The Boulangerie St. Laurent closed recently, as did the highly anachronistic Pecker Brothers. Both closings signaling yet again that The Main ain’t what it used to be… assuming it ever was what it used to be. I reported back in April that Maggie had predicted Warshaw’s imminent closing. Well, it took seven months, but boom! there it is, gone.
I’ve been dragging my ass up and down The Main since the mid-80’s so I have some small sense of what that street “used to be” — the rate of change only really took off in the 90s — and I can say that it’s not just nostalgia. Admittedly, it wasn’t all good. I remember a time when the only cafe on the whole street (or at least the section between Sherbrooke and Mont-Royal) was the A.L. Van Houtte at the corner of Ave. des pins. That cafe closed long ago, but now there are cafes galore (and not all of them are annoying corporate franchaises).
I also remember when a snack on The Main meant — and only meant — a European sausage on a bun with mustard and maybe sauerkraut. There were seven or eight competing places where you could get this (or a hot salami or other such meat sandwich) to go. They also had little counters for your elbows if you chose to stand inside to eat.
There wasn’t much else to chose from — not a single “by-the-slice” pizza joint, for example. At first glance such a lack of choice seems lame, but it helped give the street a sense of identity. It was (among other things) the street with all the European butcher shops that sold their shop-made sausages as sandwiches-to-go.
Now, pizza joints are all over The Main, as well as shish taouk stands. In the past two or three years there has also been a proliferation of Asian noodle joints. There are also a lot of bars (more than there used to be) and upscale restaurants.
The street always resisted chain operations (except for the ubiquitous Jean Coutu pharmacy). There was a Harvey’s burger joint there for a long time, but it was something of a phantom because nobody ever ate there. An Arby’s restaurant opened on the corner at rue Prince Arthur back in the early 90s, but it closed after about 15 minutes.
But now they are starting to creep in. The most disturbing part of the Canada.com article about the closing of Warshaw’s is the line “Warshaw’s longtime owners have leased the ground floor to a national retailer.” Uh-oh. Anyone care to speculate?
The result, of course, is that The Main, by now, isn’t much different from any other retail street in Montreal, or in any other city for that matter. It has almost entirely lost that sense of distinctiveness, that identity. The 20-ish people who crawl up and down The Main these days look at geezers like me and my whining about the past and they think we’re nuts. They’re having a great time swilling drinks, dancing, and eating slices of pizza at 3am. They don’t know what people like me are talking about because they’re never known The Main to be anything other than what it is now — a party street with a dying history.