Rienzi Athel Mainwaring House – Mile End Memories

Mr. Mainwaring’s Residence, Park Avenue. Extract from a prospectus, circa 1892. BAnQ P488,S1,P1

On the site of the building at 5253 Park Avenue once stood the first house built on that avenue north of Mont-Royal Avenue. Its fate is quite representative of the transformations that Mile End was to face during the 20th century. In 1893, a Toronto real estate agent named Rienzi Athel Mainwaring built the luxurious house. It was a way for him to promote his real estate development project named Montreal Annex, an upper-middle-class suburb with Park Avenue as its showcase street. However, the construction of apartment buildings starting in the 1910s, the rezoning of Park Avenue in 1913 to allow commercial uses, and the street’s increasing traffic levels as it turned into a major artery were all factors making the Annex less attractive for the upper crust, who preferred living in the adjacent suburb of Outremont. During the 20th century, the Mainwaring residence changed hands many times before ending up subdivided into small apartments. Finally, in spring 1973, having become a particularly insalubrious rooming house, it suffered the same fate as many Mile End properties during the 1970s: it was destroyed by a fire, probably due to arson.

A new office building constructed on the same site housed from 1982 the Mile End multi-ethnic public library. Its name reestablished the place name “Mile End”, which had almost completely faded from the memory of Montrealers over the course of the twentieth century. What had been a run-down area, fit only for elimination in the eyes of urban renewal advocates, was starting to be perceived in a new light.

Back in 1891, a Toronto real estate agent, Rienzi Athel Mainwaring, moved to Montreal to launch a prestigious real estate project called Montreal Annex. With associate Clarence J. McCuaig, he dreamt of transforming what is now eastern Outremont and western Mile End into one of Montreal’s most prestigious suburbs. Its central artery was to be the future Park Avenue, reserved exclusively for upper-class homes; all commercial activity was prohibited.

To promote the project, Mainwaring had himself built a mansion on Park Avenue, in 1893. It was a kind of model home, the only one of its kind in what was at the time a completely rural landscape; it set the tone for the development envisioned by the Annex promoters. In many ways its story is symbolic of the transformations of Mile End during the following decades. For the dreams of McCuaig and Mainwaring were challenged by a series of obstacles: Montreal’s real estate market was paralyzed by a recession that lasted until the end of the decade; the arrival of the electric tramway was delayed for several years, and “prestigious” Park Avenue remained a poorly maintained gravel road until the turn of the 20th century.

Mainwaring probably never lived there – at best, he lent it on Sundays to the new neighbourhood’s budding Methodist congregation and housed his gardener there – before disposing of it in July 1893. In 1895, a creditor had the house seized by the sheriff. When the dust finally settled in 1898, the Bagg family, which had sold McCuaig and Mainwaring a portion of the land for the new neighbourhood and held a mortgage on the property, gained possession of the house and rented it out. It was sold in 1905 to a prosperous French-Canadian lawyer who lived there until 1914. Thanks to the real estate boom of the early 20th century, Park Avenue seemed to finally come to life and the construction of other luxurious homes, such as that of architect Joseph Perrault, located directly across the street in 1904, and that of pharmacist Hercule Guerin (1908), its neighbour immediately to the north, meant that by then the Mainwaring house was at the heart of a chic part of Park Avenue.

However, in 1910, annexation of the town of Saint-Louis by Montreal brought irreversible changes. Commercial development was now allowed on Park Avenue and its use as a major traffic artery between downtown and northern Montreal reinforced. The lawyers, doctors and entrepreneurs who had lived there began to move to the more quiet streets of Outremont. The Mainwaring house was sold again in 1918 to merchant J. O. Gareau, owner of the Mount Royal department store. He, in turn, sold it in 1925 and it was subdivided into nine small apartments. In November of that year, architect Jean-Julien Perrault, Joseph’s son, submitted plans to construct an addition which in the following year was built at the rear of the house. Renamed “Castle Inn Apartments”, the property now housed 77 apartments and rooms!

Despite the change in use, the first residence built on Park Avenue remained standing until the night of April 8, 1973, when a tragic fire destroyed the building, causing the death of at least eight people (two others, whose bodies were never found, were considered missing). The subsequent investigation by the coroner and fire commissioner revealed that this tragedy was anything but an accident. Not only was the fire probably the result of arson, but the incompetence of municipal employees, who had closed their eyes to what had become literally a firetrap, was equalled only by the greed of the unscrupulous landlords.

Mainwaring house, the day after the fire of April 8, 1973. Photo: Jean Goupil, La Presse newspaper archives.

The identity of the property owners was hidden behind a front-man. Joseph Longtin was paid $25 by notary Nathan Fish for each document he signed. Questioned by the coroner, Longtin admitted to having recently signed a dozen deeds without any idea as to their contents. The true owners were Leon Berlin and Sydney Spinner. The latter, an undischarged bankrupt, and owing almost a million dollars to his debtors, was not allowed to own property. However, this did not prevent him, by using front-men, from acquiring a dozen Montreal buildings in 1971–1972. During the inquest, Spinner also acknowledged having collected $3,000 just from Castle Inn tenants in February, the month prior to the fire.

