Where in Montreal is Rue de la Bouteille Verte - Green Bottle Street? The easy answer is that the street is a myth from the fertile imagination of a newspaper writer who dreamt it up for a 2,000-word short story in 1954.
The mystery begins in 1912 when a self-styled Christian Science healer, an officer in WWI and an all-round charismatic dazzler named Waddington had a son named Patrick.
The family moved to England and eventually returned to Ottawa where Patrick benefited from his father's friendship with newspaper tycoon H.S. Southam, who hired him as a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen.
The young Patrick was covering a news conference in 1939 held by the League Against War and Fascism when he rapidly tumbled into love with its secretary Miriam Dworkin, an aspiring poet.
The two soon wed. "It was horrible in 1939 to be Jewish or to marry a Jew. Southam was annoyed that he married me," says his former wife Miriam. The couple moved to Montreal where they settled on Dufferin.
The poet and the newspaper scribe were soon in with the local literati who'd publish staple-binded magazines of creative writing like Preview and First Contact. The duo made front page news in 1951 after the nearby Hampstead School refused their son, as the town policy of the time was to keep Hampstead free of Jews. The school eventually relented.
As his poet-wife's reputation grew, Patrick banged out unremarkable articles, such as his profile of a Montreal bureaucrat who managed our city's street names, published in the January 18, 1947 issue of the Montreal Standard.
Seven years later Waddington drew on the article for his short story, "The Street that got Mislaid."
The tale revolves around City of Montreal official Marc Girondin, the "undisputed expert of the filing cabinets where all the particulars of all the streets from Abbott to Zotique were indexed, back, forward and across."
The fictional Girondin says things like: "if my cards didn't say so, you wouldn't exist and Oven Street wouldn't either." But Girondin is eventually shocked to discover and index card long lost int he back of the filing cabinet. To his horror the City of Montreal had lost track of a street called Rue de la Bouteille Verte, named in honour of its unusual shape.
"In his heart Marc had sometimes dreamed of such a possibility. There were so many obscure places, twisting lanes and streets jumbled together as intricately as an Egyptian Labyrinth. But of course it could not happen, not with the omniscient file at hand. Only it had."
The story was translated into many languages and has stirred some to post it on the Internet. The tale allowed Waddington -who worked at Radio-Canada International and at the same sausage'n'mash lunch daily at the downtown Murray's- to escape the shadow of his famous wife before his death in 1973.
So did Waddington conceal a private knowledge of a city street that none of the rest of us know? Here's how he describes the tight-knit, secret urban treasures whose residents life in peace and free of tax collectors: "On either side of a cobbled pavement were three small houses, six in all, each with a diminutive garden in front, spread off by low iron palings of a kind that had disappeared except in the oldest quarters." The story ends as Girondin moves to the street, forever keeping its secret.
Waddington's ex-wife Miriam, one of Canada's well-known poets, has been living in Vancouver for a decade ("a terrible city, a toy city, not a real place") and denies knowledge of the secret street.
His second wife Elaine, retired from the Royal Vic, lives on Doctor Penfield, where she plucks the viola da gamba, a precursor to the guitar. She talks fondly of Patrick's "beautiful voice and his soft, deep English accent," which never, apparently, revealed the secret of the Green Bottle.
And is she knows more about this mislaid Montreal utopia, she isn't saying.
From the Montreal Mirror Feb. 6 2002.
Patrick lived from 1912-1973, Miriam Waddington from 1917–2004
See also:
Green Bottle Street - the quintessential MTL short story based on this article...
The mystery begins in 1912 when a self-styled Christian Science healer, an officer in WWI and an all-round charismatic dazzler named Waddington had a son named Patrick.
 |
| Patrick Waddington |
The young Patrick was covering a news conference in 1939 held by the League Against War and Fascism when he rapidly tumbled into love with its secretary Miriam Dworkin, an aspiring poet.
The two soon wed. "It was horrible in 1939 to be Jewish or to marry a Jew. Southam was annoyed that he married me," says his former wife Miriam. The couple moved to Montreal where they settled on Dufferin.
 |
| Miriam Waddington |
As his poet-wife's reputation grew, Patrick banged out unremarkable articles, such as his profile of a Montreal bureaucrat who managed our city's street names, published in the January 18, 1947 issue of the Montreal Standard.
Seven years later Waddington drew on the article for his short story, "The Street that got Mislaid."
The tale revolves around City of Montreal official Marc Girondin, the "undisputed expert of the filing cabinets where all the particulars of all the streets from Abbott to Zotique were indexed, back, forward and across."
The fictional Girondin says things like: "if my cards didn't say so, you wouldn't exist and Oven Street wouldn't either." But Girondin is eventually shocked to discover and index card long lost int he back of the filing cabinet. To his horror the City of Montreal had lost track of a street called Rue de la Bouteille Verte, named in honour of its unusual shape.
 |
| Montreal city official Albert Garand whose interview inspired the short-story |
The story was translated into many languages and has stirred some to post it on the Internet. The tale allowed Waddington -who worked at Radio-Canada International and at the same sausage'n'mash lunch daily at the downtown Murray's- to escape the shadow of his famous wife before his death in 1973.
So did Waddington conceal a private knowledge of a city street that none of the rest of us know? Here's how he describes the tight-knit, secret urban treasures whose residents life in peace and free of tax collectors: "On either side of a cobbled pavement were three small houses, six in all, each with a diminutive garden in front, spread off by low iron palings of a kind that had disappeared except in the oldest quarters." The story ends as Girondin moves to the street, forever keeping its secret.
Waddington's ex-wife Miriam, one of Canada's well-known poets, has been living in Vancouver for a decade ("a terrible city, a toy city, not a real place") and denies knowledge of the secret street.
His second wife Elaine, retired from the Royal Vic, lives on Doctor Penfield, where she plucks the viola da gamba, a precursor to the guitar. She talks fondly of Patrick's "beautiful voice and his soft, deep English accent," which never, apparently, revealed the secret of the Green Bottle.
And is she knows more about this mislaid Montreal utopia, she isn't saying.
From the Montreal Mirror Feb. 6 2002.
Patrick lived from 1912-1973, Miriam Waddington from 1917–2004
See also:
Green Bottle Street - the quintessential MTL short story based on this article...