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 the ‘80s. So we’re due to be nostalgic for the ‘90s, right? Well, maybe not, at least not for Montrealers. In the last instalment of a 3-part series, writer Kristian Gravenor explains why.
Montreal in the 90s: Part 1
Montreal in the 90s: Part 2
When we left off in 1996, Montreal stood on a precipice. The referendum had been decided by a handful of votes, and accusations of vote rigging were flung with wild abandon. The city continued to bleed jobs and an air of bitterness and insecurity settled over the city.
But 1997 rolled around and the mid-90s stress slowly dissipated as Hanson’s Mmmbop and the Spice Girls’ Wannabe flowed out of boutiques, replacing the sour gangsta rap and Biggie v. Tupac that characterized the mid-90s.
Finance Minister Paul Martin and Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard replaced the sovereignty dialogue with an attack on out-of-control spending. Local signs of regeneration slowly started emerging as the abandoned Simpson’s became Simon’s and joined the Bell Centre as new downtown landmarks.
The Vancouver band Moist – one of Canada’s hottest pop music acts – led a wave of creative migration by moving to Montreal, which was suddenly being recognized as a dirt-cheap city with a vibrant cultural life.
Bruce Willis, George Clooney and Donald Sutherland were in town shooting flicks in 1997, a year that attracted $725 million in film-production dollars, triple the numbers of five years prior.
Mayor Pierre Bourque was under constant fire for his relentless international travel but it seemed to bear fruit, as Montreal gained a new foothold as a city that could connect Europe to North America.
And tourists started returning, often staying in upscale boutique hotels, part of a wave that would see $175 million poured into creating hotel rooms between 1997 and 2000.
In 1997 Montreal leapt 8 points in the job creation rankings, from dead last to 16th place among the 24 biggest cities of North America.
Headlines discussed whether Howard Stern should be played in Montreal or if a band of nudists named Rockbitch should be allowed to perform a rock concert. No news was good news. We were suddenly focussing on small, unimportant things, going from massive decisions about the future of the country and our day-to-day survival to trivial worries. (I really never could figure out why Rockbitch was a big story.)
Jan. 6, 1998 brought the second-most-famous event of the decade, behind the referendum: the ice storm. Electrical lines came down leaving tens of thousands without power and shivering in the bitterest of winter. The experience brought Montrealers together and the event gained a reputation as an important rite of passage for the city, a sort of urban rebirth. It didn’t hurt that as a result of the storm, governments and insurance companies poured $2.5 billion into repairs.
Against this backdrop was the great black swan of the 1990s, the rise of the Internet. Young minds that had been focusing on politics were suddenly learning html and dreaming of new virtual empires with a tool that offered endless horizons.
The Montreal economy kept chugging along and by the end of 1998 the city’s unemployment rate had dropped to 9.7 per cent. A year later it had dipped to an impressive 6.8 per cent – below the national average – a zone that it’s more or less hovered around ever since.
One stat says it all: an astounding 97 per cent of Montreal’s 183,700 jobs created in the 1990s came between 1997 and 2000.
The era where the tenant was king had come to an end as apartment vacancy rates tumbled to a minuscule 1.5 per cent. Rents were still relatively low with an average two-bedroom apartment going for $509, up from $463 at the start of the decade.
By the end of the 90s, the city had transformed radically from what it had started out as: moustaches had been shaved, “a louer” signs removed, dilapidation replaced by gentrification, sexy serveuse restaurants turned into tasteful brewpubs.
As the new millennium was brought in with purple fireworks shooting over the mountain, the pain and anguish of the 90s were washed away. Yet the legacy goes on, with many who lived through those tough times reflexively falling into bitter skittishness at the first sign of things not going right, in a city so radically transformed in a few years that it is in many ways unrecognizable.
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: @Kgravy, and OpenFile Montreal: @OpenFileMTL.
