Leo’s big party

By P.A. Sévigny

As he is now known as the last Irishman left holding his own in Montreal’s fabled Griffintown, Montreal architect Juliette Patterson believes Leo Leonard deserved a party. As the crowd began to gather in front of the Griffintown Café’s well-stocked bar, several city heritage activists and various urban planning professionals said they all joined Patterson’s new Griffintown Horse Palace Foundation because they want to help her raise the money to create the city’s newest museum out of Leonard’s famous Horse Palace.

“We want to restore the stables and turn the whole site into the same kind of interactive museum as New York City’s Tenement Museum,” said Patterson. While confident her foundation can raise the kind of money required to purchase, renovate and restore the property, she is also determined to maintain the 147-year-old stable’s daily operations as the inspiration behind the museum’s ongoing narrative about the district’s storied heritage and its own local history. “Instead of paving over what’s left of Montreal’s heritage sites to put up more condos,” said Patterson, “city planners should use the city’s history and heritage as a framework for mixed-use developments like the ones they built in Old Montreal and (more recently) in and around the Darling Foundry complex.”

While friends and supporters were already lined up at the bar, octogenarian Leo Leonard, the stable’s present owner, was having a quiet beer with friends at the back of the café.

“I love the horses,” he said,”but I’m getting too old… my legs aren’t what they used to be and I keep falling down all the time.”

In order to help raise funds for her foundation, Leonard offered up bits and pieces of assorted riding tack including a western saddle, a few bridle bits and a rider’s helmet for Patterson’s silent auction. Other items included valuable bottles of old, very old scotch, a pair of VIA rail tickets, a feng-shui consultation and assorted tea sets. A wide assortment of professional photographs of horses kept in Leo’s stables got a lot of attention as people began to make their bids for the framed prints. Phyllis Lambert, the director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and known to be a major influence among the city’s professional architects, briefly dropped by and bid on a stunning colour print of an old and dappled white Percheron [workhorse] standing by a massive tractor-trailer truck and its flaming red cargo container.

“It’s good to know I share something with Phyllis Lambert,” said Concordia Arts student April DeFalco, who finally bought the print. “We both like the print and I’m glad we both feel something for that horse.”

As one of the city’s major urban planning activists, David Hanna also scored when he finally beat everybody else out for a sepia print of Leo’s stable and its long line of horse stalls lit by nothing more than ambient light.

As opposed to the city’s previous plans for the Griffintown development project, which many described as being vaguely reminiscent of “Warsaw, 1952”— the tall and sterile concrete towers which still define cities built by communist governments in Eastern Europe after World War II, many of Patterson’s supporters believe the new foundation could provide city planners with the framework for a new (and less expensive) development plan for Griffintown. Others, including local resident Judith Bauer, hope the efforts to save Leo Leonard’s Horse Palace will finally convince the city it should recognize the value of its own past and its own heritage before it finally gets around to making big decisions about the city’s future.