Richler's Mile End: Moe's Cigar Store and the Bagel Ovens

The second half of the Plateau and Mile End walk crosses into the Mile End and finishes at a wood-fired bagel oven. Along the way it passes a lunch counter that Mordecai Richler turned into fiction, and two bakeries that still work the way their founders set them up. What makes these few blocks rewarding is that the literary map and the food map turn out to be the same map.

The neighborhood before it was a scene

Mile End today is a byword for creative Montreal. It was once a town of its own: Saint-Louis-du-Mile-End was established in 1878, became a city in 1895 and merged with Montreal at the start of 1910. It also sits at the northern reach of the immigrants' corridor that ran up Boulevard Saint-Laurent, where Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews dominated the boulevard until the 1950s. To see how it fits the whole island, read how to read Montreal along the Main.

Wilensky's: Moe's Cigar Store

The walk's literary stop is a corner shop at Fairmount and Clark. Harry Wilensky, who came from Russia around 1900, ran a barbershop and variety store; his son Moe suggested adding sandwiches, and Wilensky's Light Lunch was founded in 1932. It began at 119 Fairmount Ouest, moved to the corner of Fairmount and Saint-Urbain in 1935, and has been on this corner since 1952. The Wilensky Special is fried salami and bologna with mustard on a pressed roll, and the mustard is not optional.

Mordecai Richler was a regular customer in his youth, and he fictionalised the counter as Moe's Cigar Store in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; scenes of the film were shot on the premises. Moe's widow, Ruth Wilensky, ran the place after he died in 1984 and worked the counter until she was 93. Mind the chronology: the corner you see dates from 1952. From 1935 until then the counter stood a little to the west, at Saint-Urbain.

The bagel: the archaeology

The other two institutions are bagel bakeries, and they are where the neighborhood's older economy survives as working businesses. Fairmount Bagel, one short block west of Wilensky's, traces itself to 1919, when Isadore Shlafman started the Montreal Bagel Bakery in a lane off Saint-Laurent; it calls itself the first bagel bakery in Montreal. In 1949 the family moved to Fairmount, turned a cottage into the bakery and lived upstairs. His son Jack joined the business, and his grandchildren run it today.

The walk ends at St-Viateur Bagel, founded in 1957 by Myer Lewkowicz, who had arrived in Canada in 1953 with his wife Emma. The shop quotes his own line: "At Buchenwald, all I dreamt of was a piece of bread." His original partner, Hyman Seligman, came from that same Montreal Bagel Bakery on Saint-Laurent. Joe Morena started at the shop at 15 and became a joint owner in 1974; he and his sons run it now. Both bakeries still roll by hand, simmer the bagels in honey water and bake them in wood-burning ovens, and Montrealers still argue about which is better.

The full food story, the deli versus the bagel and what each one preserves, is the subject of our companion Montreal deli and bagel food map. And the first half of the same walk, from Carré Saint-Louis to Leonard Cohen's door, is the subject of our Plateau walk companion.

Why the institutions matter

Richler's Mile End was never large, and most of the world he wrote about has moved on. What stayed are a lunch counter, two ovens and a few blocks of brick plexes, and the point of the walk is to stand you inside that footprint rather than a generalized "Jewish Montreal." You finish where the smell of the oven is, having read a whole vanished world out of the few institutions stubborn enough to outlast it.

Compare it with the other routes in the best walking tours in Montreal overview.