Fairmount Bagel

The bakery took its name from the avenue when the family moved production to this small house with living quarters above the first floor. Here, bagels were rolled by hand, joined into rings, briefly dipped in honey water, and sent into a wood-fired oven. Above the entrance hangs a corner sign showing a man carrying bagels on twine: that was how they used to be tied in dozens for sale.

In the summer of nineteen seventy-nine, Irwin Shlafman entered a house where no one had baked bagels for twenty years. His father and grandfather had once worked here. Behind a partition, Irwin found an old wood-fired oven. It had not been dismantled along with the bakery; it had simply been walled off.

Irwin's grandfather, Isadore Shlafman, a Jewish immigrant baker who supported his family by selling bagels, built the oven. In Montreal, he began baking them in an alley near Saint-Laurent Boulevard. The family traces the business's history to nineteen nineteen, although it appears in city directories only in nineteen thirty-two; historians still have not agreed on who holds Montreal's first place.

In nineteen forty-nine, Isadore bought this small house on Fairmount Avenue. He knocked through the back wall, added a wood-fired oven, and moved production here. The Shlafmans lived upstairs, while Isadore went down to the first floor and got to work. His son Jack learned from his father: they rolled the dough by hand, joined it into rings, briefly dipped them in honey water, and then sent them into the oven. The old name, “Montreal Bagel Bakery,” was replaced with “Fairmount,” after the address of the family's new home.

By the end of the fifties, many Jewish families and their customers were moving from Mile End to neighborhoods northwest of the mountain. In nineteen fifty-nine, Jack closed the bakery on Fairmount Avenue and allowed Myer Lewkowicz, the owner of a business on the neighboring street, to use its name. Jack himself helped open another bakery, then earned a living trading clothes and driving a taxi. Production at this address ceased for two decades.

Irwin, who had found the oven behind the wall, decided to return the family's former business to them. He persuaded his parents to buy the house again. In October nineteen seventy-nine, the Shlafmans resumed baking here. Lewkowicz agreed to give up a name that was not his and named his establishment St-Viateur Bagel, after its street. That is how two independent names emerged, and they have shared Mile End's customers ever since.

For the opening, Jack and Irwin installed a corner sign above the entrance. It depicts Jack himself, with bagels strung on twine: that was how they used to be tied in dozens for sale. In one thousand eighteen, one side of the old sign cracked and was replaced with an almost exact copy. The date of the family's return still stands on the façade, and the man with the rings strung up is Jack himself—the same Jack who closed this bakery and agreed to reopen it twenty years later.