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MSoA — ARCH673 — W23

Little Burgundy’s Storytelling Centre

A space for living histories

by Madeleine Lachance 

Little Burgundy is the historic seat of the anglophone black community of Montreal. At 2035 Rue Coursol, on the Northwest corner of Oscar Peterson Park we find the final site of the Negro Community Centre (NCC). The NCC was a community centre founded in 1927 and found its home on Coursol from 1955 until its closure in 1989. Awaiting renovation, the building sat empty on the site until 2014 when its west wall collapsed and it was demolished. 

In its heyday, the NCC hosted a wide variety of culturally specific community programs and was a hub that connected a number of other historic and influential organizations within Montreal’s black community. Some of these foundational organizations still operating today include the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Union United Church (UUC).

The images, flyers and posters found above, are all excerpts from the NCC’s archives which were recovered from the site before its demolition. This collection is being kept and managed by the Concordia Records Management and Archives centre on their Loyola campus in Notre Dames de Grâce. 

While these archival documents are not easily accessed by the public, there are many examples of the community self organizing in efforts to make their histories known and shareable.  Initiatives such as those run out of the Black Community Resource Centre (BCRC)in Côtes des Neiges have involved community members young and old in the telling of these stories. 

The “Living History: 100 Years of Black History, Culture and Heritage“,  from 2016 is an oral history project that seeks to preserve and share the history of Montreal’s English-speaking Black Community through memoryscapes, “sound walks that invite you to experience hidden history of a place by listening to the memories of inhabitants, both historical and contemporary, as you walk through it”.

Similarly their Standing on their Shoulders project from 2016 is a community heritage project that “captures, highlights and preserves the Black English-speaking history of Montreal’s Little Burgundy District” through the creation of 20 short films by black youth.

Other grassroots community history projects include Burgundy Voices, a student documentary developed with TVMcGill, DESTA and Youth In Motion in 2011 that features interviews with a wide variety of community members accross many age groups and paints a portait of life in Little Burgundy. 

Finally, the feature film documentary Dear Jackie by director Henri Pardo from 2021  “tells the personal stories of the residents of Little Burgundy through interviews and testimonies, using a vérité style. Dear Jackie explores racism and racial inequality in Montreal and Quebec and is a tribute to the perseverance of one of Canada’s most important black communities.”

Proposal

Informed by the existing grassroots efforts to showcase these histories, and recent calls for better access to the NCC’s archival material, my proposal for the Coursol site is a Storytelling Centre; a space for living histories. 

A platform that can host the stories of the community with an archival library, gallery, auditorium and cafe. And a creative laboratory to foster the growth and telling of new stories through an artist residency, workshop classroom and multimedia studio spaces.

These spaces would all revolve around a Carrefour, an evolving exhibition space that could be used to showcase and provide wider access to copies of the NCC archival material. This space could be currated by the community in collaboration with the artist in residence, allowing for what is being presented to grow and change.

Through and around this space, the community would have access to the rest of the services offered by the Storytelling centre, including:

A workshop and classroom space that could be used to hold lessons on community history, community activities or events run by the artist in residence,

The artist in residence’s studio connected to the classroom space with living quarters above on a second level, 

A collection of multimedia studios to provide the community access to tools they can use to continue creating projects like those led by the BCRC. Including a photo/video studio, an audio/recording studio and an editing suite,  

And a stepped open auditorium as a public space people can occupy that can also be used for larger community gatherings.

The proposed building would sit on the old site of the NCC at 2035 Rue Coursol, with all the public programming accessible on the ground floor. 

The access to the building would be along Canning. The auditorium, cafe, classroom and a small gallery space would all also have street frontage viewable by passersby.

In section, the auditorium regulates the grade change across the site. The Carrefour and artist studio are both taller spaces with diffuse clerestory light. The artist in residence’s living quarters are in a north-west corner on a second level.

The Carrefour acts as both central space and central circulation to the public elements of the building.