Part 1 – 1990-93

Call it the first rule of nostalgia: Generations appear to routinely develop fad retro-crushes on the era two decades prior. The ‘70s worshipped the ‘50s and the ‘60s were repackaged for my 1980s generation.

So we’re due for the ‘90s.

But for Montrealers, romanticizing the city of that decade is an impossible task, unless one could love a place and time marked by deprivation, hardship and hostility.

Even the first Montreal-born child of the 90s didn't hang around long after breathing his first city air. Richard van den Hoef, an eight-pound celebrity-at-birth, moved to Ontario before the champagne got flat – along with his parents of course, Robert and Margaro, who felt compelled to leave a city they just couldn’t afford to live in.

They were off to Ontario, "a place where you work and pay bills,” says Margaro. To this day, the couple still dream of returning but staying then was not an option, says Robert.

What might have become the chubby little personification of a new generation of Montrealers instead became a symbol of the exodus which saw thousands flee. From 1976 to 1991, 20,000 anglos alone left the city.

And the rest of the 90s would do its best to give the most dedicated Montrealer reason to leave. Those who lived through it were beset with challenges that residents elsewhere in North America could barely imagine.

At the onset of the ‘90s, Montreal was already in a bad mood. In the weeks prior to the New Year, Olympic breast-stroke hero Victor Davis had been callously run over and killed; the Daily News tabloid had folded; and, worst of all, among the 98 murders of 1989 (making the city Canada’s murder capital) 14 were female students killed in the Polytechnique massacre. The incident left an open wound, launching years of gender-based soul searching.

The year’s first economic news announced that the city’s unemployment rate had shot up into the double digits, where it would remain until near the end of the decade. Industrial jobs were being devoured by newly-enacted free trade laws. The needle trade, the city’s economic cornerstone since settlers first leapt off canoes, was ravaged by new foreign competition brought on by NAFTA. The urban workforce was undergoing a painful bleaching, as blue-collar jobs disappeared, leaving a wobbly white-collar service economy to pick up the slack.

The decade’s first summer was tainted by the tension and hostility of the Oka Crisis, a land standoff that saw Chateauguay residents lobbing stones at natives, who blocked a bridge for 10 weeks.

The constant radio airplay of Michael Bolton and Phil Collins tunes did little to alleviate the tension.

The GST tax was introduced in 1991, making consumers grumpy. Soon the city unemployment rate rocketed to 13.4 per cent, well above Toronto’s 8.4 per cent rate where the average income was 37 per cent higher. One in four Montrealers lived under the poverty line in the mid-90s and even those with some post-secondary education were paid less than high-school drop-outs in other provinces.

Tourism was on the skids, hotel rooms were empty and ambitious office towers, drawn up before the crunch, such as the 1000 de la Gauchetière and the World Trade Centre, were being built in a city where nobody needed office space.

The city fêted its 350th birthday in 1992 but the celebration was remembered for a song contest won by a lament called "Bateau dans une bouteille", which nobody to this date appears to have ever actually heard.

Mayor Jean Doré then launched a new property surtax and rebellion began brewing among merchants, which culminated in an attack on city hall the next year. Peter Sergakis and his supporters battered down the doors and tossed eggs around the council chamber.

When the final numbers came in, Montreal’s 1992 proved to be its most difficult year since the Great Depression.

By 1993, tumbleweeds practically blew down Ste-Catherine St. as stores shut down and “A Louer” signs became the unofficial city emblem.

Drug-addled prostitutes jostled squeegie punks for corner space in the east end, a neighbourhood which became home to one-time Habs star-turned-crackhead John Kordic, who found a steady enough supply to kill himself.

Although the crime rate was slowly declining, the city was transfixed by a sense of hopelessness. A malaise hovered over town. Professor Valery Fabrikant launched a murder spree at Concordia, claiming four lives, and a few weeks later 50,000 metal-heads rioted at a Guns’n’Roses concert at the Olympic Stadium.

Then, as now, hockey was the great diversion and in 1993 the Canadiens unexpectedly bagged the Stanley Cup, defeating the Los Angeles Kings. But the victory was bittersweet, as a massive army of hockey fans took to the streets, smashing every plate glass window on Ste-Catherine and tossing bottles off Place des Arts. Miraculously, no one was killed. Riot police were helpless in the mayhem.

There wasn't a Montrealer who didn't think of moving.

What are your memories of Montreal in the 1990s? Share them with OpenFile Montreal by leaving a comment. On Friday, Journalist Kristian Gravenor will be available to answer your questions from 2-3 p.m. on Twitter. Use the hashtag #90sMTL to follow along. You can also follow Kristian on Twitter at @Kgravy, and OpenFile Montreal at @OpenFileMTL.