Denis Lepine remembers his 50th birthday in 2000 like it was yesterday. He had a party at a popular restaurant in the Gay Village, le Club Sandwich near the corner of Champlain and Ste-Catherine Street.
“It was excellent. And it was fun with all the drag queens and such,” he told Global News. “Very very funny.”
Last week, Concordia professor Matt Soar hung the metal-and-glass sign of le Club Sandwich on a second-floor wall of the university’s communications school, a hallway reminder to students and faculty of a quirky piece of Montreal’s history.
“I think signs are a hugely important part of Montreal’s heritage, and they’re often overlooked. We see them go up, we see them disappear, but we often don’t pay attention to them,” said Matt Soar.
Soar is a Concordia University communications professor who is behind the Montreal Signs Project, which seeks to preserve city signs of a certain artistic and cultural value.
Le Club Sandwich was a popular comfort-food restaurant that was in the Complexe Bourbon, which for a time was considered the centre of the Gay Village during its heyday.
But the complex fell on hard times, and by 2014, le Club Sandwich had closed for good. The whole complex was demolished earlier this year.
“A place like Montreal is not just made out of a heritage of green spaces, triplexes and church steeples,” said Dinu Bumbaru of Heritage Montreal. “It’s also made out of what made a commercial street like Ste-Catherine a living place.”
Soar currently has about 20 signs in the project’s collection.
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