ONCE UPON A TIME · 02
Our address changed in 2019 and nobody moved. The number on the door stayed the same. The name after it did not.
The first piece in this series stayed inside one building: Playground, Groove Society and Parking, three clubs that ran one after another at 1288–1296 Atateken for about two decades. Before the series goes any further up the street, there is something to settle about the address itself.
For almost every night this series describes, none of it happened on Atateken. It happened on Amherst. This is the story of the street the whole series is set on, and of the word that replaced the one it used to carry.
It had a French name first
Before it was Amherst, it was rue Saint-Jean-Baptiste. The Commission de toponymie du Québec still carries that as the street's former name. By the end of the nineteenth century the street had been extended to run from Notre-Dame all the way up to Rachel.
So 2019 was not the first time this street changed its name. It was the first time it changed back toward the people who were here before either name.
The general
Jeffery Amherst was born on 29 January 1717 at Riverhead, near Sevenoaks in Kent, and died on 3 August 1797 in the same parish — in a house he had named Montreal.
He earned the house. As commander-in-chief of British forces in North America he closed on this city in 1760 from three directions at once: James Murray up the St Lawrence from Québec, William Haviland from Crown Point, and Amherst himself down the St Lawrence from Lake Ontario. He landed at Lachine on 6 September. Montréal capitulated on 8 September 1760. He refused the French garrison the honours of war, citing "atrocities committed by their Indian allies."
I said I was come to take Canada and I did not intend to take anything less.
He left America in November 1763 and never returned. He died a field marshal.
The letters
Four documents do the work in this story, and the order they were written in matters more than any single line in them.
24 June 1763, Fort Pitt. Two Delaware emissaries had come to the fort the day before and asked to talk. William Trent — trader, land speculator, militia captain — wrote in his journal what the garrison sent them away with:
we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.
7 July 1763. Two weeks later, and as far as anyone can establish with no knowledge of what had already happened at Fort Pitt, Amherst wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet:
Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.
13 July 1763. Bouquet replied, in a postscript, that he would try to inoculate them by means of blankets.
16 July 1763. Amherst answered, also in a postscript, in the hand below.
You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect, but England is at too great a Distance to think of that at present.
26 July 1763. Bouquet, back to Amherst: "all your Directions will be observed."
What the letters prove, and what they don't
This is the part most retellings flatten, so it is worth being exact.
They prove intent. In his own hand, the commander-in-chief of British North America proposed spreading smallpox among people he called an execrable race, approved a subordinate's plan to do it with blankets, and regretted only that hunting them with dogs was impractical at that distance.
They do not prove he ordered Fort Pitt. Fort Pitt came first, by a fortnight. The documentary trail points at Trent and the officers on the ground, not at a instruction from headquarters. And whether the blankets infected anyone is genuinely disputed: Philip Ranlet argues there is no evidence the scheme worked, and smallpox spreads between people far more readily than it survives on cloth. Elizabeth Fenn, whose 2000 article in the Journal of American History is the standard treatment, is careful about causation and unambiguous about intent. Smallpox did move through the Ohio Valley nations in 1763 and 1764. Nobody has established that these blankets are why.
The paper trail is narrower than the legend, and in one specific way it is worse: the legend has a single villain. The documents show two men arriving at the same idea independently, within two weeks, and finding it unremarkable enough to put in a postscript.
The first attempt to rename it — 1964
Here is a detail that almost never comes up. From January to November 1964, this street and avenue du Parc-La Fontaine, between Saint-Antoine and Rachel, both carried the name Christophe-Colomb. Eleven months later it was Amherst again.
It is in the City of Montréal's own toponymic record — filed, quietly, under avenue Christophe-Colomb.
The committee
In 2017, then-mayor Denis Coderre announced that the street would be renamed. Announcing is the easy half. In the fall of 2018 the city formed an Indigenous toponymy committee to actually find the name — representatives of several nations, chaired by Kanerahtenhá:wi Hilda Nicholas, director of the Tsi Ronterihwanónhnha ne Kanien'kéha Language and Cultural Center at Kanehsatà:ke, who has spent her career on the work of keeping that language spoken.
They met roughly six times, and the criteria they set are the most interesting thing in the whole business. The name had to be inclusive. It had to be pronounceable by people who would be saying it every day without speaking the language it came from. And it could not belong to any single nation — which quietly ruled out honouring a particular person or community, which is to say it ruled out the normal way streets get named.
It had to reflect the people in the street. This name is a peaceful name, and does not reference a particular group.
