Café des Artistes / Le Crash (Montreal)

1. Overview

The Café des Artistes belongs to the constellation of postwar Montreal venues where people would dine, socialize and extend the evening after performances. In the entertainment trade press (Radiomonde, Télémonde, later Télé-radiomonde), the establishment appears as a familiar address: descriptions evoke receptions, meetings, a constant flow of artists and radio-television workers, and its status as a downtown “hub.”

A museum-style reading of the site rests on its programmatic layering: a cultural café at street level and, above it, a nightlife scene driven by nightclubs, including Le Crash, closely associated with the urban modernity of the period.

2. Origins and location (Dorchester / Mackay)

Located at the corner of Dorchester Boulevard West and Mackay Street, the Café des Artistes took root in a downtown area undergoing rapid transformation, in close proximity to media hubs, theatres and hotels. This strategic location encouraged frequent patronage by people working in entertainment and communications. By the late 1950s, the press and specialized columns described it as a “central” venue, frequented by artists, journalists, actors and many Radio-Canada employees, especially when they were not gathering at the bar La Seine. The café—and particularly its terrace, among the earliest of its kind in Montreal— thus became an informal extension of the entertainment milieu, a social space where creators, hosts and radio-television professionals mingled.

Regional press coverage (1958) also documents the establishment as a downtown “artists’ destination,” associated with Hector Tellier and his wife Ghislaine Branchaud, and describes the café as an address already well embedded in popular culture.

3. Ghislaine Branchaud Tellier: a central figure in cultural life

Ghislaine Tellier occupies a fundamental place in the history of the Café des Artistes. Often retrospectively reduced to her role as a spouse, contemporary press accounts and photo captions instead show her as a manager, hostess and organizer—and, according to one explicit mention, as the venue’s head cook. Her presence embodied the café’s “home-like” dimension: a place people returned to, where they were recognized, and where collective events could be organized.

Remarried in 1972 to Jean-Pierre Masson (actor; role of Séraphin in Les Belles Histoires des Pays-d’en-Haut), Ghislaine developed an autonomous business trajectory; press headlines explicitly addressed the sale of the café, implicitly highlighting the social constraints imposed on women entrepreneurs.

4. Openings, exhibitions and visual-arts life

The consulted archives confirm the use of the Café des Artistes as a cultural venue in the broad sense: society pages, receptions, social evenings, “festive premieres,” and the opening of a new room. In this context, it is relevant—and consistent with Montreal practices of the 1950s–1960s—to document the Café as an exhibition space for temporary displays, often outside formal institutions, where walls served as supports and launch evenings took the form of receptions.

5. The “L’Aiglon” room (extension / new space)

In January 1962, Radiomonde published an illustrated page announcing that the Café des Artistes was now equipped with a new room called “L’Aiglon”, described as an extension designed to make the venue more pleasant. The caption explicitly associates this new feature with Ghislaine Tellier (owner) and Jacques Labrecque, in the context of a celebratory evening.

This mention is an important marker: it shows that the Café conceived of itself as an event venue (receptions, gatherings, possibly artistic presentations), and that it invested in internal infrastructure (a new room) to accommodate larger audiences or diversify its uses.

6. Upstairs nightclubs: Le Crash, Chic-Choc and the birth of the modern nightclub in Montreal

The existence of nightclubs on the upper floor of the Café des Artistes belongs to a pivotal moment in the history of Montreal nightlife: the shift from the traditional cabaret to the modern nightclub. Unlike seated performance halls or revue-style cabarets, the nightclub emphasizes dancing, recorded music, sensory immersion and a freer form of sociability, often associated with urban youth, artistic and media circles, and a cosmopolitan modernity.

In this context, the site at 1473 Dorchester Boulevard West adopted a configuration that was typical yet still relatively new in Montreal: a cultural café-restaurant at street level, serving as a daytime and “after-show” meeting point, and nighttime venues upstairs, accessible in the evening and at night. This programmatic layering allowed for continuity between intellectual sociability, culture, celebration and dance within a single building.

The sources make it possible to state with certainty that the nightclubs were not located inside the Café itself, but rather above it. The Café des Artistes thus functioned as the social and symbolic foundation of a more experimental nightlife, of which Le Crash was the most striking example.

Le Crash: an emblematic nightclub — Opening August 1, 1967 / Closure September 1970

Le Crash emerges as the venue most closely associated with the upper floor of the Café des Artistes. Although iconographic documentation remains scarce, its presence is confirmed through press cross-references, indirect mentions and a persistent cultural memory. Le Crash belongs to a generation of clubs that broke with cabaret aesthetics in favor of a more abstract ambiance, driven by music, lighting and dance.

On the Montreal scale, Le Crash forms part of a constellation of nightlife venues that, during the 1960s, helped establish the nightclub as a space of cultural avant-garde, frequented by artists, designers, hosts, media workers and figures of the modern scene.

Le Crash was not a place for the faint-hearted. First, it was immediately recognizable by the half-car mounted on the exterior wall. Then, once inside, one encountered car parts and fragments scattered throughout.

There was another car carcass above the bar; the walls were decorated with flashing tail lights, and the tables consisted of round glass disks supported by steering wheels and columns.

Le Crash featured a metal dance floor and two—yes, two—full strobe lights. If you are unfamiliar with strobe lights, they are powerful flashing lights that give dancers the appearance of actors in a 1920s film. Once again, not for sensitive eyes.

The music was the latest from pop groups— Led Zeppelin, Chicago, and others. And it was loud. The clientele was mainly young, but everyone was welcome; the atmosphere was not cliquish, even if, as in many discos, there was a large number of regulars.

Prices were comparable to those of other discos— $1 for beer, $1.50 for spirits and $1.75 to $2 for mixed drinks.

L’Empereur, Le Chic-Choc and the plurality of uses

Archival sources and mentions associated with the site also refer to several other nightclub names, notably L’Empereur (also by Gilles Archambault) in 1966, the Chic-Choc in 1971 and the Henri Club in 1978. This diversity of names reflects a succession of identities over time, a common practice in Montreal nightlife.

Establishments thus adopted new identities—whether in concept, positioning or target clientele—without major transformations to infrastructure or interior layout, illustrating the ability of a single space to be symbolically reconfigured in step with fashions and audiences.

7. Decline, dissolution and disappearance of the site

Notices published in the Official Gazette of Quebec establish several precise administrative milestones: the incorporation of the Café des Artistes in 1964, the request for charter surrender in 1970, and its official acceptance in 1971. These documentary markers signal the end of a cycle and the transition of the business—and possibly a reconfiguration of the building’s uses. A retrospective article published in La Presse on July 9, 1983 (André Robert) further specifies that Ghislaine Tellier sold the Café des Artistes to Henri Hudson, who subsequently operated the establishment under the name Le Bon Trou du Cru.

The addresses 1471 and 1473 are now occupied by recent condominiums, erasing any physical trace of this major chapter in Montreal’s cultural history.