Montreal Jewish museum reopens century-old sewing shop as a pop-up exhibit – Montreal

For 100 years, H. Fisher & Fils was a fixture of Montreal’s garment industry, serving up orders of buttons, bolts of cloth and sewing supplies from its storefront on St-Laurent Boulevard in the city’s Plateau neighbourhood.

As the area transformed and other garment stores moved away, H. Fisher & Fils remained, operated until 2022 by Esther Fisher, the widow of the original owner’s son.

Earlier this month, the store reopened, but this time with a transformation of its own: as a pop-up museum exhibit and heritage space paying tribute to Montreal’s garment industry and its role in the city’s Jewish community.

The space appears largely unchanged from its working days. Fisher and her husband Mitch seem to have rarely thrown anything away, from vintage sewing machines and old cash registers on the counters to old newspaper clippings on the wall.

“There’s been so much change in this neighbourhood and you can’t necessarily feel that anymore, and this is a really tactile and physical way to understand what once was,” said Taryn Fleischmann, cultural programming and exhibitions co-ordinator for the Museum of Jewish Montreal, which opened the space earlier this month.

“I think it’s a really accessible way to comprehend our history, and it would be like a shame to let that go.”

When it opened in 1922, the store was one of many garment businesses on and around St-Laurent Boulevard — known as the Main. They were often owned and staffed by Jewish tailors and seamstresses who had arrived from Eastern Europe.

While it originally opened a few blocks away, it soon moved to the modest storefront where the exhibit now resides, with the Fisher family living in the apartment above. It was a notions supply store, meaning it didn’t make garments but rather provided the supplies to customers including the Cirque du Soleil, opera productions, suit-makers and fashion schools.

Guests who step into the museum are greeted by rolls of cloth running from floor to ceiling, while shelves and boxes are packed with zippers, snaps and other supplies. A screen plays a brief interview with Esther Fisher, filmed when she was in her 90s. In the clip, she described taking over the store after her husband’s death, with little formal work experience outside of raising her children.

Fisher, who died shortly after the store closed in 2022, is a presence throughout the space. Her handwriting and that of her husband, Mitch, is scrawled on the walls, the order sheets, the ledger that sits on the counter, and on the labels affixed to bolts of cloth.

Guests who book a tour with the museum are encouraged to touch the cloth swatches, spools of thread and button and zipper samples.

“I think it’s a very sensory experience as well as a learning experience,” said Austin Henderson, the museum’s arts programming and communications manager. “I think it’s a great way for people to feel history, to touch it, to see it with their own eyes as opposed to behind a display case or perhaps in a more conventional museum space.”

While the museum plans to eventually add more exhibit features, including stories collected from people who knew the Fisher family, Henderson says he enjoys the personal touches. His favourite object has nothing to do with sewing: it’s a coffee mug stuffed with tools and utensils customers left behind.

Fleischmann said the store is part of the shmata industry — Yiddish for rag or cloth — and which was an important source of jobs and security for Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century.

“I think that a lot of individuals who are not so tied to the community don’t realize that a huge reason why Jewish immigrants came to Montreal was for the garment industry history,” she said. “A lot of seamstresses in Eastern Europe, they had to flee, and came here and took up jobs in a similar way.”

In the 19th and 20th centuries, St-Laurent Boulevard was home to successive waves of immigrants who lived, worked and set up shop in the dense, bustling neighbourhood. Over time, Jewish immigrants spread out to different parts of the city, while the garment industry moved northwest, to an area above Highway 40.

Today, the street is lined with trendy restaurants, boutiques and cafés rather than sewing shops.

“This store, as it stands, is really the last fixture of that specific time,” Fleischmann said.

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