D'un Temple Patriotique pour le Canada Français au Théâtre le Plus Ancien du Canada

South of Sainte-Catherine on the Main, there's a building that doesn't quite match its neighbours. Its four storeys of grey cut stone, arched windows that grow smaller as they climb, carved trim, and a row of columns give it a regal bearing among the marquees and pulsing lights of downtown nightlife. It's only once you look at the ground floor that you get a clue about its purpose: six big openings, built as shop windows, tell you this grand stone structure needed tenants to help pay for it. It's had tenants since 1893, long enough to make it the oldest continuously operating theatre in Canada.

They were the Association Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a patriotic organization founded in 1834 to defend French-Canadian interests. This was the same outfit that invented the holiday of that same name on June 24th Quebec still takes off every summer. By the 1880s, the society had been around fifty years and still had no building of its own. That's when a journalist named Laurent-Olivier David proposed one, in 1884: offices, a library, classrooms, a theatre, and those storefronts, because the annual Saint-Jean celebrations had a habit of losing money.

They wanted to build what the bishop of Montreal had spelled out more directly: A guardian of French-Canadian tradition, a temple, an arsenal that would supply the weapons for the nation's defence, and a sanctuary keeping the sacred fire of patriotism lit. The architects were told to work in a Renaissance style, partly because Gothic was considered too Anglo-Saxon, and it would take nine years to complete it.

Nine years and $275,000

Money came in slowly and never fast enough: $24,000 in donations in 1888, then $69,000 the year after, all against a building that would eventually cost $275,000. A provincial lottery authorized in 1890 by Honoré Mercier's government fell apart under political pressure, and the notaries underwriting it pulled back their $30,000. Mercier himself, by then driven from office, broke and sick, turned up at Parc Sohmer in April 1893 to give a benefit lecture for the building. Six thousand people came. Even so, three months before opening, David sat down with a pencil and struck the elevators, the marble staircase, the statues, the cornice, the heating and ventilation and most of the interior finishing. It would open on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day as promised, finished or not.

The theatre opened on 24 June 1893, unfinished and deep in debt. The first artistic production staged was A Midsummer Night's Dream, in English.

That booking would tell the story of the place, because while the society spent a decade raising money, the neighbourhood around their new lot changed. Saint-Laurent Boulevard was the dividing line between the Anglophone west of the city and the Francophone east, and it was where nearly every immigrant community arriving in Montreal landed first. By the time the doors opened, the blocks around the building were the heart of Jewish Montreal, so the society rented the hall out of both conviction and arithmetic.

The first Yiddish play went up there in the winter of 1896, and for the next half-century the Monument was the most important Yiddish stage in North America outside New York — enough of a fixture that the Quebec playwright Gratien Gélinas and the New York Yiddish director Maurice Schwartz became friends in the building. It was leased as a synagogue during the High Holidays, and the Canadian Jewish Congress held its founding meeting there in 1919. Chinese opera companies played the same boards. None of this, obviously, was the original vision for the Monument National.

A multifunctional space before its time

The classrooms originally designed into the building had a similar accident built in, as Quebec's grant to the project came with a string attached: the building had to offer free public courses. They started in 1896 and were relentlessly practical, ranging from history taught by David himself to architecture by Joseph Venne, (one of the building's own architects) plus commerce, mining and metallurgy, agriculture, hygiene, and applied mechanics. The idea was to equip French speakers to compete in industry, which anglophone Montreal dominated at the time. Out of those rooms came the engineering school Polytechnique, the business school HEC, the Beaux-Arts school, and the drama conservatory. Idola Saint-Jean and Marie Gérin-Lajoie ran the campaign for Quebec women's suffrage out of the building. People called it a people's university in the truest sense.