Open the map by clicking on overcrowding in the above heading.
Click on the point to see details about the household.
Click on the street to see its name.
Two-thirds of the city's households, a majority in all eighteen city wards, enjoyed one or more rooms per person.
The names of household heads and the address of the property appear on the map. Only the names can be searched. One in eight were women. Only one in eleven appears to have owned where they lived; the rest were tenants. The census only recorded live-in domestic servants. An unknown number of people, mostly women, would also have worked in domestic service but resided elsewhere. Many middle-class households would have employed non-resident domestic help not shown on the map. While the census enumerators recorded the annual wages earned by each person, the household income figure is a more recent aggregation by the Mormon researchers who created the initial data base from which we worked. People earning salaries or who lived on means of their own were not required to provide any such information, but some did. More often these wealthier households show only the wages paid to their servants. The median wage earned by male heads of household was $500 a year; to establish present-day purchasing power multiply by 120.
Open the map by clicking on landladies in the above heading.
Click on the lot to see the name of the owner and the address, rent and assessed values of the property.
Only built properties have a rent or a street number.
Click on the street to see its name.
Turn of the century Montréal was a city of tenants, nine out of ten households rented where they lived. A quarter of them rented from a landlady, rather than a landlord. By both value and number, women owned more than a quarter of the properties belonging to by people, while the 22 institutions run by women owned a third of the 880 properties belonging to the city's 206 institutions.
This web map shows who owned what in Montréal in 1903. The name and, where available, occupation are shown for all but seventeen of the city's 29,951 properties. You can search the map by the owner's name. We have respected the spelling and nomenclature used by the city. Where a property was owner occupied the assessors generally recorded an occupation if owned by a man and, not infrequently, the occupation of the husband if owned by a women. The map also provides the annual rent for the property, as well as the assessed values of land and buildings. To approximate in today's value these figures multiply by 120. City assessors recorded a rental value for all built properties even if it was owner occupied and so paid no rent.
The statistical measure of rooms per person was developed in the late-19th century to analyse chronic overcrowding in the major cities of the North Atlantic. London, Paris and New York all had neighbourhoods averaging more than two people per room. Quickly, a concensus developed that this was at least double the preferred norm of one room per person. In 1897, Montréal Alderman Herbert Ames conducted a survey of living conditions in the popular class south-western wards of St Joseph, Ste-Anne and St-Antoine between the CPR tracks and the Lachine Canal, which he published as The City Below the Hill. He argued that here overcrowding was the exception rather than the rule; a finding confirmed in 1901 by the first census to record the number of rooms. It showed a city-wide average of one room per person.
Popular understandings of overcrowding have long suggested otherwise. Here two factors have combined to support an out-dated "misèrabliste" historiography of working class conditions at the turn of the century. First, people assume that large families were a near universal, whereas by 1901 the median household size was down to five from seven at mid-century, with only one in twenty families having six or more children living at home. Second, the very real housing crisis of the late-1930s and 1940s has left an indelible mark on the popular imagination. Oral history interviews for the past twenty years evoke a rare unanimity on this point. We tend to project these eye-witness accounts, as well as the highly evocative fictions of a Michel Tremblay or a Mordecai Richler, back onto an earlier past that was not only different, but at least in this regard considerably better.
The remarkable detail of our web map offers a substantive correction to this image of a working class scrambling to survive. The map's high level of resolution is only possible because MAP has succeeded in placing almost all the households of the 1901 census onto their respective lots. (See our video on Landlord/Tenant Relations) Institutions and hotels were both important places of permanent residence in 1901 that represented quite different realities than those facing families and so are not included here. This left 50,771 households, however the data is incomplete for 3,912. The remaining 46,859 households show a remarkable range of situations.
The great social divide of 19th century Montréal, the escarpment, ran just below Dorchester (now René Lévesque)in the west as far as Beaver Hall Hill where it rose up to just below Sherbrooke at Bleury. In the city above the hill uniformly spacious households predominate. The most obvious area of comfort, in the north-west, clearly stretches as far east as Lafontaine Park, that is to say well beyond most of the households with live-in domestic servants. They stopped just west of St-Urbain, beyond which they were largely restricted to the French-Canadian bourgeois corridor bound by St-Denis and St Hubert streets, with minor extensions around Carré St-Louis and along Cherrier to Lafontaine Park.
