Beyond The 'McGill Ghetto:' An Oral History Of Community Organizing In Milton-Parc

When I entered the building at 3714 Avenue du Parc, I couldn't stifle my anxiety. I wasn't even sure I was in the right place — unbeknownst to me, the former home of notorious student watering hole Bar des Pins had switched hands. I was still prepared to enter a tacky student bar, but instead, I walked into something more.

Bar Milton-Parc, as it's now known, is a solidarity cooperative run by the Citizens' Committee of Milton-Parc, a storied organization whose history I was about to hear from of one of its most long-running members: Dimitri Roussopoulos, an older gentleman with an arresting yet gentle presence and a quick wit. He's the kind of person who doesn't take bullshit, and I was immediately in awe and a little unsure of myself.

Roussopoulos's co-conspirator and fellow organizer, Malcolm McClintock, welcomed me as I came in. McClintock is friendly whereas Roussopoulos is stoic, but it was immediately clear the two share a bond with foundations as solid as those on which the cooperative efforts they participate were built.

As soon as I hit record, Roussopoulos dove in.

Milton-Parc or the McGill ghetto?

"The first thing you should know, as a former McGill student," he told me, "is that the Milton Parc Citizens' Committee [MPCC] has a [...] contractual relationship with the McGill administration, which took several years to negotiate but has recently been renewed."

He explained that this contract "sets down the do's and don'ts on what we can expect the behaviour of McGill students to be, and what we expect the McGill administration to do about this behaviour.

"McGill students are not as free to do whatever they want as they used to be."

This may surprise McGill student readers, whose social domination of the area near the university has long been the norm, to the extent that part of the area known to organizers and residents as the Milton-Parc community has been subsumed into the ugly misnomer "McGill ghetto."

The name betrays plenty about how McGill students perceive their surroundings: not only are the neighbourhoods near McGill subordinated to the will of the students who live in them, but they're also defined solely by student lives and assumptions.

A scent of social activism

Roussopoulos's introduction, then, is a direct response to the ways in which his home, and his fight to preserve it, have fallen to the wayside in the popular perception of the area. In other words, McGill students not only think of this part of Montreal as theirs, they do so at the expense of the people who spend far more than four years in the area bounded by Milton and Parc.

"The second thing you should know," Roussopoulos told me, "is that 3516 on this street is a three-story building which is rented by the MPCC." He explained that several social activist organizations hold space in the building, including QPIRG-McGill. It has a rooftop garden, an organization that supports homeless people, and plenty of documentation about the history of Milton-Parc.

But there's very little signage to declare that to newcomers. Roussopoulos says there should be, "so not everybody has to walk by and say" — here, he sniffs dramatically — "'There's a distinct odour of social activism, it must be coming from this building!'"

I told you he was witty.

But after this aside, he's all business.

Founding the Milton-Parc Citizens' Committee

Roussopoulos tells me the MPCC was founded in 1969, after a real estate company, Concordia Estates Ltd., made plans in 1968 to demolish a six-block area in order to build high rises: a hotel, an office building, and a mall.

"In other words," Concordia Estates Ltd. wanted to "completely transform what we knew and what we enjoyed."

Thankfully for Milton-Parc, there was a community fund-raising centre called Red Feather, which served Montreal's anglophone communities and provided support beyond money. Now, this work is carried out by a foundation called Centraide of Greater Montreal, which was founded by Red Feather in 1974.

"One day, one of the people who worked there charged into the building and said, 'We've just heard that a real estate company is going to destroy the neighbourhood!'

With very little delay, a group of concerned people, including McGill Social Work students, gathered together in the hopes of combating this powerful enemy together.

"And so the Milton-Parc Citizens' Committee was more or less born."

Rousing support for the cause

The new committee undertook a door-to-door campaign, knocking on 800-odd doors and ultimately rallying some 400 people to the cause of saving their neighbourhood, Roussopoulos recalled. The organization attracted social activists from Concordia, McGill, and even the Université de Montréal.

"What was important for us to articulate is that we not only wanted to save the neighbourhood, but in trying to save the neighbourhood, we wanted to create a neighbourhood that was based upon cooperative, nonprofit housing," Roussopoulos explained.

"And to also create a new kind of cooperative neighborhood where people work together and did various things together, over and above the housing question."

Demonstrations, petitioning and campaigning followed tirelessly, with no response from the "power structure" at all.

Help from the architects

Then, the committee wrote to architects across the city, asking for support.

"Not one of them responded, except one." It was Michael Fish, who would later find Save Montreal, the predecessor to Heritage Montreal, in 1973.

Fish conducted a study of the heritage buildings in the area sought to be developed by Concordia Estates Ltd. "Don't forget," Roussopoulos reminded me, "they were, almost all of them, built in the late 19th or the 20th century."

"He proved, with his knowledge and his experience, that it was cheaper to renovate these old buildings, to the level of the national housing code, which requires a certain standard, rather than demolishing them and building something new.

"So here we had, in capitalist terms, a very logical case to save the neighbourhood, even for the power structure, right? No response, no interest."

Pulling out all the stops

"By 1971, we sort of were coming to the end of the road in terms of what we could do."

So later that year, the committee occupied the office of the "speculators," Concordia Estates Ltd. This, finally, got a response from the powers that be.

According to Roussopoulos, 51 arrests were made, and in 1972, they were taken to trial — one that Roussopoulos surprisingly described as "wonderful."

The judge allowed witnesses to be called, to the great dismay of the crown. And they were right to be worried since the strength of the testimonies that followed was such that the jury deliberated for a very brief time before ruling in favour of the occupiers — in favour of the Milton-Parc Citizen's Committee.

That was the MPCC's first real, unabashed win. But it wasn't the last, not by a long shot. Although I had the great fortune of speaking to Roussopoulos for an hour, listening rapt to the stories he had to tell, you'll need to be a little more patient to learn what happened next. So stay tuned, watch this space, and the next time you hear "the McGill Ghetto," remember who else calls this neighbourhood home.

This article's cover image was used for illustrative purposes only.