Basin Street, where once stood St. Anne's church, where once beat the heart of Griffintown's old-time Irish population, made news last week.
The sneaky Projet Montreal administration furtively changed the name that has honoured the street for time immemorial.
Snakes gonna slither so you can't do much other than to continue calling it by its heritage name, as we do for renamed streets.
One unknown fact is that Basin Street was named after a body of water that dominated its landscape.
The area bordered by Seminary, Aqueduct and Ottawa streets - maps from the 1850s indicate - was filled with a giant 20-foot deep pool of water serving as a "wharf of public landing."
Ships would sail off the canal right up to Ottawa street west of Mountain in the heart of Griffintown unload or reload.
The body of water stretched 854 feet up from the canal, almost the length of a football field
So not only did magnificent ships with oversized sails pass by Montrealers in the canal, but they once came considerably further north inland into the city through the basin on Basin.
The basin disappeared somewhere along the line but we don't know when or why.
In its original form Basin Street was only about half a kilometer long.
Walk west on Basin from Mountain (then McCord) and then you'd soon hit the water basin. The second and final block of Basin was over a bridge bisecting the body of water.
Other basins jutting out from the Lachine Canal, during that era, according to the map, include one coming northeast from Mountai and Wellington.
Another nearby extinct waterway connected to the Lachine canal was a tailrace draining into the Lachine Canal on a southeastern angle at the foot of Richmond Ave.,
(A tailrace is a cool-sounding term for an industrial drain for water used by a turbine or waterwheel.)
A third ancient basin from the Lachine Canal remains gloriously intact in the form of the waterway surrounding the Redpath Sugar factory-turned condos on St. Patrick south of the canal. The water forms a delightful element to the property and offers a spot where delighted tourists and optimistic locals snap happy photos in the yellow afternoon summer sunlight.