One in twenty five households have two or more people per room and they are scattered throughout the city's popular class wards. There is a complete absence of any heavy concentrations. A little more than a quarter of the remaining households have fewer than one room per person. There are evident clusterings along certain streets and they constitute the majority in northern St-Gabriel, immediately south of the Grand Trunk railway station in St Joseph, in the Ashkenazi ghetto below Ontario in St-Louis, along the escarpment from Amherst(now Atateken)to Papineau and in parts of Hochelaga, St-Jean Baptiste and Ste-Marie. So while their presence is very real in popular class Montréal, they fail to dominate any single ward.
Interested in knowing more about housing at the turn-of-the century? Download our QGIS application on landlord/tenant relations.
Property in Western Europe and its colonies of settlement has historically been gendered, with inheritance practices treating immoveables (chiefly real estate) as male and moveables (everything else) as female. This made sense in a world where women normally left their homes to establish a household with their husband upon marriage and the immoveables and moveables of a household tended to be of roughly equal value. Among the popular classes this rough parity meant that inheritance, although gendered was not necessarily unequal. This parity between the two types of property was dramatically overturned in the 18th and early 19th centuries, with immoveables increasing in value and the value of moveables collapsing as the ways of producing those goods changed. The resulting change in women's economic position fundamentally altered the political economy of marriage. In Montréal, this change largely preceeded and facilitated local industrialisation at mid-century. By 1880, this regendering had led to an almost complete eclipse of female property owners in the city. How then to explain this remarkable presence of landladies only a generation later?
In early-19th century Montreal, property was mostly in the hands of the economic and social elites or the various orders of the Catholic church. Only in two popular-class wards of St-Joseph in the west and Ste-Marie in the east did local property owners predominate. Over the second quarter of the 19th century this changed quite dramatically with the development of a modern real estate market, characterized by a high level of speculative turn-over. Most of these new owners came from the popular classes and by mid-century local proprietors were the norm in all wards outside the town centre.
Property investment in a rapidly growing city could be highly profitable. A limited number of families from the popular classes came to rely on multi-generational investment strategies that over time resulted in large, diverse holdings in various part of the city. Certain of these rentier families intermarried so often that it suggests dynastic planning. A much larger number of families from both the popular classes and petty-bourgeoisie mimicked these investment strategies, but tended to restrict their investments to their local parish or ward.
Equitable inheritance practices, while not gender-blind, did favour the distribution of property among the female offspring of these property-owning families. This intergenerational transfer could take the form of doweries upon marriage. The default marriage regime in Québec was community of property, which saw the husband administering on behalf of the couple all of its property. The city made no mention of this shared ownership for any properties owned by husbands, whereas it always identified the husband of both married and widowed female proprietors. Married women exercised veto rights over the sale of any of her "own" property that she had brought into the community or received as inheritance, which explains why by 1903 the city always identified her husband because he administered the community. Earlier, in 1880, the city did not list properties that were her "own" as belonging to the wife, and as a result there were only 217 married female proprietors on the role. Upon the death of her husband, widowed women regained full legal rights to their property.
As property was so often an integral part of a family's accumulation strategy, life-cycle mattered a great deal. By 1903, 521 single women owned 958 properties, 1,479 married women owned 2717, 1,298 widows owned 2,680, while a mere 108 female estates owned 231. Female estates numbered only a fifth of male estates, while owning only a tenth of the properties owned by male estates. This relative insignificance of female estates speaks to both how recent the widespread acquisition of property ownership by women was, as well as the strongly patriarchal nature of family structures. Far more men owned such substantial holdings that it made sense to keep them together as an estate after their death, rather than distribute them among his children.
Women's civil status affected their right to vote. Men's did not. The municipal franchise was open only to those who held either sufficient property or paid a relatively high rent. All female property owners had been denied the municipal franchise in 1832, but both unmarried and widowed property-owning women gained it in the 1870s. They could not, however, run for office. Frequently, single women were identified on the tax roll as having an occupation of "fille majeure" (adult girl) because of these restrictions. Married women were denied the vote. Husbands of property-owning women were, however, empowered to vote by their wife's holdings and if those holdings were large enough so too could their sons. This was important, because only one in six husbands of landed ladies owned property in their own right. Property-owning married women would only get to vote when all resident citizens were accorded the franchise with the elimination of property qualifications in 1963.