One summer day in 2005, I was bicycling to my mother-in-law's apartment. I can't remember why exactly, but my wife was probably there. In any case, I passed by the sign for Aumont Park and noticed that besides the title of the park, it displayed the seal of the City of Côte Saint-Luc. The area seemed quite far from where I thought Côte Saint-Luc was. I walked to the other side of the park on Dufferin Avenue where there was another sign. It was identical to the first sign in every way except that it bore the seal of the City of Hampstead instead of Côte Saint-Luc.

'How odd, this feels like an episode out of The Twilight Zone,' I thought. And so began years of research to find out why such a strange situation existed. Two years after that event, I gave a slide lecture at my synagogue nearby entitled the Côte Saint-Luc Digit, referring to the finger-shaped island of territory that belonged to the municipality. That lecture just scratched the surface of the mystery on MacDonald Avenue. Eventually I wrote this book about a strange product of passion, pain and profit entitled Greed and Opportunity.

Rather than recount an impersonal history of the Snowdon, Notre Dame de Grace and Hampstead neighbourhoods, in Greed and Opportunity, I have attempted to animate that narrative by creating fictional conversations and events involving real characters to bring historical figures to life. These small dramas are not the absolute truth, but they are the result of a weaving of known facts that creates a comprehensible narrative of the neighbourhood's development. I filled in the blanks of what I knew about each character to get them where they had to be in order to perform their important real roles in the history of the districts immediately to the west of central Montreal.

My goal is to create a plausible reality, one which relates to real people and real places. The fictional aspects of the book are created to make the tortured history of this area less dry. The information comes largely from a series of walking tours, given initially on foot and then on Zoom during the Pandemic. The format of the book is my attempt to transfer the immediacy of those tours into a written format.