Parc Jules-Crepeau in Ahunsic, off l'Acadie, near Henri Bourrassa.
It's a tiny little park, the one the City of Montreal named after Jules-Crepeau. The street too is named Jules-Crepeau.
City streets are known for what exists on them, not for whom they are named.
It's ironic. Someone has posted a complaint on the Internet, saying that this area of town has fewer green spaces than the rest of Montreal.
But who uses parks anymore, except to walk dogs?
It's doubly ironic. My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, the subject of the play I am writing, Milk and Water, was often on Committees that wanted more parks and playgrounds in the City.
In 1927, the date of my play, I notice, he was elected campaign chairman for the year's Clean UP Week (coming up in May) when all citizens were asked to get up, get out and clean up. Mayor Mederic Martin accepted the position of Honorary Chairman.
This was an initiative of the City Improvement League.
Triple Irony. A certain doctor, Atherton, talked at the launch press conference about how this year it was especially important that the city's bylaws be enforced, what with the Laurier Theatre Fire and the Typhoid Epidemic. (At that point they didn't know that the epidemic was caused by milk from a farm somewhere.) Atherton says that the police should be instructed to carry out their duties with respect to the bylaws.
My grandfather was accused by the Coderre Commission in 1925 of hampering police in their duties, with respect to movie theatres. And he has just given testimony to the inquiry into the Laurier Fire.
Of course,Jules Crepeau was just the 'Go-Between' in the City. I could call my play just that, except L. P. Hartley got there first.
Dr. Boucher of the Health Department had something to say, deeply relevant to my play. "Measures of personal cleanliness should not be neglected. They are of daily necessity, especially the washing of hands. All young babies should be brought to clinics established for them. Mothers should seek there the teaching necessary for the good observance of health rules when it comes to nursing babies."
Milk and Water deals with the delivering of clean water to Montreal homes. Once the City had done this (and it wasn't a given throughout the century that homes had the right to clean water)then it was up to the individual to stay clean.
This typhoid epidemic was annoying, in that it put the blame back on the City.
One other initiative of the City Improvement League was school gardens. GEEESH. School gardens initiatives have been promoted since the beginning of the century, starting with the Macdonald-Robertson movement. But they never get a foothold. Why?
I suspect that it's a touchy feely program, no one can object to, so it is brought up again and again, but it either isn't feasible, or it's counter-culture...as in against the flow of industrialization.. or the Powers that Be really don't like the idea...
Today, actually, while looking up stuff on archive.org, I unearthed a 1910 booklet about the Macdonald-Robertson Movement called Children of the Land. It was aimed at Americans. The M-R movement was about training children for rural occupations, moving them back to the country from the city. (Against the flow, you see.)
A very misguided notion of course. But the movement did promote the agricultural sciences. So now we have mega-farms with few employees providing food for the people of the cities.
In 1927, a US Department of Health group examined the typhoid epidemic, and traced it to one milk company. 1,200 to 1,500 farms supplied milk to this company, their report published in JAMA said, so it was hard for the scientists to trace the exact source of typhoid.
This fact helps support the plot of Milk and Water. The Americans were so concerned with this epidemic, they sent up their own people. This epidemic didn't help tourism, or exports. So my grandfather has a right to be mad at Thomas Wells, President of Laurentian Spring Water, who has spent 3 decades trashing the city tap water, so to speak, in his advertisements.
Macdonald of course was the tobacco tycoon so this HEALTH Movement was funded on 'iffy' money, on money derived from the promotion and sale of a product that causes great illness and death. (And let's not talk about the human rights violations involved in the picking of the plant.) So it goes.
