It's being rebuilt — the storefront, the block, the streets around it — as Pointe-Claire was in 1989. You ride a bike through it and deliver pizza before the streetlights come on.
The buildings and addresses come from the 1989 street directory. The rest comes from people who were there.
Play it now Free, in your browser, on a phone or a computer. It asks for an email at the door.
You can play it now. One evening is one shift for Athens: George hands the orders over the counter, you ride them out, and the night ends when the streetlights come on. It runs in the browser on a computer, or on a phone turned sideways, with two thumbs.
The streets around Walton are there, and every house on them has its number by the door. So are the Athens row and the room inside it, the Pointe-Claire Shopping Centre, the pool, the arena and the library, Scoopy's, Valois Bowling and Velos, and the Terra Cotta woods with Dead Man's Hill, the Pits and the soccer field. Tab puts the whole town over the screen, with you on it. The Village stands too, with St-Joachim, the windmill, the Yacht Club, the Pioneer and Gigi's, and so does Sunnyside Park with its pool and the hill. Other people playing at the same moment ride past you in the street, the radio plays CHOM 97.7, and a night at Valois Bowling posts to the board of the evening's top riders.
It is a work in progress, and it says so. What's new lists what changed and when.
Athens opened at 102 avenue Walton in 1970 and fed the neighbourhood until 2016. It was a pizzeria, and it was also a breakfast counter — the doors opened at 7:30 in the morning — and a Greek diner, and for a great many people it was mostly a room you were allowed to sit in.
It stood in the Braebrook Shopping Plaza, a low row of shops set well back behind a wide parking lot, with a strip of grass and a few trees at the Spartan Crescent end. In 1989 the row ran: Lisa Marie Beauty Salon at 100, Athens at 102, DĂ©cor A J C at 104, Nettoyeurs Braebrook Cleaners at 106, CĂ©ramique Power at 108, and Pilon Luc & Assoc at 110.
After Athens closed the plaza stood empty, and then it came down. Residents fought the twenty-unit development proposed for the site and the city turned it down; what was finally approved was twelve units and a small park. Demosthenis Papadimitrios, George's son, petitioned to have that park named after his father's restaurant.
Athens Park is there now, on the ground the building stood on.
George Papadimitrios ran Athens for most of its life. He was an energetic man who moved at about one-and-a-half times everyone else's speed, and he remembered his customers — not just their orders, but their families, and which street they'd grown up on.
In a short film made about the restaurant he explains something he did deliberately: he let kids sit in the place without making them buy anything. He wanted there to be somewhere safe for them to be, and he reckoned that if they were happy there, they'd be good customers one day.
Almost every pizza place and dépanneur in 1989 had an arcade cabinet or a video lottery machine in the corner. Athens had neither. It had food and it had jukeboxes on the tables, and that was the whole of it.
Jason Bolanis made a short documentary about Athens, with George in it, talking about the place in his own words. It is the best record of the restaurant that exists.
Ride the streets yourself The same block, the same year, from the seat of a bike.
See something wrong? Tell me and I will fix it. The game is built from records, and your memory is one.
Your old house on the wrong side of the street, a shop that was never there, a street that didn't go through yet, the wrong name over a door: the directory and the aerial photographs get a lot right, and plenty wrong, and the only people who can tell are the people who were there. I read every correction, and when one holds up, the game changes. If you have a photograph, say so: in this project a photograph beats a memory, mine included.
For a line or two, use the form below and choose a correction. For more than that, there are two downloads.
A map of every address the game knows, to open in your browser. Click an address, say what is wrong with it, click where it should be, and send me the file it saves.
Download the corrections package (a zip, about half a megabyte; the map needs Python 3, the spreadsheet needs nothing)
Every house in the game today is one of ten stock shapes in colours picked at random. If you know what yours looked like, you can build the real one. It doesn't have to be good: a wonky model of the actual house beats a perfect generic bungalow.
.glb; the colours; a
short description of the house to fill in; a checker that needs only Python; and a guide. It is
built for one house around the corner from Athens, as an example. Write to me with your address and I will
make you one for yours..glb and the filled-in description, by
email. Photographs of the house from back then are welcome too, and are never published without
your say-so.Honestly: the game cannot load a contributed house yet. The first ones back are what that part will be built and tested against.
Download the house kit (a zip; needs Blender, which is free)
Everyone who went there has a story — about George, about Peter at the door, about sitting in a booth for three hours over one Coke. Those are the things no archive has, and they're what I'm collecting.
I read everything before any of it goes anywhere, and nothing is published without that. Leave your name off if you'd rather.
Photographs. Athens inside or out. The Braebrook plaza and the other shops in it. The RC car track that took up a quarter of the Pointe-Claire Plaza parking lot on Saturdays. Ted's Hobby Shop. Anything at all of the neighbourhood in the seventies and eighties.
Corrections. Anything the game has wrong: see Corrections above.
Anything you remember about the block. What was in the unit next to Athens before it changed hands. Which banner the dépanneur was flying. What the salon at number 100 actually was, because nobody I've asked ever saw anyone go in.
It runs in the browser, on a phone or a computer, and it's free. You start at Athens with an order on the counter and ride Pointe-Claire as it was in 1989 — Walton, the Plaza, the tunnel at Valois — and deliver before the streetlights come on.
Play Athens Delivery Want to hear when it grows? Leave your email in the box above and say so. That's the whole mailing list.
The streets, the houses and the shops come from Lovell's 1989–90 street directory for the West Island suburbs — every civic number, in order, page after page. The positions come from Quebec's address registry. The building itself was measured off historical aerial photographs: the row was 51.3 metres long, and the parking lot in front of it was 82.4 metres deep, which is a great deal of asphalt to cross on a bicycle in the dark.
Everything the records don't hold comes from photographs and from people remembering — the blinds in the window, the gold lettering on the glass, the green vinyl on the stools, the black curtains at number 100.
Where something is a guess, it's written down as a guess. That's the whole method, and it's why the box above matters: the directory can tell me who was at 102 avenue Walton in 1989, and it cannot tell me one single thing about what it was like to be there.
Nobody's name or telephone number from the directory appears anywhere in this project. The people who lived on those streets are their own business.
It isn't for sale, it isn't official, and it has nothing to do with the City. It's one person rebuilding a block he grew up on, with the blessing of the family whose restaurant it was.
Some of what people have sent in. There's more of it inside the game, on the jukebox at the booth.
The schooner model behind the 1950s cash register!
— Andy C
Always went for the Athens Special, and lots of Dire Straits Sultans of Swing plays on the jukebox. Met many times there with musicians (Doxases, LPHS jazz friends, Gangster Politics)... First date was there in high school... Great job Jer!
— Liam
When my sister and I were kids our favourite memory was asking George to put money in the jukebox to play the song sweet dreams while eating our pizza. We would then get milkshakes in that old style milkshake machine.
— Theodore Spitadakis