An east end expedition in Mercier

In November, as the season’s last leaves fell from the trees, I took the metro out to the east end for an afternoon stroll around Mercier. I don’t know much about the neighbourhood’s history and I still can’t find much online, except that it started to develop early in the twentieth century and was named after former Quebec premier Honoré Mercier, who died in 1894. But I was intrigued by an article in Voir that described it as an unfashionable but quietly pleasant neighbourhood, distinguished by its eclectic housing stock, which includes old workers’ cottages, classic duplexes and triplexes, postwar veterans’ houses and new condos.

My walk started at Cadillac metro and my instinct told me to head south, towards the St. Lawrence. Along the way I passed by lots of small cottages built by the federal government for returning soldiers in the late 1940s. The laneways between many of them were unpaved, which I found odd consider that this certainly wasn’t the case elsewhere in the neighbourhood.

I noticed new condo construction throughout the neighbourhood, including this one project that seemed to be built on a former institutional site next to a school. These duplex-style condos were arranged along a courtyard; a row of mature trees had been preserved at the back of the lot. Mercier might not seem like the most obvious place for new condominium construction but, if you think about it, the location is convenient and the metro is just a few minutes away by foot.

Like I said, the housing in Mercier is nothing if not heterogeneous.

One of the things I’ve always found odd about Montreal’s more out-of-the-way neighbourhoods—basically, anywhere deep inside the east end or west end—is that their civic infrastructure seems not to have changed since the 1960s. This bilingual stop sign is a case in point. These are increasingly rare in heavily anglophone neighbourhoods like downtown or NDG, but they’re abundant in Mercier, a district that is almost entirely francophone. Go figure.

As with almost every neighbourhood in Montreal, there’s an imposing parish church with a caisse populaire across the street. Nearby is a little commercial district on Marseille Street with all of the everyday essentials: a supermarket, depanneurs, a couple of restaurants, a drycleaners, a hardware store and a BBQ chicken joint. There’s even a nice Spanish Revival fire station.

I think my favourite thing about Mercier, though, is that every eastbound street below Sherbrooke has a view of the Olympic Stadium.