Normand Arseneault
Testimony of an ex-worker of the Expo 67
Boston Tea Party ride
In summer, 1967, I was 20 years old and I got ready to enter first year at the university, in September. I worked on the Exhibition from April till September, 6 days a week, in the daytime or at night, as " appointed to the maintenance ", way prosaïque to say that I was a blue-collar worker for the City of Montreal. I worked absolutely everywhere on the site, but mostly, it was on the Sainte-Hélène island.
All the employees in the maintenance worked 6 quarters of day, followed by a day of leave. Then, they began 6 quarters of night.
Overview from the last balcony of the France Pavilion.
In the daytime, the work was routine. Each had a territory and had to make sure that it is clean. Territory memory of which I have: from the subway station to the China Pavilion. Equipped with his small broom and of his door-dust, the employee constantly had to patrol his territory and collect all that there was for waste and throw them in to the garbage can. All in all, I personally had to collect thousands of butts of cigarettes. It was formally forbidden to sit down. In the first insult, we were of use to us a warning. In the second, it was the dismissal! If there was almost nothing to clean, you should not stop patrolling, but pretending to work by walking around.
Trinidad and Tobago Pavilions
As the small kiosks of information Esso were always crammed, the visitors approached us to ask for information. However incredible it can appear, here is the question which I had mostly to answer, every time I just worked in front of the United States Pavilion: " Is this La Ronde? "
Small deserted bar of the Place des Nations. I took this photo while I had to work only in the middle of the night on the Place des Nations
At night, the work was completely different and varied. At 11:00 , we were assigned by small groups to various tasks everywhere on the site: in priority, we had to go to clean La ronde after its closure, the autostadium after a concert, the Place des Nations after a dance or the bandstand situated in front of the Belgium Pavilion. Otherwise, to spray the lawn everywhere, to replace the roses faded in the rose garden near the USA Pavilion, to put some peat and ect.
La Ronde,seen by the Jacques-Cartier bridge
Every night, bulbs burned with lampposts or moreover, were replaced. All the streets were swept, then sprayed. Spots on the asphalt were scratched, then brushed with some cleaner.
I took this photo of this brewery on the Notre-Dame island, near the bridge of the Cosmos, at about 6 am in the morning
Except for La Ronde, the last visitors left at 11 pm, but the music continued to play in loudspeakers till midnight. From this hour, loudspeakers became suddenly dumb and the site, immense and completely illuminated all night long, took the looks of a ghost city from another planet.
So beautiful was quite illuminated, thanks to the spectacular architecture of its pavilions, without its essential element, the human being, it took a gloomy bit look. Without its tens of thousand daily visitors, without soul which lives or almost, except some workers scattered here and there on both islands, without counting the Cité du Havre, after two o'clock in the morning, it was the silence. Silence broken only by the wind of the river, or distant shouts of the other groups of workers.
Photo taken in the morning, before the opening of the site at 10 am