In the heart of downtown Montreal, between McGill University’s main campus and Place Ville-Marie, is the almost entirely torn-up McGill College Ave. The street runs for only three city blocks and is currently lined by office buildings and a few cafés, but the major makeover underway will turn the space into an ode to the great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.
“Oscar Peterson was a remarkable jazzman that brought honour to his home city of Montreal,” wrote Hugo Bourgoin, a media relations employee of the City of Montreal, in an email translated from French to rabble.ca. “This is why we have decided to pay him the homage he deserves with this place that will carry his name.”
Place Oscar Peterson, as the City of Montreal has named it, was announced in 2021 as the culmination of several years of work to dedicate a space in the core of the city to Peterson. Though originally slated to be completed in 2025, the start date for construction on the public space has been delayed until 2025 because of the addition of a public transit station underground.
Once completed, the public square will feature a statue of the jazz virtuoso among other permanent art installations for which the City is now accepting proposals. There are also plans to fill the square with shrubbery, turning it into a meeting place and a resting place in the middle of a bustling city, something the municipal government and Peterson’s close friends and family feel is appropriate for the pianist who took the world by storm but also remained dedicated to his city.
“Let’s remember that M. Peterson is a symbol for the collective, particularly in regards to the shared challenges of systemic racism, which is tied to the chronic under-representation of diversity in the public space,” Bourgoin wrote. “This project marks an additional step towards inclusion.”
Throughout his career, Peterson received global acclaim for his talent, for how his fingers seemed to move across a keyboard faster than made sense, but he remained in Montreal till late in life when he moved to Mississauga with his wife. Despite the lasting impact Peterson left on Montreal and jazz music, the public square currently under construction is the first official nod to the musician outside of Little Burgundy, the neighbourhood Peterson grew up in and one of Montreal’s historically Black neighbourhoods.
Peterson leaves a lasting mark on Montreal
Montreal has had strong ties to jazz music for decades—it is, after all, home to the largest jazz festival in the world—and Peterson played a role in cementing the city’s status as a jazz hub. He eventually made an appearance at the Montreal International Jazz Festival and had an award named after himself, which he won in 1989. Peterson also joined a jazz trio with Ray Brown and Herb Ellis; he encouraged Oliver Jones to pursue a career as a jazz pianist; and Peterson composed numerous songs such as “Place St-Henri” in tribute to Montreal.
Reminders of Peterson are also seemingly woven into the fabric of the Little Burgundy neighbourhood. Not only was that where he grew up, but it is where he met Jones and where Peterson’s sister, Daisy Peterson Sweeney, taught both men to play piano. Each of the Peterson siblings has their own mural in Little Burgundy to commemorate the impacts they had on Montreal’s jazz scene and Oscar had a park named after him.
Discussions of how to incorporate the renowned musician into public spaces outside of Little Burgundy have been ongoing for years. In 2020, Naveed Hussain launched a petition to rename the Lionel-Groulx metro station after Peterson, but the City claimed that renaming the station would be too complicated.
Concordia University did rename its main music hall in 1999 from Concordia Concert Hall to The Oscar Peterson Concert Hall, but this has been the only successful renaming in honour of Peterson.
For his wife, Kelly Peterson, though, there is something special about an entirely new place being named after her husband.
“Being here and seeing this area that is being developed and named for Oscar is actually overwhelming,” she said at a press conference for the announcement of the public space. “He would have been extremely humbled and overwhelmed and very grateful [….] I am especially pleased that it is something new [getting Oscar’s name], that it doesn’t have to be renamed, and this very special location, it is going to be spectacular.”
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Nick Seebruch, editor
