the realm of governing urban space. It connected urban elites from across the North Atlantic world who shared and debated ideas through the emergence of a dynamic public sphere of meetings, lecture tours, and newspapers and other print publications that constructed the physical and social landscape of the city as something that could be effectively reformed. Ultimately, their vision was about harnessing the authority and power that they had at their disposal to foster their vision of how an orderly modern society ought to look and function. No matter the portal through which they engaged with this diffuse project, the unruly and violent crowd became the primary embodiment of everything that was out of step with this vision These reforming projects were, however, contentious. The popular classes and the kind of unruly behaviour that was associated with them were typically the target of these reforms. Montreal’s poor frequently resisted these measures, occasionally in explicit ways but more often than not by quietly – or not so quietly – refusing to abandon the sorts of practices that they had long used to navigate the material and cultural challenges of urban life. These forms of resistance included alcohol-fuelled revelry, the raucous practices of street vendors and hucksters, and the employment of unruly and confrontational political practices on the city’s streets. Tensions over the use of urban space were in keeping with broader conflicts between the popular classes and politically engaged elites. Cherrier donated her land before Montreal had a municipal government. In 1818, the city was governed by a group of justices of the peace charged with the task by the colonial authorities. When presented with her donation, they quickly organized a special session to discuss the logistics of the transaction. After all, the land had come with strings attached that entailed an outlay of public finances to improve the land and to establish a public market. A study revealed that meeting these conditions would cost the colonial government an estimated £350. Cherrier, her sister Rosalie, and her nephew Louis-Joseph Papineau, were in attendance when the inspector of roads presented the justices of the peace with the official plan to turn the land into a functioning market at a meeting held later that summer. There was little mention of the Viger donation in the public record for the next twenty years. The stream that flowed through the property was filled in by 1825, as a neighbourhood emerged in the area that had been orchards and marshland when the donation was made. The land became the property of the municipal government when it was established in 1832, with Cherrier’s nephew Jacques Viger serving as the first mayor. After the municipal government was re-established in the aftermath of the rebellions, one of its first actions was to oversee the expansion and modernization of the market, which now stood at the heart of a bustling and largely Canadien suburb in the city’s east end.

A bylaw was tabled, debated, and passed by the municipal government at the end of 1840 that solidified plans for the construction of a pound and cattle market on what was now being referred to in official documents as Place Viger. The law reconsidered the scope of activity taking place on the square. While it appears to have been used very broadly as a public market, with vendors selling a variety of wares to residents, the bylaw proposed converting it exclusively into a site for the exchange of hay and cattle. Funds were set aside for the construction of a pound “for the purpose of shutting up and impounding therein all horses, horned cattle, sheep, goats and hogs found straying on or damaging the property of any person or straying on the beaches, highways, or public grounds within the city limits.” The bylaw also earmarked money to hire “a fit and proper person” appointed by council to oversee the operation of this pound. Twenty-two years after the land was donated to the city, it was clearly still being used to foster public order. The wording of the law suggests that stray animals remained a problem in this ramshackle neighbourhood on the urban fringe. The construction of a pound was introduced as an orderly solution to this problem. Furthermore, section 8 of the bylaw implemented a ban on the sale of cattle in the city’s markets, with Place Viger being the only exception to this rule. This suggests an attempt on the part of the municipal government to consolidate the exchange of cattle into single location that would be made particularly well equipped to deal with the logistics of this trade. The rest of the bylaw laid out the costs of renting stands in the market and the penalties for disobeying a variety of other provisions for selling goods in Place Viger, again pointing to the role that markets played in rapidly growing cities like mid-nineteenth-century Montreal. 

This rethinking of Viger Square occurred at a moment when civic elites were harnessing the newly expanded powers available to them through municipal government to foster their vision of an orderly city. Setting aside a space like Viger Square as a site where some of the messier and more disorderly aspects of urban life could be contained and managed demonstrates their strategies around this civic project. They were motivated by an audacious vision of the sort of city that their reforms could foster, where disorderly barriers to circulation and gentility could be subdued through effective legislation, thereby creating an urban landscape that reflected their idealized notions of modernity. Public projects, even this relatively minor retooling of Place Viger, were part of a larger effort to streamline the way that commodities and people circulated through the city. They created a node of governance that would tame the elements of the urban landscape that struck civic elites as problematic and out of step with modernity. Such actions need to be interpreted as part of the process in which local elites used the civil powers at their disposal to foster an orderly public culture... 

