Griffintown Blog (Blog #2)

My experience with the Griffintown soundwalk was shocking and extremely touching. This is my first time with this kind of a soundwalk, and I am very glad I got to experience it. Before I went on it I really thought it was going to be basically walking through the streets and learning about the town itself, but it was so much more than that. You hear about the lives and the experiences of people who grew up there and how they viewed their town and that was beautiful and tragic at the same time. You realize that the community and the life they had was amazing. They all knew each other and the neighbourhood was filled with people at all times. Now as you walk through this town you realize everything is completely different, in every way.

As I was listening to one of the speakers talking about William St., a horse carriage passed by and then a few minutes later I heard the same sound in the soundtrack. It was interesting because I thought the carriage ride passing was random but that means it has been passing there for quite some time. Another interesting sound on the corner of William and Ann St. was the humming of the train. It was so present yet I didn’t seem to pay attention to it until Lisa mentioned it. She was saying the humming drowns out other city sounds and that was very true. As much as I was trying to hear other sounds I couldn’t, my mind was still focused on the train’s humming.

As the plane crash story was being told by many people who had witnessed it, I was shocked. This is the point in the soundwalk that my view towards the whole Griffintown project changed. I literally got chills up my spine. I definitely did not expect this when I first set out to do this. The sounds of the plane’s engine and the pilot’s voice really did a good job of making me believe I was really there and that made the experience more traumatizing but in a good way, meaning I wasn’t just hearing about the story, I was almost experiencing it. The explosion of the plane was a wake-up call for me. I was so wrapped up in the story to the point I couldn’t believe that this really happened but when I heard that final explosion, it brought me back to reality and great grief came over me.

As I kept on listening, I found out that the boys and girls club was on the same street that the plane crashed. It is a university residence now. I find that very sad because all the memories that these kids had there were torn down with the building itself.

One block down from the boys and girls club was the boys’ school. It is a parking lot now. Another part of their lives torn down as well.

The ghost story about the prostitute Mary Gallager being murdered really got to me. This was another point during the whole soundwalk that gave me chills. I personally believe in ghosts so these kinds of stories scare me, but fascinate me at the same time. In my opinion, this story adds another dimension to this community. It seems like this community had a little of everything: happiness, sadness, tragedy, poverty, togetherness, separation, and Mary Gallager’s story adds to that, it makes this community more complex and interesting.

When I reached the site where the girls school and the church used to be I got an even better understanding of the Griffintown community. So many things were getting torn down and these people still stayed and still tried to keep their community alive but when the church closed there was nothing left there for the people of Griffintown. As we hear Lisa and a few of the speakers say that the church and the girls school was the “heart and soul” of this community, you start to understand that it wasn’t necessarily the people that kept people in Griffintown, it was the place itself. As I was walking towards where the church used to be, I saw the rocks on the ground from what was left of the church and I started to feel sick in a way. I felt like they ripped down their home and everything that was close to them. I felt anger and I wished I could have helped them in some way. The fact that the benches were put in the same direction as the church seats were gave me chills and it made this story more realistic than ever. There used to be so much beauty in this town, and now all that’s left is dead streets and new buildings. It was a sad experience but I’m glad I experienced it because now this story will live inside me and inside the people I share it with.