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Ruvenoff: Member of the Imperial Russian Ballet escaped Siberia then made...
 Ezzak Ruvenoff , (aka Ezak, Isaac) (1874-1970) lived one of the biggest lives of any Montrealer.    Ruvenoff was born in Kiev, Ukraine and started as a dancer at the age of seven at the Imperial...
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Montreal once jailed 125 Chinese laundrymen for failing to pay a special tax
 Chinese laundry family in Vancouver 1874 Incredible but true: Montreal police arrested and imprisoned at between 125 and 300 Chinese laundry business owners in 1900 for failing to pay a new tax...
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Beverly Van Horne - Railroad heiress got away with shooting a guest dead at...
Beverly Van Horne, 1960Â Â Beverly Van Horne (1932-1998) became instant Montreal royalty when she slid into this embattled planet, for she was the grand-daughter of William Cornelius Van Horne, who...
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Elizabeth Kugiel: glamorous Montreal scenester had her father tortured in 1967
Elizabeth Kugiel, 1968 Elizabeth Kugiel, 20, struck an elegant figure as a downtown Montreal scenester in 1967 as she flitted about in bars and bistros around Mountain and Crescent, motoring around...
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Torrance Street - Demolished one block-downtown street was home to plenty of...
  Torrance Street, now a single. denuded block, was - until about 1960, a dynamic, bustling, crowded 350-foot stretch that packed more thrills per-square-foot than any other piece of downtown land....
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Montrealers celebrated doctor who swallowed his loan agreement
 Montreal housed a miniscule population of 60,000 in 1858 when an ingeniously diabolical and deceptive maneuver made the news far and wide.  On the evening of 16 February Dr. Charles Sabourin, Esq. a...
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Beryl Dash: Black McGill student became Jackie Robinson of beauty queens
 Beryl Dash, aka Beryl Dickinson-Dash, 21, was an unknown McGill student when she found herself, on 18 February 1949, being cheered by 8,000 at the Montreal Forum as she was greeted by Montreal Mayor...
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Edward Walter Fryer, rock star Eric Clapton's father, was a free-spirited...
Fryer, 1949Â Rock guitar legend Eric Clapton didn't get cheated of drama when he learned of his biological father Edward "Ted" Walter Fryer (1920-1985), a seductive Montreal-based drifter with a great...
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1967: These amazing photos shine a light on Montreal's year of great energy
Men rubberneck at a parade on Sherbrooke Street East. Jules Rochon's photo collection on BANQ puts into focus an era of great change and energy in Montreal. Rochon's photosnaps come with no biography...
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This day in Montreal history - Madeleine Lacas loses her sons to the icy St....
Mrs. Joseph Lacas with her grandchildren just hours before they died Madeleine Lacas was born in 1922 and lived a normal life with her two parents until one day her dad Joseph walked out, leaving her...
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Not fiddling around: Johnny Mooring, Canada's flirtatious fiddler beaten to...
 Johnny Mooring and his magic fingers could fiddle to hell and back without turning around.     Mooring's magnetic music stopped studdenly when the Springhill, Nova Scotia musical icon mysteriously...
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"He stared ahead and screamed, gripping the steering wheel with all his...
Larose Montreal's first-ever car bomb on 9 September 1962 targeted Armand Larose, 34, one of the thugs charged with killing his own crime gang's boss Rocky Pierson. The Pierson affair was one of the...
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Place des Arts - the massive downtown Montreal block sacrificed for a...
 We all know Place des Arts in its current form, a vast space of concrete that grabs mucho tax dollars away from citizens to the old-fashioned elitist cummerbund-crowd listening to chamber music and...
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Montreal's Bohemian Beatnik Colony - a report on the new culture from 1959
Alfie Wade playing piano at his club Boyce Richardson tackled the task of describing Montreal's Beat Generation to readers of the Montreal Star on 18 April 1959. ** Montreal at this moment has among...
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It's way out! 1960 Beatnik hub El Cortijo on Clarke
24 Oct 1959 Montreal GazetteIt's no funeral parlour, it's way outBy Bill Banley, photos by Mike Gravel The sign across the door, slopped there in white paint, says in French: "don't be afraid this...
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Luigi Gino Maida: Hard-luck Montreal mobster tried to tame Sex Fox of...
Luigi Gino Maida Luigi Gino Maida (1939-1988) grew up in Montreal where he served the dominant Violi Mafia clan before becoming the big fish in the small pond of Chibougamau in the mid-1970s.  Maida...
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McGill Daily article claimed President Johnson violated JFK's corpse - the...
 Lyndon Johnson committed an obscene act on the corpse of assasinated President John F. Kennedy, according to an article in published in the McGill Daily on Page 4 of the 3 November 1967 edition.  The...
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Montreal Police Games rehabilitated the image of cops - time to bring it back
 Montreal residents held their police in low-esteem in the 1880s so police Captain Frank Loye - who had previously worked as a cop in Ireland - decided to change that. Frank Loye  Loye launched the...
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Montreal Mayor Camillien Houde's plot to storm Ottawa - plus rare footage of...
   Take a peek at the video above to understand the significance of Donald Britton's 1976 documentary on longtime Montreal Mayor Camillien HoudeHis Worship Mr Montreal  This Coolopolis video analyzes...
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Treadmill Queen Yolande James - how Quebec's provincial representatives...
 Coolopolis has long believed that Quebec could slash its health issues by getting citizens to take their fitness seriously. In an article published on 11 January 2011 in the Montreal Gazette, I polled...
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