Montréal’s historic Red-Light District

In those days Montréal was one of the few places in North America where you could still legally buy alcohol. The city’s unofficial theme song was the 1928 Irving Berlin Co. chart topper Hello Montréal! which summed up the sentiments of thirsty tourists: “Goodbye Broadway, hello Montréal / I’m on my way, I’m on my way / And I’ll make whoop-whoop whoopee night and day!”

Tourists, gamblers, racketeers and the world’s greatest entertainers flocked to the city to let the good times roll. Montréal’s fabled Sin City era would continue well into the 1950s.

Sin City Montréal

“Every night in Montréal was like New Year’s Eve in New York!” burlesque icon Lili St. Cyr observed about Montréal’s Sin City era in her 1982 memoir Ma vie de stripteaseuse (Éditions Quebecor).

St. Cyr’s home base was the landmark Gayety Theatre located in the heart of the now-defunct Red-Light District which overlaps the present-day Quartier des spectacles.

The downtown area now known as the Quartier des spectacles has been home to nightclubs, concert venues and cultural institutions for more than 150 years beginning with the Gesù theatre which opened in 1865. Other theatres followed: the Monument-National, birthplace of francophone professional theatre in 1893; the Gayety Theatre in 1912 (which became the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in 1951); and Théâtre Saint-Denis in 1916. All are still operating, as is the Imperial Cinema on Bleury Street which in 1913 was one of the first “super palaces” to be built in Montréal.

“Between the 1920s and the start of the 1960s, the neighbourhood was home to an impressive number of cabarets that headlined famous artists,” explains the non-profit Quartier des spectacles Partnership which was created in 2003 to redevelop the area. “Montréal garnered a reputation as a fun-loving city, and tourists started to arrive in great numbers. American Prohibition increased Montréal’s popularity but also created conditions that led to the growth of organized crime, prostitution and illegal gaming houses. It is during this time that the neighbourhood was christened the Red-Light District.”

As Concordia University Archivist Emerita Nancy Marrelli notes in her bestselling book Stepping Out: The Golden Era of Montreal Nightclubs (Véhicule Press), “The city’s ‘bad’ reputation became a tourist asset and attraction.”

Montréal’s Red-Light District

During Montréal’s Sin City era, hundreds of brothels set up shop in the Red-Light District whose central area was bordered by René-Lévesque Boulevard to the south, Sherbrooke Street to the north, Bleury Street to the west, and Saint Denis Street to the east. Its epicentre was the intersection of Saint Laurent Boulevard – still known today by Montréalers as The Main (or “La Main” in French) – and Saint Catherine Street which was dubbed “St. Kits” by Montreal Herald and later Montreal Gazette nightlife and crime reporter Al Palmer in his 1950 bestselling pocketbook Montreal Confidential (Véhicule Press).

“The Main and ‘St. Kits’ are the iconic crossroads of Montréal where you could lose your watch on one side of the street and spot a gentleman in a trench coat selling your watch across the street,” says legendary Montréal burlesque performer Velma Candyass, a.k.a. Velma Cabriole who is also a historic Red-Light District tour guide. “There were brothels since the 1800s, but as grifters, criminals and drugs flowed in, it became more dangerous to be a sex worker in the Red-Light District. It was definitely gritty, but remember the very rich brothels were also pretty amazing.”

Montréal’s Red-Light District was so notorious that Mae West wrote and starred in her smash hit play Sex which premiered on Broadway in 1926. The play chronicles fictional Montréal prostitute Margy LaMont who worked in a brothel on “Caidoux Street” which was actually real-life Cadieux Street in the Red-Light District. On April 19, 1927, the NYPD rounded up the cast and charged Mae West with obscenity. West served eight days in jail while the City of Montréal quickly changed the name of Cadieux Street to De Bullion.

Montréal’s most notorious real-life madam was Anna Labelle – alias Mme Émile Beauchamp – who in the 1930s would arrive at the courthouse in furs and a Cadillac. Says Cabriole, “She was a sex worker herself and owned three brothels by the time she was 19-years-old. She was a tough girl and quite the business lady who soon owned up to 12 brothels.”

Cabriole says Montréal also has a strong history of burlesque. “We had a number of theatres that played a role in the vaudeville and burlesque circuit, such as the Gayety Theatre. American burlesque stars got top billing while Canadians usually got lower billing. Lily St. Cyr started off as a chorus line dancing girl who worked her way up to become a superstar. It was in Montréal that she really made her mark.”

In the 1998 NFB documentary Showgirls about Montréal’s Black jazz scene during that era, Montréaler Tina Baines Brereton explains how she joined Canada’s first all-Black, all-Canadian chorus line at the Café St-Michel at age 15 in 1942.

Brereton said showgirls were also hired to sing and dance at stag parties: “We’d put on five costumes and take off four,” Brereton told me. “We didn’t strip. They had white girls for that. They couldn’t dance as well as us, so they took their clothes off.”

