Before the Bulldozers: John Little’s Fun and Games on Beaudry Street, 1951

Oct 9

In Fun and Games on Beaudry Street, John Little captures a crisp autumn day in Faubourg à m'lasse, one of Montréal’s working-class neighbourhoods. Children play in the street, tossing a ball against the façade of a building long since vanished. The small KIK-Cola sign glowing in a corner window evokes the rhythms of everyday life in the 1950s.

John Little, Fun and Games on Beaudry Street, 1951 Oil on masonite 22 x 32 in — John Little, Fun and Games on Beaudry Street, 1951, Oil on masonite, 22 x 32 in

Painted early in his career, this scene reflects Little’s vibrant palette and the graphic sensibility he developed during his formative years as an illustrator. His recently unearthed photo archive reveals that he documented this neighbourhood with particular fascination; these are among his earliest personal photographs, dating from around 1950.

In the years that followed, Montréal entered a period of rapid modernization. In preparation for Expo 67 and other large-scale infrastructure projects, city planners targeted working-class districts such as Faubourg à m’lasse, the area surrounding Beaudry Street, for expropriation. Entire blocks were demolished to make way for the CBC/Radio-Canada complex and the Ville-Marie Expressway. By the early 1960s, the neighbourhood had been erased from the map, displacing approximately 5,000 residents — including the very people whose daily life Little had captured in this painting and in his related photographic studies.

Throughout his career, Little remained devoted to recording the traces of mid-century Montréal — its architecture, modest storefronts, and rhythms of everyday life. Fun and Games on Beaudry Street thus stands not only as an early exploration of those themes, but as an inadvertent memorial for a community soon to vanish. The painting has gained renewed relevance today, as the new Quartier des Lumières redevelopment seeks to restore residential life and urban vitality to the former Radio-Canada site — this time, informed by the lessons of past urban renewal.

A Glimpse into the Artist’s Process

Shared here for the first time are two of Little’s original reference photographs of the corner, taken in the 1950s and used to create this painting. The faint grid of lines—known as squaring up—reveals his meticulous method for transferring a photographic composition to the painting surface. In a characteristically resourceful gesture, Little glued these photographs to the back of a piece of cardboard cut from an old cereal box, then stored them in a studio file labeled “CBC Radio-Canada Neighbourhood / Prospects.”