Montreal painter John Little had an enduring affection for urban landscapes

John Little, who died in Montreal on Oct. 29 at the age of 96, was a painter best known for his city scenes, in particular of his native Montreal along with Quebec City and New York. Many of his paintings are of working-class neighbourhoods now being gentrified. He came to dislike the way the centres of cities, especially Montreal, were bulldozed for expressways and high rises.“If we knock down all our old buildings and neighbourhoods, we’ll become a people without a past,” Mr. Little said in one of the few interviews he gave in his long life, in this case to Maclean’s magazine in 1961. “My motto is new plumbing for old buildings. I don’t mean to preserve everything but there is so much in this city worth preserving.”