How a toddler's death reshaped the geography of NDG

Little Jean Taschereau died in January 1951

  A child's ghoulish death in the 1950s offered my father the unexpected opportunity to purchase a long strip of land at the top of the St. James Street cliff - west of Decarie  - for one dollar.
  Details of the story, alas, have been stubbornly evasive, none of the 5Ws of the sad anecdote have emerged, in spite of endless searching.
  Colin A. Gravenor I purchased the land for almost free from Canadian National Railway, he explained to me, by offering to accept all legal liability for the property following the death of a child "who fell down the cliff."
  He later allowed downtown skyscraper builders to dump their excavation dirt over the cliff, effectively growing the property considerably until it grew into the spacious lots present around Terry Fox Park.
   But who was the ill-fated child and how and when did he die?
Years of rooting around old newspapers have proven fruitless but the death of three-year-old Jean Taschereau in 1951 - an article I stumbled over yesterday - might be just the thing.
   At the start of January 1951 CNR lawyer Pierre Taschereau moved into a home at 2296 Harvard with wife Yseult Beaudry and only child, toddler Jean.
    The boy was alone playing in the snow in the small front yard on Thursday January 4 at about 4 p.m. when he suddenly scooted off yonder.
   Witnesses noted that they spotted a toddler walking alone down Girouard and through the Girouard underpass.
   A massive team of 500 police, firemen, Boy Scouts and other volunteers rapidly started scouring the area for the boy in the cold weather.
   After midnight the team found the little boy frozen to death at a creek west of the Turcot train yards. The exact place is not described in the story.
   Ross Flanagan and Robert Easton, who found the toddler, surmised that the child broke through ice and only managed to get a few more feet from the creek before succumbing to the cold.
   Exactly one week later another small child, Peter Le Gros, 4, disappeared from his home at 2122 Addington but was found unharmed weeping at the corner of Goirouard and Sherbrooke, ending a four-hour, 30-person search.
  As for the ownership of the strip, it is no longer in the family, as Colin A. Gravenor died in 1993 and those who inherited all of his wealth (none for me) sold it and pocketed a solid profit.