Rolly Martin Country

LC Gagnon worked for McDonald, Currie & Co beginning in August 1944. They were a chartered accountant firm, with offices in the Aldred Building on the east side of Place d'Armes in Montreal. In 1947 he changed jobs, moving to the CPR headquarters to work for the Auditor, Freight Receipts in Windsor Station.

By October 1948, he had some vacation days accumulated and a CPR pass. Elsewhere on this blog, you can see his CPR trips around Nova Scotia in 1949 (including some CNR mileage), and out to Vancouver in 1950.

Here are some photos from his first trip - to Quebec City. You can guess where he stayed ...

Back in those days, the value of the corporation's underlying real estate asset had not been surfaced by securitization via a Real Estate Investment Trust and the hotel was run by ... 'employees' ... not pyramids of management contracts.

There may also have been a discount for CPR employees.

He arrived on Saturday and departed on Tuesday morning.

Considering all of these factors, his nightly rate in 2026 dollars is $88.11 .

A passerby has volunteered to take LC Gagnon's picture standing on the Dufferin Terrace using his trusty box camera.

Like Montreal, Quebec City has a Place d'Armes. Maybe it was a franchise. You can see it above.

People always like to see the old cars and buses. The steeple at the left belongs to the Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity. LC Gagnon might have attended on Sunday, as his grandfather was an Anglican minister. The Price Building is the tallest feature.

The bus at the right by the Hotel Chateau Normandie is parked outside a 'good restaurant' - so perhaps check it out if you're in the neighbourhood this weekend. On the roof, over the word 'Hotel' is a frame that looks like a primitive radar. I fiddled with the photo a little and I can tell you that whatever this neon sign advertises ... it is 'World Famous' - the only words I could decipher for certain.

The box camera has a convex lens, so vertical structures at the photos' edges tend to bend toward each other.

We're aboard the ferry and taking a trip to Lévis. They're putting a good fire in by the looks of the stack. Throughout this series of photos, a number of coal smokestacks can be seen.

Maps of the Quebec and Lévis waterfronts are presented at the end of this post.

A steam whistle by the stack.

With a good head of steam, the Bienville is approaching the Quebec dock.

Many postcards of the Quebec Citadel were taken from this vantage point.

Notice the starboard sidelight and the voice tube beyond it on the wing bridge.

'The most photographed hotel in the world.'

... So far we've seen three photos of the Chateau Frontenac.

Today the docks are frequented by ever-larger cruise ships.

Looking to the east, Quebec's industrial waterfront is seen.

Seen from the Citadel wall, a steamer travels down-river while one of the ferries begins another trip.

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Old Maps

I wanted to find some maps which showed the industrial heritage of the waterfronts of Quebec and Lévis. This first map from BANQ is a fire insurance map which keys to more detailed maps.

There was nothing to see on the map above the key so it is excluded. Simply read the first map from left to right, then drop down to the next map and read from left to right. This takes you up-river on the Lévis side.

from: Levis,1894; Charles Goad fire insurance maps. BANQ
BANQ. https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/2244202?docsearchtext=Levis

* * *

On the Quebec side ...

This is part of a streetcar map from circa 1900. I think the CPR roundhouse is pictured in the upper left corner. There is no numbered key to decode the various identities of the buildings.

The Ross Rifle factory in the lower left corner is included for history buffs.

Moving east from the Citadel, we are are reminded that the city was shelled by the Americans in 1775 from the west and from Lévis. Major General Richard Montgomery (1738-1775) of the Continental Army (he was ex-British Army) was killed here during that invasion.

The Dufferin Terrace becomes the Durham Terrace at the east end. The Chateau Frontenac should appear on this map near the latter.

This map does not do justice to the extensive railway network in this area at the time - particularly in the industrial harbour area.

Quebec City, Electric Railway Map, circa 1900; BANQ.
BANQ https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/4293393?docsearchtext=plan+Ville+de+Quebec

end

LC Gagnon obtained this map of Toronto Transit Commission services in 1943.

At various times, his grandfather - a dairy farmer living near Lachute, Quebec - sent 'a car' of livestock down to the Royal Winter Fair to show them - or to sell them in some cases. This was in the period when livestock could ride in boxcars with attendants. However, there was no 'Royal' in Toronto during the Second World War as the military had taken over the exhibition grounds. So the reason for this map acquisition is not clear.

The first of the TTC's 700-odd PCCs arrived in 1938. In an official 1953 history of the TTC, they were identified repeatedly as 'Streamliners' and not PCCs. The period of Art Deco styling and aviation-style streamlining influenced the design of many items in the 1930s and 1940s. 'Streamliners' they remained into the 1950s. Unless they were operating along an urban canyon into a howling blizzard, we can guess that their aerodynamics were never employed to advantage.

The cheap, resource-sparing wartime printing and dyes are evident in the image below. Before minor computer-tweaking to bring out detail, the prevailing colour of this cover today is almost a uniform, muddy brown.

In wartime, or at any other time, there can be no obvious reason why someone would wear a Robin's egg blue suit when coal smoke and soot were ever-present features of urban life ... unless they needed to stand out when posing in front of the dark interior of a PCC streetcar.

As Toronto would have been an important centre for the intake of civilian personnel into the military, we can imagine that incredible numbers of these maps were produced to help these newcomers navigate in the Big Smoke. As Toronto citizens went into the military from their local civilian jobs, we can also assume that many replacement workers were also coming as newcomers to replace them in Canada's second city.

The TTC information (all of it is reproduced below) is on one side and a generic gas station streetmap (by the HM Gousha Company) of the city appears on the reverse. As usual, the latter provides no interesting information on the location or features of particular railway facilities.