Erik Slutsky is a longtime Mile End native and veteran visual artist, who we met through his hosting of the New Penelope Facebook group – a group that since 2013 has become a lively place for nostalgia about the 1960s music scene, centered around the legendary venue. He kept his copies of old New Penelope Café newsletters, concert posters and many clippings about the wider music scene of the time,

BLUE METROPOLIS: MONTREAL 1975 / 2015, A different imaginary A round-table discussion organized by Arcmtl for its Montreal Underground Origins project, held on April 24, 2015 at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal. The discussion explored two Montreals: the city that local writers wrote about in 1975 and the entirely new city in 2015. Featuring the authors Endre Farkas, Anna Leventhal and Ralph Elawani and moderated by Bryan

Live from Earth: Prince Arthur, 1970, Montreal’s Haight-Ashbury ? Prince Arthur St. east of St-Laurent heading towards Carré Saint-Louis was one of the most popular parts of town for the counter-culture crowd of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even today’s Fodor’s travel guide to Montreal refers to this past : In the 1960s rue Prince-Arthur was the Haight-Ashbury of Montréal, full of shops selling leather vests, tie-dyed T-shirts, recycled

Before the mid-1960s era of rapid change, the early 1960s in Montreal were in many ways a late phase in an era that began with WWII. Nightlife remained rife with questionable characters to this day, but the experiences related here were from a whole other world. This anonymous interview with a lifelong Montrealer was first published in Montreal’s Fish Piss Magazine, Vol. 2 No. 1, 2000. R: So this was