The Stanley scene

Here’s an article about Montreal’s Stanley Street scene as it was when Gary became a part of it by opening his series of coffeehouses.

Transcription:

The Stanley Scene

Sometimes a big city university can be the centre of social and cultural ferment. Such a university is San Francisco’s Berkeley and New York’s N.Y.U. of Greenwich Village renown. Sir George with its facilities scattered, located among downtown Montreal’s busiest night-spots is a similar centre. Stanley Street, for many years a mecca for Canadian beats and hippies, has been undergoing radical changes. 

Once scattered with dimly-lit coffee shops and decaying buildings, Stanley is now a waste-land of parking-lots and construction sights. Today only the Carmen and Pam Pam remain of the once plentiful European restaurants. With the Bohemian atmosphere came the cultural developments which are so often over-looked or passed off as avant-garde and “beatnik”. For a time there was a communal enterprise of musicians and painters called simply “The Place”, where Jeremy Taylor played the drums in the nightly Jazz sessions.

Bob Silverman opened a back room in his seven-steps bookshop where screenings and poetry-reading by Irving Layton took place The Morris Fineberg the “Steps” into the Potpourri, then featured as converted “Canada’s only coffee-house-bookshop”. Along with a vast selection of pocket-books, Morris had some of the finest folk-singers available entertaining in the back room. Reverend Gary Davis, Dave Van Ronk, Judy Collins and Bob Dylan all made their Montreal debuts at the Potpourri while the works of young artists such as Gale Wenny and Nina Raginski were display in the bookstore. Many of the old Stanley Street people have gone on to successful careers in films, music and the literary arts. Others have clipped their hair and exchanged their jeans and sweatshirts for business suits. Few of the Stanley Street crowd remain. Gary Barker, a McGill student owned l’Enfer, a now defunct jazz club where former Georgian Herbie Spencer used to blow trumpet.

Stanley Street has in a sense moved west to Mountain and Bishop. Le Bistro is now the most popular drinking place while folk-music can be heard at the Penelope on Bishop. Folk music has been an ill-omen for club owners what with the demise of the Finjan, the Potpourri, the Fifth Dimension and the Fifth Amendment, but Gary Eisenkraft, a folk musician himself can be expected to provide some interesting local and American entertainment. Coffee house jazz for all-nighters is now the fare of the Black Bottom on St. Antoine. Here Jeremy Taylor from “the Blue” accompanies Buddy Jones, a highly original organist. The myriad creative enterprises in the Sir George area can be said to provide a welcome feedback for students who want a truly liberal education. There is ample room as well for Sir George students to contribute a midst all this activity.

Gary BROWN