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| The Bal en blanc would not have been possible during the era in Montreal when dancing was banned after midnight |
But some of our basic assumptions can be quite incorrect.
Example: we imagine Montrealers to be epic jaywalkers with police too distracted to worry about such trivialities.. but that identity myth has been busted by ongoing jaywalking ticket spree.
Another misconception is that Montreal has always been a laissez faire kinda ville that has always allowed nightclubs to operate relatively unmolested.
In fact the city repeatedly attempted to enforce a bylaws restricting dancing in nightclubs, both by performers and patrons all day Sunday and every other day after midnight.
So that meant at midnight you were still free to stick around and drink until 2 a.m. but you had better not shimmy, shake, boogie, break dance or make like a chicken in any way, or police would shut the bar and fine management.
The earliest mention of the bylaw that I could find comes in a warning from Jan. 2, 1925 that police would start applying the rule; 35 joints were fined in 1934,and an unnamed police source confessed to selective enforcement to ensure that clubs don't go too far. Another article from December 1935 notes that five clubs around the Lower Main were busted for violating bylaw 432. In November 1946 the midnight dancing curfew was being referred to as Bylaw 1643 but it appeared to be the same thing, as cops once again swooped in on six bars for permit people to dance after midnight.
But finally Belmont Park challenged the Sunday Dancing ban, which was now being described as the Lords Day Act, and in October 1957 a Municipal Court judge ruled that it was a provincial matter and the province had no rule against Sunday dancing, so it was quite legal.The city did not give up its meddling, however. In 1967 the city passed an anti-mingling bylaw that prohibited bar employees from talking to customers. The idea was that this could stop prostitution or some such thing but that too was seen as a flop and only sporadically enforced.
Strip clubs also saw many of their restrictions tossed out over the years as well, the g-string law was booted out in the mid-80s and the lap dance ban ended in 1999.
I should note that my father owned a nightclub on the Main in the 60s called the Peppermint Lounge. He told me that he refused to bribe police, so they raided two straight nights and forced everybody to show their identification, effectively killing the business, the point being that these bylaws were likely used as leverage for bribery.