I love St. John’s in a way that is more than anything else, constant. In some spiritual way, it never changes. It has always been my home except for a brief interval. I loved the city through it all and I love it now and I don’t anticipate ever leaving. It is just a part of me.

The old pictures of St. John’s are nice, but they aren’t really close to capturing the heart of the city and the place I know and love. The “jellybean row” pictures are good for both tourists and us, but they are an affectation that have more to do with visitors than with us. Nothing wrong with them, mind you, but they aren’t the soul of the city. It’s a mid-1970s thing, if you ask me, like Screech-ins.

The older pictures from the poorer part of the west end of St. John’s, where I grew up, also don’t capture the city. Yes, the houses are real and the lack of paint on those houses in my part of town is also very real, but the pictures still don’t ring the bell for me. They are of a very narrow section of downtown St. John’s that has vanished and not a minute too soon. Good people lived there but, my God, it was extremely poor.

To me downtown St. John’s, more than anything else, had an atmosphere and aura to it. If you walked from Pleasant St. down to the waterfront there was more than sight and sound. There was smell. First there was the Horwood’s Lumber yard. There is a nice rich smell to newly sawn wood and it wasn’t all just pine, spruce, and birch. I know all about it because I worked at Horwood’s and worked at wood. There were some exotic woods down there.

Heading down to the harbour from our house you crossed first New Gower St. It was a busy street. Our family bought our meat at one of a half dozen or more butcher shops that were downtown in those days. Our butcher was Casey’s but there was also Metcalf and Roberts and Shields and Warrens Meats, and Max Lawlor’s and a load more around the city. They were all butchers in the old-time sense of the word. There was sawdust on the floor of the shops and there was the smell of fresh meat and a hint of blood. I also remember the butchers wore white coats. Your meat purchase was wrapped up in a piece of brown paper and tied up with a string. No plastic in those days. That would come later.

As a little aside story to this story, Casey the butcher on New Gower had the best sausages in the world. I haven’t tasted anything close to them since. We bought our meat there every payday which was Friday for Dad. He was a clerk on Water Street. Part of our weekly purchase was always a pound of sausages. Eventually, Casey sold the butcher shop to his top hand who I think was Mr. Tom Power. This is where the story turns sad. Tom didn’t live terribly long. A few years or so after he took over Casey’s shop he died. I don’t know if the shop was still operating then but I do know the recipe for Casey’s sausages was lost when Tom Power died because he hadn’t shared it with anyone. The Casey sausage recipe is something now lost to the ages.

There were also a lot of fruit stores in downtown St. John’s. There was Kenny’s, Lars, and MacDonald’s and many more. The proliferation of fruit stores meant that we had more than our share of exotic fruits for a small city. We had coconuts at Christmas and even corner shops carried apricots and grapefruits. My family had grapefruit almost every day at breakfast. I don’t know why so many fruit shops appeared, but I will guess it had something to do with trade of Newfoundland fish to the West Indies and the ships coming home laden with fresh fruit. The fruit stores smelled of “far away places.”

I can’t mention the smells of my city without talking about the harbour itself. I am old enough to have bought fresh fish down “in the cove” off Water Street. Steers Cove, I think. I’d be sent down for a 50-cent fish or a $1 fish. They were sold by real fishermen off planks stretched across two barrels. The cod, sometimes gutted with head on, would be wrapped in sheets of newspaper. That smell was the smell of Newfoundland. It was the smell of fish, and it was intoxicating.

Throw into all of these odours the smell of oil drums and cod liver oil and nets and coal on the wharves of the harbour and you have the scent of old St. John’s. This may not be accurate, but it doesn’t matter. It is the way I want to remember this old city. For background audio there was the sound of the steam whistles at Horwood’s and the dockyard and the sound and smell of locomotives as they shunted cars around the CNR rail yard. I do miss it all.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca