Garth Gilker and his People’s Yellow Pages
Image: Map of Village du Carré Saint-Louis, Winter 1973. People’s Yellow Pages city guide, p. 47-48. ARCMTL collection
Credit: ARCMTL collection. Interview was conducted at Café Santropol, in Montreal, with Garth Gilker by Louis Rastelli, Director of ARCMTL.
Duration: 1:33 min
In 1973, Montreal had several head shops, mostly located on Prince Arthur Street, in the heart of the Village du Carré Saint-Louis. These smoking paraphernalia shops emerged from the hippie movement, and reflected the increase in drug use among Montrealers at the turn of the decade.
During an interview conducted by Louis Rastelli in October 2015, Garth Gilker, editor of the People’s Yellow Pages magazine, tells how he catalogued the alternative part of the city that flourished between the summer of Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympic Games.
Transcription:
Louis Rastelli: [For the first issue] you mention being inspired in Amsterdam.
Garth Gilker: Yes it was Amsterdam.
Louis Rastelli: But i’m not sure you mentioned what publications you saw there. Was it Red Light District, they had [inaudible] or guides ?
Garth Gilker: The one I saw was, I think it might have been called the Amsterdam Yellow Pages, and there was also one from San Francisco too, made up at the same time. The Whole Earth Catalogue was coming out at the same time. You could tell that they were a rogue, like small underground printing. That’s what gave me the idea, I knew that I could do that too. You know, you could just print it out. So that’s when I dropped out of University and I decided I was going to write Montreal’s People’s Yellow Pages!
Louis Rastelli: [I like how the Peoples’ Yellow Pages has a] mix of nightlife and fun stuff, but then also important resources like abortion, or health clinics…
Garth Gilker: And the price of marijuana & hashish, which back then, nobody was printing THAT information.
Louis Rastelli: Was that why there was a certain anonymity to it, and why there’s a P.O. Box…
Garth Gilker: Yeah, that’s a post-office box, that’s station “G” – that was on the corner of Clark & Pine Avenue, that building on the southwest corner?
Louis Rastelli: So it was considered safe at the time, with the post-office box… […] What sort of research team did you assemble to make sure you got the prices right?
Garth Gilker: Me! [Laughs.] It was me! I did all the research and all the correlating and all…