Uptown versus downtown

Montréal’s nightclub scene was divided between three areas:

The East End clubs and theatres were centred around The Main; uptown clubs such as Chez Paree and the El Morocco were located around Saint Catherine Street; and the downtown clubs were located around Rue Saint Antoine, such as the Café St. Michel, Rockhead’s Paradise – which Louis Armstrong frequented after performing at the Montréal Forum or uptown clubs, and where a young Ella Fitzgerald made her Montréal début in 1943 – as well as the Alberta Lounge where Montréaler Oscar Peterson was discovered by American jazz impresario Norman Granz in 1949 before becoming a global jazz icon.  

Pianist Oliver Jones, a protégé of Oscar Peterson, was just 10-years-old when he first performed at the Café St-Michel in 1944. “It was across the street from Rockhead’s Paradise which was the first Black-owned club in all of Canada,” Mr. Jones told me. “The St-Michel was a little rougher. Rufus Rockhead never let anything get out of hand although there was always pressure from authorities to close him down. But I remember playing in the St-Michel and saw a lot of what I wasn’t supposed to see – girly girls and strippers. But the people there, there was always someone looking out for me.”

Vice, crime and morality

Montréal’s Sin City reputation was foundational for the cosmopolitan and cultural metropolis that exists today, a theme explored in the 2013 Centre d’histoire de Montréal exhibition Scandal! Vice, Crime, and Morality in Montréal, 1940-1960.

The exhibition’s companion guide points out Montréal’s glamourous nightlife existed “in symbiosis” with the illicit activities of clandestine Montréal:

“Hundreds of brothels operated openly, a few yards away from the best-known nightclubs. Gambling dens and bookmaking counters proliferated downtown and spread to the four corners of the city, enriching gangs who were also involved in heroin trafficking.”

When gambling kingpin Harry Davis was shot dead in broad daylight in downtown Montréal in 1946, “in a scenario that seemed straight out of 1920s Chicago, an incorruptible young lawyer, Pacifique Plante, was appointed to head the morality squad. However, his energetic anti-vice activities soon caused him to be fired for excessive zeal.”

A call for reform

When the Caron Inquiry (1950-1953) investigated “commercialized vice” as well as police officers and municipal authorities accused of being corrupted by organized crime, the sensational revelations enabled young reformist politician Jean Drapeau to become elected mayor in 1954 to clean up the city.

The Red-Light District’s fate was sealed by the advent of television and the arrival of new and more mainstream cultural institutions such as Place des Arts (1963) which in turn drew more visitors and commercial activity, such as the inaugural Festival International de Jazz de Montréal in 1980, followed by the area’s rebranding as a cultural district in 2003. Today, the Quartier des Spectacles is the heart of Montréal’s arts and entertainment district and home to cultural festivals year-round.

Erasing the past

Few monuments to Montréal’s Sin City era remain, a time when Frank Sinatra headlined Chez Paree on Stanley Street during a residency there in 1953. In the end, glamourous nightclubs and floor shows were replaced by burlesque shows, then strip clubs, as jazz lost ground to Rock and Roll. By 1960, even the iconic Chez Parée nightclub was transformed into a strip club.

“By the 1980s strip clubs on the Island of Montréal were huge,” says former stripper, legendary Montreal Mirror sex columnist and burlesque performer Sasha Von Bon Bon, a.k.a. Alex Tigchelaar, whose Concordia University PhD thesis examines Montréal’s historic Red-Light District, tourism and sex work in the city.

“I’ve documented about 50 strip clubs on the Island of Montréal in 1983. But there has been a shift in the way people receive that entertainment. The Internet has changed the face of sex work and there are very few strip clubs in Montréal today. Major strip clubs like Chez Paree, Wanda’s, Cabaret Les Amazones and Café Cléopâtre have survived.”

Tigchelaar is referenced in the McGill University study Banishment through Branding: From Montréal’s Red Light District to Quartier des Spectacles. Published in the Swiss scholarly journal MDPI in September 2022, the study explores how the Red-Light District was rebranded the Quartier des Spectacles with a wink to its past. Says Tigchelaar, “Montréal understands that its history is inextricably linked to the sex trade and has profited off the mystique of sexuality.”

Queen of The Main

The iconic Café Cléopâtre strip club on Saint Laurent Boulevard is affectionately called “The Queen of The Main” and is the last remaining hold-out from Montréal’s Red-Light District. Café Cléopâtre opened its doors in 1976 and in 2011 won a two-year battle against the City of Montréal which wanted to expropriate the building which has been a show bar since the 1890s. Today, Cleo’s strippers ply their trade on the ground floor while the second-floor show bar hosts drag performances, fetish parties, and burlesque and comedy shows.

“There is entertainment for everybody on both floors,” says Velma Cabriole who has been producing her Candyass Cabaret burlesque show at Café Cléopâtre for more than a decade. “You can feel it in the building, the establishment reflects another era and the ephemeral history of The Main. Cleo’s is an important part of our history and heritage.”

While Montréal’s fabled Sin City era is long gone, the city still holds the power to seduce visitors. As global drag icon RuPaul told Montréal cultural newsweekly HOUR magazine in 2005, “Montréal to Americans is sex city. It’s such a sensual place.”

And still very much in Montréal’s DNA.