Editor’s Note: Bill Mont died last weekend at the age of 96. Here is an archived Macdonald Notebook story, originally published in 2018.
Bill Mont On His Lebanese Roots
By Andrew Macdonald– Published 2018.
Veteran businessman Bill Mont, then newly turned 89, claims his grandfather Peter Allen was the first person from Lebanon to immigrate to Halifax at the turn of the previous century.
For a certain generation, Mont has a household name in Halifax. Before Sunday shopping, he was Metro Halifax’s King of Flea Markets. He still owns an island off of Halifax Harbour, runs a cemetery in Lower Sackville, and is a former property developer.
Mont was front row centre at the recent Lebanese Cedar & Maple business gala in the Cunard Centre at the Halifax Seaport in 2018.
I caught up with Mont, now a resident of Northwood Manor on Gottingen Street, as I was interested in his Lebanese roots and his claim to be a descendant of the first Lebanese immigrant to our province.
There are about 13,000 people of Lebanese extraction in Nova Scotia, and most live in Halifax, including many of the city’s leading condo and apartment developers.
With a mind as sharp as a tack, Mont — a life-long non-smoker and a light drinker — still goes to his office at the Lord Nelson arcade almost on a daily basis. For 16 years, his office was located at the Via Rail compound.
“There is a Lebanese magazine that says my grandfather was the first Lebanese immigrant,” Mont tells The Macdonald Notebook.
“It looks like that is the thing. My father was an Allen, which means Alima, meaning the flag from Lebanon, so it looks like we were the first immigrants from Lebanon,” says Mont.
“My grandfather was the first—Peter Allen.” Mont’s cousin is a noted pianist, also named Peter Allen, of Halifax. “He is very well known in this area. His father looked after trustee estates.”
“A tiny village in Lebanon was one of the main areas (for immigration), where my grandfather came from, and the other area was Diaman, as one of the other main areas where Lebanese around Halifax came from.”
The Lebanese community hall at Kearney Lake is named for Diaman, a town where noted developer Wadih Fares immigrated from in 1976. Fares is a leading condo and apartment developer and built the Trillium condo complex on South Park Street.
Mont knows second-generation Lebanese developer Norman Nahas “pretty well.” Nahas is president of the Lebanese Chamber of Commerce, and co-owner of the King of Donair chain, and is the son of subdivision developer Basam ‘Sam’ Nahas.
“I was a partner with Norman’s father, Sam, a well-known businessman tied into apartment developing,” says Mont.
Sam Nahas co-owns the rebranded Halifax Exhibition Centre, formerly the Exhibition grounds, and also runs the venerable watering hole, Oasis Tavern, on Spring Garden Road.
With Sam Nahas, Mont did land development, and once had a connection with former property tycoon Richard Homburg, who at one time owned a $4 billion global real estate empire before it was dissolved in the last five years.
“We were expecting more but it didn’t happen,” says Mont of the property dealings with Nahas and Homburg.
“I was with bigger boys than Sam. I was a partner of Richard Homburg in the beginning. I never had time to stick in the office with him, so he rolled past me.”
Mont was also a partner of mega property developer George Armoyan. “We started Eaglewood,” a Bedford housing subdivision.
“Both those guys got good help from me to get rolling,” Mont tells me.
Mont also runs what he calls the oldest auction house in Canada, and before Sunday shopping, he was the city’s King of Flea Markets, and once used to pack 10,000 folk into a location in Lower Sackville.
Today, the only flea market still open for business is a Mont-run operation at the Halifax Forum, now under the control of Mont’s daughter, Janice.
“I am not the King of Flea Markets anymore,” quips Mont. “The only one left is held at the Halifax Forum. Once Sunday shopping came in, that killed the flea market business on Sundays.
“I was the first, started out in Lower Sackville in 1975. We used to have 10,000 people gathering every Sunday for a long, long time.”
Mont’s parents took him out of school after grade 6, and put him to work on the Halifax Seaport.
“I was five years old when my dad died during the start of the 1929 recession,” says Mont. “My father was a prizefighter in Washington, DC. I had step-parents and it was a hard life,” he offers.
“I have to get my book written. It’s crazy all the stuff I did over the years,” he says, noting he has written 80 per cent of his book, but has not touched it the last three years.
“I haven’t had a chance to get at it since,” he says. “I am busy every day.”
His cemetery in Lower Sackville is known as Pleasant Hill Cemetery. A burial plot goes for $1,500, and then there is the cost to dig the grave. The burial ground is modelled after cemeteries in California, with no tombstones, just bronze burial markers.
There are famous people buried in his graveyard, including musician Don Messer, who had one of the Maritimes’ best-known TV shows of the 1960s and ’70s.
“There are very interesting people out there.”
A man who once ran horse racing and gambling businesses in Metro is also buried in the 21-acre cemetery, as is Ada Jane McCallum, world-renowned for the brothels she ran in Halifax.
“If you put your body to science at Dalhousie Medical School, we have a section for that at the cemetery,” says Mont.
Daughter Janice runs the cemetery, where Bill Mont donated some of his land to the Lebanese church, St. Antonio’s.
Mont once bought the former high school Horton High in the Annapolis Valley, paying $200,000 and later selling it for $600,000.
Mont spent two and a half months at nine years of age in a reform school, all because he skipped one day of school.
“I was 12 when I went to work on the Halifax waterfront, as a boil chipper, one of the dirtiest jobs you could get down in ship bilges, crawling around.”
Mont almost bought the famed Oland Castle on Young Street, but says George Armoyan talked him out of buying the property from then owner, corner store king Jimmy Chen.
Chen had a plan to turn the huge home into a condo complex in the 1990s. Later, Armoyan bought the property and converted it into his primary Halifax residency.
“I had that castle tied up for six months. George Armoyan—my partner at the time—said, ‘No, no, you want to stay away from that’.”
Former developer Peter Ryan, who built condo and apartment units 30 years ago in Halifax, also once owned the Oland Castle.
Mont’s wife, Dorothy, is from Eastern Passage, where her family once farmed land that became the Shearwater military base. Mont owns Devil’s Island in Halifax Harbour.
He says he enjoys life now living at Northwood Manor and is on its tenancy board. He likes the daily contact with its other residents, and participates in the weekly Wednesday dances at the seniors’ home.
The above article was first published in the Notebook in 2018. Bill Mont died last weekend at age 96.
Norman Nahas, president of the Lebanese Chamber of Commerce in Nova Scotia, left, chats with Bill Mont, the active collector in this 2018 Noteook picture.