The construction of a permanent structure to house the cattle market on Viger Square helped reinforce its status as a community hub. The Agricultural Society of Lower Canada began hosting exhibitions in the square in the mid-1840s. These events drew crowds into the square to observe the latest advancements being made in animal husbandry. “The show of stock was numerous,” read one review of the 1848 exhibition, “and several fine animals were on the ground, though intermixed with very inferior ones ... Several good horses and brood mares were shown, but we regret to see that the stallions exhibited do not appear to be of pure Canadian breed.” Public events of this nature were fitting for the city’s cattle market; they were infused with the language of improvement and national accomplishment that were very much in keeping with these larger discussions of public order. They also marked a shift, however, in how spaces like Viger Square were used. On the one hand, they remained places of open sociability. On the other hand, these sorts of exhibitions were pushing people who frequented the square towards a particular kind of sociability. While we cannot gauge how people reacted to these exhibits, or behaved while in attendance, the public became an audience for discussions of improvement. The hope that Place Viger could remain something of an oasis of effective governance and regulation in a tumultuous and rapidly growing neighbourhood began to fray at mid-century. The 1840s were a tumultuous period in the city, with repeated outbreaks of sectarian popular violence that cast a long shadow over public life. The decade was marked by a series of high-profile election riots.... Debates over the parameters of democratic reform provided the spark for this conflict, but it was rooted in deeper tensions between the city’s Canadien community and the British Protestant community. Both of the leading political factions employed violence as a political strategy, surreptitiously encouraging their brawniest supporters to take to the streets during elections for seats in the Legislative Assembly and municipal council to intimidate and harass voters attempting to make their way to the polling station to record their votes. Outbreaks of collective violence frequently ensued from these confrontations. These riots were not sporadic outbursts separated by periods of sustained public order. Rather, they occurred against the backdrop of a contentious urban popular culture where violence was interwoven into the fabric of daily life. They were only the most visible and newsworthy manifestations of a raucous popular culture that was rooted in the streets and other public spaces of the city. Pivotal works in the history of unruly urban crowds situate this boisterous popular culture on the streets, but open spaces like Viger Square, integrated into the quotidian rhythms of urban life, were equally vital sites of cultural formation.... ... The behaviour that troubled the reform-oriented urban elites was, in their minds, rooted in a problematic landscape. Montreal, like many cities across the North Atlantic world during this period, was growing at an unprecedented rate. The process of urbanization, which is often associated with industrialization, but, in the case of Montreal, preceded it by more than a decade, had wreaked havoc on the city. Neighbourhoods like the Quebec suburb where Viger Square was located had grown in an unchecked and virtually unregulated fashion. The growth in population and density was increasingly linked to disease in both the popular imagination and medical research. The bustling urban landscape that Périne-Charles Cherrier had hoped to bring order to with her donation was, with its stubbornly high infant mortality rates and repeated outbreaks of epidemic disease, an exceptionally challenging space to govern. Attempts to impose greater sanitary measures in the city, and to isolate people suffering from communicable diseases, despite being vigorously endorsed in the public sphere, met with both subtle and explicit forms of resistance. 

Disease was also associated with the accelerated scale of migration into the city, particularly from Ireland and the British Isles. This was a process where regulation had largely been left to private interests, with minimal state oversight. As thousands of migrants began passing through the docks in Montreal each summer, however, the public began demanding that authorities provide them with more protection. Contentious public meetings and scathing letters published in the local press demonstrate that a vocal and politically engaged segment of the community was profoundly dissatisfied with the apparent inability of the local authorities to respond to these crises in public health, despite overwhelming evidence in support of a forceful intervention. This precarious or diminishing confidence in the institutions that were meant to protect public order was pervasive. The police, who were meant to play a critical role in the maintenance of public order in the city, frequently struggled to accomplish this task, thus becoming another example of what many reform-oriented elites considered to be institutional incompetence in the city. When faced with brawls spilling out of taverns, grog shops, and brothels, in addition to the sorts of large-scale outbursts of collective violence that occurred during elections, police frequently found themselves outnumbered and forced to retreat. Even when the police did manage to arrest suspects for engaging in disorderly actions, the accused were often rescued from custody by their peers. The records of the lower courts and Montreal’s Police Commission reveal regular occurrences of violent attacks on police officers. .... With these twin concerns over public health and sectarian conflict, the notion that the urban environment was inherently disorderly gained traction during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Popular unrest and disease became inextricably linked in the public discourse to the city’s narrow and dark streets. The reform-oriented segment of the urban elite, whose politically engaged ranks crossed the city’s linguistic and sectarian divides, became determined to remake the city by improving lighting, widening streets, and planting trees along sidewalks. This agenda was not crafted on aesthetic grounds alone. Reformers believed that such measures would have a pedagogical impact. The popular classes that had crowded into cities across the North Atlantic world in increasing numbers would change their behaviours and cultural practices when placed in this uplifting and rational environment. Broad, well-lit streets would provide fewer opportunities for a wide range of disorderly activities that included petty theft, prostitution, and drunken revelry to elude the gaze of police officers. 

This effort to reform the urban landscape as a means of transforming the most troubling aspect of a raucous popular culture was an undertaking that was profoundly modern and liberal. It was built around the notion that individuals could be gently nudged towards improvement. It revealed a connection in the social imaginary of local elites between rationality and legitimate cultural and political authority. This perspective, which was rooted in the Enlightenment, would shape social relations along the lines of class, gender, and race deep into the twentieth century.

