New Gower Street Recollections with Lorraine Michael

TRANSCRIPT:
[Animated Heritage NL logo; Lorraine Michael is seated in a chair in an office space and introduces herself.]

I’m Lorraine Michael. Born and raised in St. John’s. My parents, Fred Michael and Anne Michael, were both born and raised in St. John’s as well.

[New Gower Street, St. John’s NL Recollections with Lorraine Michael]

[Lorraine Michael is seated in a chair in an office space sharing her recollections of New Gower Street.]

So we’re in the year 2024, and I go down to New Gower Street here in St. John’s and I see a place that I don’t recognize from my childhood. Because New Gower Street when I grew up there in the 1950s, I grew up in the Lebanese community basically. And New Gower Street on both sides of the street for the most part were businesses, retail centres on the bottom level with store fronts – my grandfather had one, my aunt Mary had one – and then families for the most part living above the stores. And it was a beehive of activity because it was the retail centre of the west end of St. John’s. And it was paralleled by Water Street below which had the clothing stores and dry goods and that kind of thing. On New Gower Street you had dry goods stores, you had um, you had markets, you had the, you had the meat markets, you had the grocery stores, you had the Chinese laundries, you had beauticians, hairdressers, you had the barbers. It was a whole community and while it wasn’t just Lebanese – it was quite a mixed, metropolitan kind of area – the Lebanese community that lived here and got itself established in the early 1900s that’s where it was. That is the New Gower Street I think of. When I stand now with my back to the Majestic and look down there is no sign of the life of that community on New Gower Street. And for me that is really sad. There at least needs to be something that recognizes what was there. Yeah, I feel that very strongly.