The committee did not stop at one street, either. It set out to build a database of Indigenous place names for the city to draw on the next time this question comes up.
Atateken
The word they chose is Kanien'kéha, the Mohawk language. The City of Montréal's toponymic record glosses it as « hommes et femmes » or « frères et sœurs » — men and women, or brothers and sisters — and adds that it "carries within it the notion of relationships and of equality between people." The city publishes a recording of how to say it; Radio-Canada rendered it for francophone readers as a-da-dé-gan.
That gloss is easy to skim past, and it is the whole decision. Every other name in this story belongs to somebody — Amherst, Gage, Christophe-Colomb, Saint-Jean-Baptiste. A street is almost always named for a person, and naming one is how a city says out loud who it thinks is worth remembering. This street is named for a relationship instead: for what the people on it are to each other. That is a different kind of thing to put on a sign, and it is the part of this that has aged best.
21 June 2019
On National Indigenous Peoples Day, mayor Valérie Plante unveiled the name at parc Miville-Couture, at the corner of Amherst and René-Lévesque. Grand Chief Serge Simon of Kanehsatà:ke, Grand Chief Joseph Norton of Kahnawà:ke and Ghislain Picard of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador spoke.
I think the word Atateken is perfect because it brings together the fundamental values of Montreal: reconciliation, inclusion and sharing.
Ghislain Picard: "Today we are removing General Jeffery Amherst from our past — we're erasing that part of our past." Serge Simon, more measured: "This may be symbolic but I think it has more meaning that people will give it."
The city's official designation date is 20 August 2019. The signs themselves came down and went up on a Monday morning that autumn — 21 October 2019. The 14 bus took the new name with the street.
What changed, and what didn't
Civic numbers didn't move. Our two doors are 1288 and 1290 exactly as they were. Every flyer in episode 01 with an Amherst address on it still points at this building; only the second half of the line is out of date. If you are holding a Parking flyer from 2006, the number on it is still good.
It didn't stop at one street
On 16 June 2025, rue du Square-Amherst became place du Pain-et-des-Roses, after the 1995 women's march — about 47 addresses, and the last Amherst in Montréal's street names.
Not the last of the men who took the city, though. Chemin Gage, also in Ville-Marie, is still named for Thomas Gage, the general who served under Amherst at the 1760 capitulation and then governed Montréal for three years. And the city has so far declined to rename avenue Christophe-Colomb — the name this street itself wore for eleven months in 1964.
Why we care, from a shop full of turntables
We spend all day reading names off labels and arguing about which pressing is the real one. A street sign is a label too: a small piece of print that tells you what a place is called and, if you look at it long enough, who got to decide.
Episode 01 ended on the observation that anyone who ever hit six a.m. on one of these dancefloors — gay, straight, anglo, franco, and every permutation the Village welcomed — already knew what the new name means. That still seems right to us.
The clubs were already gone when it changed. The building wasn't. Neither was the street.
A note on what we didn't print
The year the street got Amherst's name. Several sources give 1817. The Commission de toponymie du Québec's own record dates the designation only as « avant 1914 », and we couldn't find the original decision, so we haven't printed a year we can't stand behind.
The date at Fort Pitt. Peter d'Errico's widely-cited document page gives William Trent's journal entry as 24 May 1763. The scholarship, Fenn included, puts the parley and the blankets at 24 June 1763, the day after the two Delaware emissaries asked for a meeting. We've used June and flagged the discrepancy rather than quietly picking one.
The two emissaries. They have names in the record. We could not confirm them from sources we could actually read, so we've left them out rather than guess at them.
The epidemic. We have not written that the blankets caused one, because that isn't established.
The translation. The city gives both "men and women" and "brothers and sisters" for Atateken. Press coverage mostly used the second. Both come from the same municipal record, so we've printed both.
Sources: Ville de Montréal, Répertoire toponymique (rue Atateken, avenue Christophe-Colomb, place du Pain-et-des-Roses); Commission de toponymie du Québec; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, “AMHERST, JEFFERY”; Peter d'Errico, “Jeffrey Amherst and Smallpox Blankets,” University of Massachusetts; Elizabeth A. Fenn, “Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst,” Journal of American History, 2000; Philip Ranlet on the same episode; Radio-Canada, Espaces autochtones; Global News; HuffPost Québec; La Presse.
Part of Once Upon a Time, our series on Montréal nightlife. Next: Stereo's sound system — nineteen thousand watts, and a deliberate refusal to put a limiter on any of it. Know something about this street that we don't? Tell us about it.
