MONTREAL—It must have seemed at one point like a ridiculous notion: a Berlin magazine devoting an entire 123-page issue to one street 6,000 kilometres away in Montreal.

But Flaneur, a startup literary magazine, went ahead with it, dispatched a team to scour a 1.9-kilometre strip known as Rue Bernard, discover its habits, haunts and its humanity and take from it inspiration for a collection of stories, comics, poems, essays, profiles and photos.

Making money from the slick finished product, which was released last week, may be another matter. But it has mined a few nuggets of truth about life in Canada’s second-largest city.

Bernard stretches from the wealthy francophone enclave of Outremont in the west (where it is officially an “avenue”) to the back alleys that hum with black-hatted Hasidic Jews. It ends up in the east as a plain old rue, or street, in the rundown or reclaimed industrial area known as the Mile End. This in the neighbourhood put on the map a few years ago as Arcade Fire’s home base.

Rue Bernard has existed on city maps since 1912 in a city historically divided by Saint Laurent Bl., the city’s main north-south artery, between east-end francophones and western beachheads of Westmount and Cote-des-Neiges where English rules.

The magazine’s third issue (the first two gave the treatment to the German cities of Berlin and Leipzig) makes a case that Bernard could now be the artery best defining modern Montreal — one that speaks French and English, that new immigrants and old-stock Quebecers call home and where artists and shift workers live side-by-side. It’s a celebration of the bustling masses of minorities busily going about their lives.

“I think I can see the Canadian social contract from up here,” Andrew Zadel, a native Montrealer, writes from his third-floor apartment, after years spent in war zones and refugee camps. “Right there, where the working-class immigrant holds the door for the tattooed hipster, right where the Hasidic Jew walks serenely by the Royal Phoenix, known for its deep-fried Mars bars and frenetic queer dance parties.”

The inspiration for the Montreal project came simply enough. Flaneur’s editor-in-chief Ricarda Messner was urged to consider the city. Last October, she took a detour during a trip to the United States, checked out a Bixi bicycle rental and set off on her search.

“I put on my helmet and I drove around for eight hours without ever having been to Canada, without any kind of research beforehand and just drove based on my intuition,” she told the website cultmontreal.com. “I drove down Bernard and it was such a powerful street because after Parc (Avenue) it changes completely. It was just my gut telling me it was the right street. Then I came back to Berlin and we started doing the research.”

A team from the magazine arrived in Montreal in late winter and basically moved into the street. They spent two months interviewing residents, business owners and the local fixtures that would become the source material or plant the seed of inspiration.

The anchor tenants — of the street, as well as the issue — are Yves, the old barber of Outremont, whose spacious shop is adorned with the celebrity covers of Paris Match and sees himself as much a therapist as a cutter of hair. At the other end there is Tammy the flower lady, whose greenery spills out onto the street and hangs from the balcony of an apartment where she has raised her 14 children while running various businesses over the last quarter century.

Yves grumbles about the stinginess of his rich customers and the generosity of the poor. Tammy throws in an extra stem for her customers as a thank you to the donations that helped rebuild her business after it caught fire last year. They are recurring characters who pop up every dozen or so pages.

“I bring Yves the barber flowers from Tammy the flower lady,” writes Flaneur editor Grashina Gabelmann in a segment, written as if from the subconscious, titled Fragments. “I think they should fall in love. He would cut hair during the day while she sold flowers, then they would meet in the evening to exchange stories of all the people’s lives they had touched that day. They would listen to each other until they fell asleep.”

Along with the poems, historical essays, profiles and photos there is a 15-page comic book serving as a double homage both to Montreal’s graphic novel scene, centred around Rue Bernard’s Drawn & Quarterly bookstore, and the ladies’ Roller Derby league whose teams play at an arena at the east end of the strip.

Flaneur has demonstrated there is literary merit in the simple exercise of drilling down into the personalities lurking in the shop windows and alleys of a single street. But the magazine’s aim is to find something universal in the various storefronts and stoop dwellers.

In Montreal, editor Fabian Saul finds a place that is at once a “no man’s land” and an “every man’s land” — where the francophone Outremont neighbourhood is separated by one main road from a Mile End settled by immigrant textile workers who fled when business flopped. The students and artists have taken their place more recently.

But so too have the orthodox Jews, whose insular community and large broods attract gawkers and complaints, despite being just a generation or two removed from the large-looming Catholic church in Quebec and the clergy’s insistence on procreation.

Tying those together is the tale of “two extravagantly dressed-up boys” the magazine’s photographer discovers in the street, which turns into the tale of Aaron and Vincent, a young gay couple from the unlikeliest of origins.

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Vincent is a student from the suburbs. Aaron, a recovering addict, has been shunned by his Hasidic family.

“On Sabbath we sometimes cruise through the Jewish community on our wheels,” Vincent says. “Aaron likes to yell in Yiddish and give everyone the finger.”

Quebec en scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. awoods@thestar.ca

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