Haven’t watched the whole episode but what the fuck, it features my favourite city and I’m generally a fan of the program, though I’ve admittedly only seen a few episodes.
Also, what the fuck kind of Expos t-shirt is Andy Nulman wearing at the beginning?
Anyways, enjoy – more content on the way ya heard?
So way back in the day you could rent rowboats, canoes and gondolas at the lagoon at Parc Lafontaine.
Today you can rent over-priced plastic pedal boats at Beaver Lake and Lac des Dauphins.
As you can see above, some of these modest river craft featured canopies, advertisements. In some cases you could even get someone to row you around.
And if I’m not mistaken, many of our parks had lagoons filled with swans. Why did we get rid of the swans?
Not too shabby eh?
Today no such luxuries exist, nor do the ornately designed boat houses (as you can see above) which once housed the boats and offered citizens and tourists alike a variety of services. Instead, the pedal boats are accessed via an exposed impermanent deck. The people responsible have a folding table.
It looks cheap.
What you see above does not (in my eyes, feel free to disagree).
I believe parks and public spaces have a variety of important societal and economic functions which must be encouraged through direct city involvement. I’m certainly not saying we’re not doing this today – Montreal’s parks and recreation department does good work. Our parks are clean and generally well used throughout the year. We are a city that still adores its parks and generally integrates park usage into our day to day lives, whether for recreation, a pleasant stroll, to let the dog out, whatever. This is not particular to Montréal, but there is a significant portion of the urban city which was designed with parks playing crucial roles in traffic diffusion and societal cohesion. We benefit immensely by having many first-ring suburbs oriented on parks, squares, plazas etc, providing exceptional amounts of public green space. As intended in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Montreal’s urban parks have become fully integrated into the urban tapestry and our way of life.
But what I find fascinating is how four of our most important urban parks (the nature parks; Maisonneuve, Jean Drapeau, Lafontaine and Mount Royal) are generally not visited by tourists; they are used chiefly by locals. By contrast, the smaller urban squares (Place d’Armes, Dorchester, Place du Canada, Square Victoria etc) are overloaded with tourists and too few citizens.
It might be time to end our voluntary park segregation. Admittedly, you can indeed do a lot more in the nature parks and the urban squares are closer to the major hotels (so as to account for this distribution of users), but we should consider that the urban squares have for the most part received significant upgrades of late, whereas most of our nature parks are beginning to look worn-out.
We might want to consider a significant investment in our larger nature parks, and further seek to extend our best foot forward. If we wanted an international audience to discover our mega-parks, we’d still have the swans, still have gondolas in lagoons, not to mention impressively clean public washrooms and other public facilities. Today our biggest parks, which ought to rank highly among the major tourist destinations of our city, are instead largely hidden.
And if you’ve ever had to use the washroom at Parc Jeanne Mance, you know why.
This is the front cover of the ‘bid-book’ published by the City of Montréal when it was angling for the 1972 Summer Olympics (notice it says XX Olympiad), which would eventually go to Munich and be highlighted by the triumphs of Mark Spitz and the horrors of Black September. Mayor Drapeau, being the tenacious individual that he was, continued pushing for a Summer Games to be held here, despite the terrorism that marred the Munich Games. He would ultimately succeed in 1976 with an Olympic Games that helped restore faith in the games as an instrument of global diplomacy and peace, but it came at the cost of what can only be described as massive cost overruns as a result of corruption in the construction industry (sounds familiar?)
Ultimately, the legacy of the XXI Olympiad was its crippling long-run costs, though we often overlook the work done on infrastructure, the development of high density residential towers in the urban core, the boon to the tourism and hospitality industry and the publicity it generated for city & citizen alike.
The Games were not bad for business Рif anything the cronyism and cost-throttling were great for private enterprises. But as far as running an Olympiad for the cost-benefits to the city, Montr̩al stands head and shoulders above all others as the biggest loser. So much so that the planning committee of the 1984 Los Angeles games studied Montr̩al specifically, in effect trying to be as much the opposite of our games as possible. Los Angeles `84 stands as the most financially profitable games of all time.
So if Peter Ueberroth (the head of the LA-84 Olympic Committee) could use our example to plan for massive success, certainly we can do the same, no? Let’s take advantage of all we’ve built and maintained since – I can imagine another Montréal games could turn a massive profit given how little would have to be built, we can simply use existing facilities. Moreover, with three airports, an expanded public and inter-city transit capability and a significantly larger number of hotel rooms, we might be able to break attendance records inasmuch as we could break revenue records.
So if the City comes to ask what I’d like for our 375th Anniversary, I can only ask for an Olympic organizing committee with a serious bid and a promise to doggedly pursue another Summer Games until we get one. 2024 isn’t that far away.
So this is a sight we’ll never see again. Place Bonaventure, prior to its renovation, with the Métro tunnel being constructed in the foreground, adjacent to the (then) recently completed Chateau Champlain and Place du Canada building, from the Laurentian Hotel, which no longer exists. Notice the parking lots and the old building which would be razed to make room for 1000 de la Gauchetiere. Prior to the construction of Place Bonaventure and the Chateau Champlain complex, you could look out and see most of the Old Port and the Tour de la Bourse from this vantage point. Oh to live in a city hell bent on urban renewal and re-development, as it once was.
One of my all-time favourite early-90s hip-hop tracks, from one of the brilliant minds in comedy, Mr. Barrel Roll himself Tom Green. This 2011 remix music video was shot right in my backyard, Downtown Montreal.
I’ll add this to a list of great Montreal music videos later. Enjoy!
If you like what’s above, click here for more photos from a neighbourhood in transition. Or you can select the seventh series in the photographs tab above.
Enjoy!