Le Faubourg Vieux Hull
75 Promenade du Portage

Since 1888, three successive buildings have stood at 75 Promenade du Portage. The current building dates from 1928.

In 1883, Janet Louisa Scott, great-granddaughter of Philemon Wright, sold the land to Sydney P. Cooke. Three years later, he resold the unoccupied lot to François-Xavier Filteau (1851-1931), a photographer from Quebec City, who had just married Marie-Louise Aubry in Hull. In 1888, Filteau constructed a two-storey building with stone lateral walls, and a brick front and rear. Filteau lived on the second floor and set up his photography studio there. Two businesses occupied the ground floor: P. E. Caron et frères, a clothing and dry goods store, and the shoe store of Trefflée Saint-Jean, who was also an actor. In 1900, the Caron family - Euclide, Damien, Joseph-N. and the widow N. Caron, all from Saint-Barthélemy - moved to another part of Hull.

Life was not a bed of roses for the photographer. His wife left him, and the Great Fire of 1900 razed his building. He moved in temporarily with his sister, Adéline, wife of Basile Carrière, a hardware dealer on Victoria Street, who refinanced him. A second building was constructed, with brick facade and rear and using the two stone lateral walls. It also had a third floor. Filteau lived there until 1913, although he ceded the building to Carrière in May 1901.

The Albion Hotel replaced one of the businesses on the ground floor and offered its clientele billiard tables and alcohol. Filteau appears to have added the hotel business to photography: he was manager of the hotel for a time, because he was replaced by Joseph Fournier in 1905. Under the same roof, the barber Émile Lessard offered massage, shampoo and tonic, as well as beard trimming and haircutting. In the western part of the building, Ubald Beaudin and Fabien Sincennes ran a restaurant from 1912 to 1917. Upstairs, the photographers James Neville, A. J. Lessard and Jean-Baptiste Dorion successively occupied Filteau's studio. From 1917 it housed the B. Feller haberdashery, property of Bertha Hammervich of Ottawa. The Club national canadien (Canadian National Club) also rented space at this address.

Basile Carrière and his wife Adéline died in 1917. In 1920, their heirs, Jeanne Carrière, wife of Lionel-A. Gendron, and her sister Maria, wife of Jean-Dosithée Chéné, entrusted the management of the building to the photographer Donat Forcier, from Saint-Guillaume d'Upton. Forcier rented or sublet the Studio de luxe from Dorion, but, the following September, he transferred the lease to Albert Hopson, a machinist, and Émile Laurent, a photographer. Forcier sold all his photographic equipment, including his furniture and statues.

There was another fire in 1924. Maria Carrière, and Moïse-J. Laverdure and Dosithée Chéné, guardians of her sister Jeanne's children, sold the property to George C. Stamos of Ottawa in December 1925, but set certain conditions on its reconstruction. When Stamos failed to fulfil the conditions of the contract, the owner of the adjacent building, Jean-Baptiste Pharand, bought the property.

One week later, Pharand signed a 10-year lease with the company P. T. Legaré Limitée, a furniture merchant from Quebec City, and offered to build a store to his specifications. The new building, with a classic modern facade very fashionable in its day, opened its doors in 1928. The Legaré store closed in 1979. With its 51-year history, it was probably the longest-lived business on the former commercial artery.

A new era began in the 1970s, when buildings in the areas around the original commercial centre were demolished to make way for federal government buildings. In future, shoppers would take their business to the new shopping centres. Over the next two decades, tenants inflicted considerable damage to the building. A video arcade took over the first floor in 1979. Two years later, the wall between 75 and 77 Promenade du Portage was demolished to make room for the Tabasco discotheque. The wall was rebuilt after a fire in 1991. Abbas Mahmoud's Thunderdome nightclub took over the first floor. It closed in 1993, and the building was not used commercially until 2002.

That year, Gatineau entrepreneur Claude Renaud acquired the building, and restored its proud appearance. Shoppers can now find specialty foods, coffee and fine imported cigars at the Faubourg Vieux-Hull.