THE PLUCK OF THE IRISH.

A plane crash is the worst of many calamities to hit Montreal's Griffintown in Quebec, Canada. The storied neighbourhood -- home to Irish immigrants who fled the potato famines in the 1800s and to several generations of their descendants -- has endured floods, fires, riots and strikes. It's a colourful past that has won Griffintown a small, if unhappy, place in the literary imagination. In the acclaimed historical novel 'Away,' Ontario writer Jane Urquhart's heroine heads to Griffintown in search of her lover, only to encounter "ragged families huddled on thatched or tin rooftops," trying to escape a flood. Author Brian Moore chose Griffintown as the home for the hapless protoganist of his 1960 award-winner, 'The Luck of Ginger Coffey.' Even renowned humorist Stephen Leacock found only gloom there. In his 1942 book about his adopted home, 'Montreal: Seaport and City,' Leacock touches on Griffintown, and dismisses it as "a wretched area, whose tumbled, shabby houses mock at the wealth of Montreal," and "the first of our industrial 'slums.' " In 1654, Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the founder of Montreal, granted the land that would eventually become Griffintown to Jeanne Mance, a pious woman who, with the nuns of the H&ocric;tel-Dieu, ran the city's first hospital.