Café des Artistes / Le Crash (Montreal)

1. Overview

The Café des Artistes belongs to the constellation of postwar Montreal venues where people came to eat, hold court and extend the evening after performances. In the specialized entertainment press (Radiomonde, Télémonde, then Télé-radiomonde), the establishment appears as a familiar address: it is described through receptions, meetings, a constant circulation of artists and radio/television workers, and a recognized “hub” in the downtown core.

The “museum” reading of the site rests on its programmatic layering: a cultural café at street level and, above it, a nightlife scene carried by nightclubs, including Le Crash, 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 the heart of a downtown area undergoing major change, in close proximity to media hubs, theatres and hotels. This strategic location encouraged frequentation by the performing-arts and communications milieus. From the late 1950s onward, the press and specialized columns described it as a “central” place, frequented by artists, journalists, actors and many Radio-Canada employees, especially when they were not gathering at the bar La Seine. The café — and especially its terrace, among the first of its kind in Montreal — thus established itself as an informal extension of the entertainment world, a social space where creators, hosts and radio and television artisans crossed paths.

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 established 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 reduced, in retrospect, to her role as a spouse, contemporary press and photo captions show her as a manager, hostess and facilitator — and, according to an explicit mention, as the venue’s head cook. Her presence embodies the Café’s “home” dimension: a place one returns to, where one is recognized, and where collective events can be organized.

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

4. Openings, exhibitions and visual-arts life

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

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

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

This mention is an important reference point: it shows that the Café conceived itself as a place for events (receptions, gatherings, possibly artistic presentations), and that it invested in internal infrastructure (a new room) to host more patrons or diversify its uses.

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

The existence of nightclubs upstairs from the Café des Artistes belongs to a pivotal moment in the history of Montreal nightlife: the shift from the traditional cabaret to the modern discotheque. Unlike seated performance halls or numbered cabaret programs, the discotheque privileges dancing, recorded music, sensory immersion and a freer sociability, often associated with urban youth, artistic and media circles, and a cosmopolitan modernity.

In this context, the site at 1473 Dorchester Boulevard West adopts a typical yet still relatively new configuration in Montreal: a cultural café-restaurant at street level, serving as a daytime meeting point and “after-show” destination, and nightlife establishments upstairs, accessible in the evening and at night. This programmatic layering enables continuity between intellectual sociability, culture, celebration and dance, within the same building.

The sources allow us to state with certainty that the nightclubs were not located in the Café itself, but above. The Café des Artistes thus functions as the social and symbolic foundation of a more experimental nightlife, of which Le Crash is the most striking example.

Documented chronology of the names (according to La Presse, January 7, 1971)

A Spec by night column published in La Presse on January 7, 1971 provides a rare and explicit reference point for the succession of establishments associated with the premises where Le Crash operated. The text clearly states that Le Crash succeeded L’Empereur, itself the successor to Le Loup-Garou, and further specifies that after the closing of the Crash (which occurred in September 1970), Ghislaine Tellier decided to open a new concept under the name Le Chic-Choc (piano bar), announced for mid-January 1971.¹⁶ The same column also mentions earlier uses (notably the Cercle des Réalisateurs, La Clef de Sol of André Lejeune, and Le Petit Caporal of Raymond Lévesque), without, however, specifying the chronological order or the exact dates of those earlier occupations.¹⁶

• Le Loup-Garou → L’Empereur → Le Crash (succession explicitly stated)
• September 1970: closing of Le Crash
• Mid-January 1971: announced opening of Le Chic-Choc (piano bar)

Le Crash: an emblematic discotheque — Opening August 1, 1967 / Closing September 1970

Le Crash, formerly L’Empereur, appears as the name most closely associated with the upstairs level of the Café des Artistes. While iconographic documentation remains rare, its presence is confirmed by press cross-checks, indirect mentions and a persistent cultural memory. Le Crash belongs to that generation of clubs that broke with cabaret aesthetics to adopt a more abstract atmosphere, driven by music, lighting and dance.

On the scale of Montreal, Le Crash belongs to a constellation of nightlife venues that, during the 1960s, helped make the discotheque a space of cultural avant-garde, frequented by artists, designers, hosts, media workers and figures of the modern scene.

Le Crash is not a place for the faint of heart. First, you recognize it quickly thanks to half a car fixed to the exterior wall. Then, once inside, you discover car parts and pieces everywhere.

There is another car shell above the bar; the walls are decorated with blinking tail lights, and the tables are made of round glass discs supported by steering wheels and columns.

The Crash offers a metal dance floor and two — yes, two — full-fledged strobe lights. If you don’t know strobe lights, they are powerful flashing lights that make dancers look like actors in a 1920s film. Again, this is not for sensitive eyes.

The music is the newest of what’s happening with pop groups — Led Zeppelin, Chicago, and others. And it’s loud. The clientele is mainly young, but everyone is welcome; the atmosphere isn’t cliquish, even if, as in many discotheques, there are many regulars.

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

“Le Crash”

“Here, you step outside the ordinary. You feel a little lost, as if you had wandered by mistake into a private ‘party.’ Everyone knows one another, gets along. The people are clearly younger.

There is a girl dancing, wearing fashionable trousers, long hair, heavy makeup. She is surely not yet twenty. She plans to become a teacher; in the meantime she is going to study theatre. She is there because she meets friends there, people who think like she does.

Another is twenty years old and works in a bank. She likes numbers, unconventional terms… and the Crash. The way people—men in particular—dress.

Very curly hair, gold chains around the neck, a suit in bright colours. It is a young man, 22 or 23 years old. ‘Elsewhere people laugh at us, at the way we dress. Here we are appreciated; we know that we are “Vogue.” I have nothing against people who think differently, but I feel more at ease here.’

There are also older men, aged 30 to 40, who watch with interest what is going on, without getting too involved. Perhaps at the end of the evening someone will organize a ‘party’ somewhere…”

7. Decline, dissolution and disappearance of the site