Relocation in Rouyn South, 1938

This is young Henri Robert in 1938, during the relocation of several houses of Galipeau Street (now known as Larivière Street). In the background, you can see the St-Michel Church. In the fall of 1938, many residents had to relocate in order to comply with the new planning standards that the provincial government had just mapped out for the area. Here is an article excerpt from the newspaper La Frontière from July 15, 1938, that describes the situation very well: “Who will soon be able to recognize Rouyn South? Yesterday, it was a cluster of humble homes haphazardly built in the middle of a tangled maze of streets, muddy backstreets and tortuous paths. Today, it is a suburb of Rouyn in construction; tomorrow, it will be an integral part of Rouyn with large, straight streets and ridable backstreets; the paths will vanish. Every day, houses rise, fall, move off, move forward, move backward, get built, get modernized and line up into the limits assigned to them, under what is imperiously dictated by good order and symmetry.”