So in a search for an answer, I thought I'd turn to the crowd of reader (You mean "readers" surely? - Chimples).
The reply might be contained in the 2nd Memories of Snowdon book, which author Bill Conrod was gracious enough to send to me from his home in Ottawa. (Ottawa? Sheesh! - Chimples).
I'm told that the answer does not lie in the first book and was too busy to read through the sequel to find out if it's in there. (Too busy? But not too busy to play 1,000 geography and trivia games on QuizUp?- Chimples).
Here's the note:
In the 1950s and even in the early 1960s, it was often said that
Snowdon was "the second largest shopping area outside of downtown." Do you or your readers have any idea where this originated?
As a onetime Snowdon resident many decades ago, I too would say it to people. Nonetheless I was a little sceptical at the time and thought it sounded more like business hype than truth. Snowdon area had many commercial enterprises stretching from just east of Westbury on Queen Mary west to about Earnscliffe. Decarie had businesses on both sides from Cote St. Luc to about Isabella years before the expressway was built.
But there were a lot fewer businesses in the 1940s. It was in the 1950s that many of the apartment buildings on Queen Mary started converting their ground floors to retail space. Perhaps the idea started when Morgan's (The Bay) opened their first store outside of downtown Snowdon in the early 1950s. But even that was a novelty for only a few years. By the mid-1950s, there were Morgan's stores in Dorval and at Pie IX and Jean Talon. So that can't be it.
Indeed Queen Mary and Decarie, the epicentre of Snowdon, was a busy place in the 1940s with the streetcar turning loop and the many routes starting or terminating there. By then Decarie had also become the main road route to St. Laurent and the Laurentians. But again the shopping area wasn't really. Perhaps it was because adjacent Hampstead allowed no commercial operations in their city and residents had to go to Snowdon to shop. But then, Hampstead wasn't as populous as it is today. In any case, the streetcar loop had been moved to Garland Terminus about a mile north of Queen Mary and Decarie by 1949 so you didn't have the same foot traffic. In fact I might even argue that Snowdon's downward slide began in the 1950s when more people were buying their first cars and moving to newly developing suburbs. As an original old streetcar suburb Snowdon just did not have the parking space for all these new cars. That's why so many of the new shopping centres of the early 1960s with their free parking lots became so popular. Where did that "second after downtown" statement originate? Surely in the 1950s there were equally populous and important commercial neighbourhoods in Montreal that would prove it untrue.
Conrod's reply: I would agree that the Morgan people must have been behind it. Definately car ownership forced a change in shopping habits. The Buskards would drive to Dorval to buy groceries, probably because it was easy to park there. Your right in reminding readers that the change from Snowdon Junction to the Garland turn-around influenced the drop-off shopping in Snowdon. I might suggest that Gerry Snyder might have been behind the boast about the "second largest". Ask his son, Glen.