Montreal’s Trinity Anglican Memorial Church in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce has announced it will close its doors for good in 2017 because of lack of funds.
If your family attended this 95-year-old church and you want to see the inside or re-visit it, now is the time to do so.
Trinity Anglican Memorial Church at 5220 Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal will soon close its doors. Photo: Google Maps, June 2015.
Trinity was built in 1922 and officially opened in 1926. It was dedicated as a memorial to soldiers who died in World War I, and is classified as a Class B Heritage building.
Its history, however, is older than the building.
According to the church’s website, “Trinity Memorial can trace its ancestry to 1840, when the original church was founded in Old Montreal on St. Paul Street opposite Bonsecours Market. Subsequent locations were Gosford St. (1860), and Viger and St. Denis Street (1864).”
Executive Archdeacon Bill Gray said in an interview with CBC, “Trinity Church was built in a day and age where you could seat 1,000 people … but the building is beyond (the community’s) capacity to maintain.”
The church has an imposing grey limestone exterior structure, with walls rising over 40 feet from the ground. The building is a unique Quebec example of an Anglican church built in the English Victorian tradition of the Tudor Gothic revival.
The church contains a gallery in the back, beautiful stained glass windows, and an original Casavant organ that was installed in 1931. The organ was a gift of John H. Molson in memory of the parents of the Rector of the church, the Rev’d Canon John M. Almond.
Trinity’s annual Christmas service will take place as usual this final year.
