Life After Demolition: The Absented Presence of Montreal’s Negro Community Centre

Abstract

In 2014, The Negro Community Centre (NCC) located in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood of Montreal was demolished after being closed for nearly 25 years. As one of the first organizations of social, cultural, and community support for Black folks in Montreal during the twentieth century, it is remembered by those who attended as a site of empowerment and encouragement. While almost all the building’s debris has been removed from the site, there still remain large stones surrounding the hole were the NCC once stood as a reminder of the loss of a site of Black sociality. In the physical world the NCC no longer exists, however, when its 2035 Coursol address is entered into Google Street View, the centre stands upright—its digital presence defying its physical absence. As such, this article is an opening-up of what it means to experience place through images and through “digital remains”. In doing so, it proposes that an understanding of the experiential can be taken up anew through a focus on lost material sites of Black life or Black geographies. In what ways can virtuality and spatial imagery generate a paradigmatic shift in how we participate and observe the past? With a particular focus on the interplay of presence and absence as well as the virtual and the actual, this article is concerned with paradoxical encounters with images.