Montreal was the largest and most wealthiest city in Canada in the 1920s and also the most cosmopolitan, having a French-Canadian majority with substantial English, Scots, Irish, Italian, and Jewish communities. The multi-cultural atmosphere in Montreal allowed a black community to be established in the 1920s. The Black community that emerged in Montreal in the 1920s was largely American in origin, centring on the "sporting district" between St. Antoine and Bonaventure streets, which had a reputation as a "cool" neighbourhood, known for its lively and often riotous nightclubs that opened at 11:00 pm and closed at 5:00 am, where the latest in Afro-American jazz was played, alcohol was consumed in conspicuous quantities, and illegal gambling was usually tolerated. The Nemderloc Club (nemderloc being "colred men" spelled backwards), which opened in 1922, was the most famous black club in Montreal, being very popular with both locals and Americans seeking to escape Prohibition by coming to Canada, where alcohol was still legal, hence the saying that American tourists wanted to "drink Canada dry". Many of the Afro-Americans who settled in the "sporting district" of Montreal came from Harlem to seek a place where it was legal to drink alcohol. Relations between the police and the black community in Montreal were unfriendly with the St. Antoine district being regularly raided by the police looking for illegal drugs and gambling establishments. Despite its reputation as the "coolest" neighborhood in Montreal, the "sporting district", now known as the Little Burgundy neighborhood was a centre of poverty with the water being unsafe to drink and a death rate that was twice the norm in Montreal.