Montreal’s NDG neighbourhood turns 150 — here’s how its historical society is celebrating

Notre Dame de Grasse is turning 150 this year and the NDG Historical Society is celebrating with a wonderful exhibit and I'm here with the Executive Director Jeffrey Kastner. Hello there. Hi. I want to start off with this amazing statue because I remember it from my childhood. It was once atop Saint Augustine's Church here in NDG. Yeah exactly. And how did you manage to bring it here? We were scouting, we were thinking about this exhibition and we went down to Verdun to see their 150th which was the year before ours and we saw this statue at the church there and so we said we have to repatriate it so we brought it here tell me about the significance of this statue well i mean this really symbolizes the the the irish catholic largely irish catholic english-speaking uh catholic community that was here in ndg uh it stood atop uh saint augustine for, I guess, 60 years. It had to be taken down because the bases were rotting. But it's really, you know, it overlooked NDG Park. It was a big part of the community. There's so much more to see here as well at the exhibit. Can you take me on a little tour? Sure. All right. These are our five de Cary brothers, and this was contributed by the great-great-granddaughter of this fellow. This is Daniel Jérémie, who was mayor of NDG for for ages, for 28 years I think, and these five brothers were all quite famous. So the middle brother was the postmaster in the area, secretary treasurer of the village, and he was knighted by the pope, and this is his knight's uniform given by his great-granddaughter. I'm curious to know what this is, this costume here. This is the costume that Marc Favreau used to wear when he was playing his character Sol. He lived here through most of his adult life. He gave this to the Ecole Marc Favreau, and they lent it to us to have here. It means so much to the Francophone community. I would imagine. How much time went into bringing all of these pieces together? Well, we started thinking about it two years ago. A year ago, we put out a poster asking the community to contribute objects. It was a huge community effort to put this thing together. That's something about NDG isn't it? It's a very active community. It is and that's kind of what we're trying to do with this exhibition is kind of get to the heart of what is NDG? What makes that community tick? Let's take a look at this exhibit here. Daisy Peterson Sweeney, very much part of the community. She was and she's not normally associated with the community. She's normally associated with Little Burgundy. There she taught her younger brother Oscar to play piano. But she moved to NDG in the 50s, and she taught piano in the schools and out of her home. She bought a house here in NDG. Her husband ran a restaurant on Monkland. She was very much part of the NDG community. This report card's from 1958-59 at Gilson School, which no longer exists. And it's one of our, actually one of our History Society members who took lessons with her and took lessons in her home. And yeah, it's really lovely to recognize that Daisy was part of our community. So Jeffrey, what is your favorite piece here? There's so many to choose from, but I think for me it has to be a video that we got of an early Sunday in the park. It took me five years to get a hold of this. I saw it in the Concordia archives, but it was on old videotape. And this is from 1973 when tens of thousands of people came out to NDG Park to just celebrate together. It was kind of NDG's love inn. Do we have anything equal to that today? I mean, now with the rendezvous in the park, there's an element of that that's revived. This year for the 150th, Notre Dame des Arts put on a Sunday in the park. So there are echoes of it, but that was really a moment in time. Why is it important to sort of look back over the 150 years and collect items like this? Well, you know, I've got two responses from people in looking at this. There's the, oh, I remember. And that's really important, is to bring back these memories, to evoke the memories. But the other thing is, I didn't know that. It's such a rich history and people only have a fragment of it. To get all of what's happened here over 150 years is important to help people understand where they are and to appreciate the things that are around them. Well, thank you for showing me this exhibit. It really is lovely. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you.