Dubious copyright historical trivia quiz challenge!

Can you guess what the Canadian Illustrated News has illustrated on the front page of its May 27, 1871 issue?

« Unearthing of the Dead to Make a Way for the Living. A sketch on Cemetery Street. »

The first to guess the correct answer will win a fabulous prize! Get ON it!

EDIT: For bonus points, what is the current name of Cemetery Street?

DOUBLE EDIT: There is a winner! Details after the break!

Living it up, SHAUG TOWN style

The area between Atwater, Sherbrooke, Guy, and René-Lévesque has a couple names going for it.  Shaughnessy Village.  Lincoln-Tupper.  The West End.  None of these names have much currency in conversation, though, and they seem to carry their own connotations.  Shaghnessy Village implies–principally–the area south of Ste-Catherine.  Lincoln-Tupper would logically be bounded by its eponymous streets.  The “West End” tag is logical enough, but just as likely to refers to NDG, and is perilously similar to “West Island”.  Though comprising one of the most densely-populated census tracts in Quebec, the neighborhood doesn’t have a definitive label.

Spacing Montreal recently wrote about the difficulty in determining what constitutes a neighborhood.  The post linked to Le Coeur de Sainte-Marie, a blog that investigates the names and boundaries that have helped define the Centre-Sud’s identity.  If nothing else, the resulting discussion underscored the difficulty in assigning a name to a location. Places as complex as neighborhoods, where personal experience and subjective opinion matter as much as simple geography, are not easy to label.  In peeling back the layers of history, the fascinating legacy of wards, parishes, old municipalities, and colloquial nicknames on the area’s toponymy becomes apparent.  Can any neighborhood–let alone the subject of this post–be objectively called anything?

Yes.  I’m going to resolve the ambiguity and dub the area “Shaug Town”. Much better ring to it.

Eyyy!

Having lived for two years on Mackay, a stone’s throw from the Shaug Town‘s eastern border, I’d like to think I know a bit about the dirty streets of downtown’s western annex.  Though not the city’s prettiest neighborhood–or even close– its unexpected vibrancy and wild contrasts mitigate any lack of good looks.