The Keystone of the Neighbourhood: Gender, Collective Action, and Working-Class Heritage Strategy in Pointe-Saint-Charles, Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1973, in the deindustrializing, impoverished Montreal neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles, neighbourhood activists—normally preoccupied with jobs, housing, and food security—made the fate of an 82-year-old fire station their top concern. Pointe-Saint-Charles was the proposed site for a new highway construction: le Projet Georges-Vanier. If built, this artery would have sliced the working-class community in half, destroying the fire station as well as a much-loved public park, and displacing about 140 families in turn. In their organized resistance to this plan, Comité Action-Boulevard recognized and mobilized around the fire station as the keystone without which the plan could not proceed. This article situates an important but under-studied moment in Montreal’s preservation struggles in the pivotal early 1970s. It proposes this story as a powerful illustration of the idea that heritage is not an object but rather a social, cultural, and political process, and considers the fragility of collective memory about how this building was saved. Part of that fragility arises from a conundrum: the women who were largely behind this action worked collectively under organizations rather than under their own names, as individuals. The action to save the fire station coincided with a period in the neighbourhood’s history in which women were gradually emerging from restrictive gender norms. In searching for the complete story of how the community of Pointe-Saint-Charles saved their fire station, I have encountered a partial, but compelling story of how the women of an impoverished neighbourhood took power over their own built environment, activating what Iain J.M. Robertson calls a “heritage from below.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".