This notion that the city’s popular classes could be disciplined and reformed through landscape architecture reflected an important shift in how the governing elites of Montreal conceptualized the public. In 1818, the social vision of Périne-Charles Cherrier and her family appears to have been shaped by the notion that an orderly urban society could be produced with minimal intervention. It was, fundamentally, an expression of confidence in the processes of liberal urban governance. Challenges such as social conflict, migration, disorderly activity, and economic uncertainty could be effectively managed. While this elite social vision was deeply hierarchical, it assumed that, no matter their ethnic or class background, the residents of Montreal could be moulded into orderly citizens. Ensuing social crises, however, had diminished this confidence, and the generation of civic elites who were wielding authority in the second half of the nineteenth century began to explore more coercive means of shaping popular behaviour. The impact of this shift was keenly felt on Place Viger.

By the end of the 1850s, civic leaders had transformed Place Viger into Viger Gardens, a greenspace with sumptuous vegetation and winding pathways designed to encourage restrained sociability and quiet contemplation. It was not an exclusive space. The city’s industrial working class from the surrounding neighbourhoods were welcomed to pass through its gates and spend their leisure hours there. Nonetheless, it marked a notable shift in the relationship between the city’s elites and the popular classes. Viger Gardens reflected a new approach to urban design that was based on the audacious assumption that the rowdy culture of the urban popular classes could be reformed to more closely resemble the genteel ideals of urbane elites. Open, expansive spaces like what had taken root on the land donated by Périne-Charles Cherrier could simply be remade to suit the cultural practices of the popular classes for their own needs, whereas the gardens would gently but forcefully foster a new kind of sociability. This idea was rooted in a broader concern about the disorderly way in which the popular classes used the streets, and reflected an increasing social segregation in the city defined by wealth and privilege.

The redesign of Viger Square was sporadic. It began in the middle of the 1840s and unfolded over the following two decades. Its status as a public market was not immediately extinguished, but this role as a well-regulated community hub was figuratively and literally pushed to the periphery. The transformation began when a parcel of land was donated to the city by the Lacroix family on the eastern border of the square, which could then be extended beyond St Hubert Street. The Lacroix donation came with some stringent conditions. It could not be used simply to expand the existing market on Place Viger. Instead, it was to be set aside as a green space, the focal point of which would be a fountain commemorating the contributions the late Hubert-Joseph Lacroix had made to public life in Lower Canada. 

Much as Cherrier had two and a half decades  earlier, the Lacroix family was bequeathing their property to the public good as an opportunity to weave their family’s story into the city’s landscape. The land the Lacroix family donated, however, implicitly demanded a different sort of relationship between the public and the space. Unlike the bustling marketplace made possible by the Cherrier donation, the Lacroix land was intended as a place of quiet contemplation, where the attention of passersby would be drawn towards the commemoration of a wealthy local family and their contributions to civic and colonial life. This final parcel of land that expanded the perimeter of Viger Square helped transform the square from a boisterous community hub to a space geared towards the sort of recreation favoured by urban elites. Other events helped nudge this transformation forward. In 1852, a devastating fire swept through the east end of Montreal. The ramshackle suburban neighbourhood that surrounded the square, where the majority of homes were wooden, was nearly flattened by the blaze. The fire had long-term consequences. The bustling popular suburb would not be rebuilt. Instead, property in the streets adjoining the square was snapped up by wealthier families, predominantly of Canadien descent. They built solid stone townhomes in what became a suburban enclave a short distance away from Montreal’s bustling commercial centre. In the second half of the nineteenth century, and for the first decades of the twentieth century, the streets adjoining Viger Square would be among the most respectable addresses in the city, with both Catholic and Anglican cathedrals being built in close proximity to it. The transformation of the square from a bustling market to a serene garden thus reflected the changing demographics of the neighbourhood, though it is important to note that it remained within walking distance of predominately working-class districts. The remaking of Viger Square accelerated at the end of the 1850s, when the market was removed to the square’s periphery to make room for fountains and gardens. In 1863, city council approved plans to build a greenhouse modelled on London’s Crystal Palace, the site of the Great Exhibition of 1851. In some ways, this was in keeping with the agricultural exhibitions that had been held on the square when it was exclusively a market. The events that were held in the greenhouses, however, appear to have been of a more genteel quality, such as exhibits of plant life from the southern hemisphere. Officially renamed Viger Gardens in 1867, the square was now a resolutely elite space in one of the city’s finest neighbourhoods. The market was pushed to the southeastern corner of the square during these renovations and would gradually be dismantled before being shuttered for good in 1892. Events held in the gardens suggest an effort to cultivate a bourgeois sensibility. Montrealers flocked to the gardens to hear the Rifle Brigade Fanfare perform twice weekly concerts, and special events were marked with dramatic illuminations conducted by a Mr M. Globbenski.