A real estate broker, Leon Berlin, had been the owner of Castle Inn for almost 10 years. He had sold it to Spinner – via a front-man – in 1971, but still holding the mortgage on it, he repossessed it one month before the fire. Three days before the tragedy, Berlin purchased an insurance policy for $300,000 on the property. Roméo Brunet, the janitor he had hired, described the condition of Castle Inn when Berlin repossessed it:

Doors to the rooms were off their hinges, the mattresses were torn, furniture was piled up in the corridors, the rear staircases were filled with old mattresses and chairs. […] The stench was terrible […] smells came from accumulated garbage, mouldy carpets. Children came and went through the windows. Many of the apartments inside, when Mr. Berlin took possession, were empty, unrented. Everything was upside down […] Cockroaches crawled out from under the stoves […] under the mattresses. […] Some apartments had no windowpanes.

A tenant, Mary Nadon, gave testimony. She explained she had a rent-free room in exchange for work she did for the janitor. She stated that the janitor and Leon Berlin had asked her to set fire to the building. In tears, she said: “He was having all kinds of trouble with the building. The police were there nearly every night looking for people who were smoking marijuana and hashish and taking pills.” Mary Nadon was unable to complete her testimony: she was immediately interrupted by the prosecutor, who objected that these serious accusations could be harmful to the criminal investigation currently under way. The coroner allowed Leon Berlin to recount his side of the events. He denied having asked Mary Nadon to set fire to the building, although he admitted that he had said, in a moment of anger, he hoped the building would burn, but he added that he had not meant it literally.

On May 24, 1973, coroner Paul-Émile L’Écuyer released a scathing report. He wrote that the fire was “probably” due to arson, but proof could not be established with certainty, despite the fact that it had started in two different places. The coroner also rejected the testimony of Mary Nadon, judging it not very credible due to her many contradictions. The night before her testimony, in custody at Tanguay prison, Mary Nadon had tried to commit suicide by swallowing medication.

Nevertheless, the coroner recommended the firing of Maurice Lessard, head of fire prevention for the City of Montreal. The inquest had demonstrated that the building should have been condemned years before due to the impressive number of safety code violations: the lack of emergency lights, a defective alarm system, emergency exits blocked by piles of garbage, etc. The city building department was blamed almost as harshly: one of its inspectors admitted having gone to the property after several complaints, but did no more than glance at the lobby and nearby corridors. He admitted he was unaware that 21 rooms had no emergency exit. The coroner also denounced insurance fraud that had become systemic. He underlined the fact that the property had been insured “far above its real value”, “without any verification”.

Based not just on this case, but on many others – even more blatantly over-insured – noted during our previous inquests, which demonstrate this is a common practice, we recommend that the brokers or agents who underwrite these policies in exchange for high premiums be subject to prosecution.

While the coroner’s recommendations regarding the municipal employees were ignored, that was not the case for Leon Berlin and Sydney Spinner. The coroner recommended they be charged with criminal negligence – not because they were the cause of the fire or because they had tried to defraud the insurance company, accusations which were the responsibility of the police investigation – but because they had knowingly allowed the building to become a firetrap. Noting that such accusations would be a first in Quebec, Paul-Émile L’Écuyer wrote: “I believe that landlords have a greater responsibility toward their tenants than just collecting rents.”

Although the police investigation did not lead to any other charges, the following July, the Crown accepted the coroner’s recommendations and laid charges of criminal negligence against Berlin and Spinner. However, procedures got bogged down in a long preliminary investigation – delayed several times – until October 1975, at which time Berlin’s lawyers tried to have the accusations quashed on the grounds of the weakness of the evidence, in their view. In early 1977, four years after the fire, the Superior Court dismissed Berlin’s attempt and ordered the trial to go ahead. In the meantime, accusations against Spinner were dropped.

The trial of Leon Berlin finally took place in fall 1977. In his ruling, the judge recognized that the evidence established that tenants did not know what to do with their garbage after the City of Montreal banned incinerators in this kind of building; that the janitor and Leon Berlin knew that, as a result, garbage piled up in the corridor leading to the rear exit of the building, at one of the two places where the fire started, completely blocking the exit. But he added that the Crown had not proved beyond the shadow of a doubt the Berlin had demonstrated “wanton or reckless disregard for the lives or safety of others.” Even if the accumulation of trash contravened municipal bylaws, it could not be determined by whom and how the fire had been set, and “the accused had demonstrated his intention to return the property to a better condition.” Leon Berlin was acquitted on October 25, 1977.

The nondescript building which now stands on the site of the Mainwaring house was erected in the early 1980s (as an office building, later converted to residential use). Beginning in 1982, its ground floor housed the new Mile End multi-ethnic library. In 1993 the library moved into the former Church of the Ascension, a bit further north on the avenue. The decision to name the library “Mile End” – the municipal electoral district had also been named Mile End the year before – contributed to the renaissance of a neighbourhood and a name which at the time was fading away in the memory of Montrealers.