Dissipating Darkness: Governing Nighttime in Montreal, 1954-1986

Abstract

In 1954, fresh off the heels of a sensational inquiry into political corruption, Montrealers elected reformist mayor Jean Drapeau. At City Hall, and along with a cadre of police officers, Drapeau produced a plan that sought to clear the city of its disreputable characters and their preferred haunts: brothels, nightclubs, and gambling dens. Fundamentally, city authorities understood nighttime as a moment that enabled vice and immorality, and because it had been unregulated for so long, they reorganized policing and bylaws to gain control over it. Although he lost the 1957 municipal election, Drapeau returned to power in 1960 and extended this project as he governed Montreal under the banner of the Civic Party until 1986. Throughout this quarter-century the Civic Party made significant reforms in its attempt to transform Montreal into a cosmopolitan destination. To upkeep the city’s cosmopolitan image, it gave police the go ahead to crackdown on sex workers, the queer community, working class labourers, and dissident artists. Informed by currents in the fields of Canadian urban history and the history of sexuality, this dissertation shows how the transformation of Montreal during the ‘Drapeau years’ (~1954-1986) partially revolved around a struggle to control the night and its economies. To realize its goals, the municipal administration created and amended several bylaws that defined proper behaviour in public space by regulating obscene literature, nightclub mingling, protest, loitering, prostitution, and soliciting. Yet, in an era of social protest, the municipal administration also had to keep its own workforce under control. In moments of great defiance, when the city’s transit employees, police officers, and firefighters went on strike, they revealed how unruly nights could lead the city into chaos and anarchy. Despite a fleeting moment of transgression in 1969, the city’s Police Department generally acted as the main force regulating visible forms of disreputability as it removed sex workers from streets, raided queer nightclubs and bathhouses, and oversaw the destruction of public art installations.