Category Archives: Photographs

Economic commentary, History and Culture, Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Perspectives on the City, Photographs, Scenes from the City, Urban Redevelopment

The World’s Largest Holiday Inn

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A rendering of the new Holiday Inn, to be located at René Lévesque and Lucien L'Allier on the Overdale block
A rendering of the new Holiday Inn, to be located at René Lévesque and Lucien L’Allier on the Overdale block

If you’ve been walking down René Lévesque around the Bell Centre of late, you’ve doubtless noticed our city’s in the midst of a building boom.

And it’s not all condos either. The new Deloitte Tower, located between the Bell Centre and ‘surrounded’ by Windsor Station, has topped out and should open later this year, marking the first major office tower built in Montreal since the Cité du Commerce Electronique (CCE herein) was completed just over a decade ago (and about half a block away).

And just on the other side of Lucien l’Allier street from the CCE is a big gaping whole in the ground where our city’s new Holiday Inn will soon stand.

At first glance of the rendering (shown above) you might think this city’s about to be graced by the world’s largest reasonably-priced hotel, but alas the hotel will only occupy the first ten floors (and offer 250 rooms). The other thirty floors are intended for high-end rental apartments (you’ll also notice the rendering doesn’t show the full height of the intended project).

Hard to believe what used to be the site of a dilapidated parking garage/ 24-hour brochette restaurant may, within three years, be a forty floor tower with hundreds of residents on top of a full service hotel.

And here’s something to consider. Just two blocks away stands one of the last major hotel towers built in this city, the Sheraton Centre, completed in 1982 after being left abandoned (and half built) for six years.

It was originally intended to be the world’s largest Holiday Inn.

This was supposed to be the world's largest Holiday Inn
This was supposed to be the world’s largest Holiday Inn

In the 1960s and 1970s several high-rise hotel towers popped up in Montreal, most notably the Chateau Champlain across from Windsor Station (originally built for Canadian Pacific Hotels to rival the Canadian National-owned Queen Elizabeth Hotel, itself adjacent to CN’s Central Station). The Hotel des Gouverneurs at Place Dupuis, the OMNI Montreal on Sherbrooke and the former Delta adjacent to the Tour de la Bourse are just a few other examples of the same basic idea – luxury high-rise hotel towers that looked often too much like the office towers they adjoined).

In addition to the Chateau Champlain, Canadian Pacific also owned the Laurentian Hotel, located at Peel and René Lévesque and offering 1,004 rooms at some of the lowest respectable rates in the city. The Laurentian was prized by business travellers, budget travellers and perhaps most importantly, the city’s convention bureau, simply because it was a genuinely nice and inexpensive hotel in a choice location. The hotel returned about $1.8 million to CP annually in profit during the time they owned and operated it, between 1969 and 1976.

Canadian Pacific demolished the Laurentian two years later.

It was a move that baffled people. The hotel was large, fireproof, only thirty years old at the time of its demolition. It had been remodelled as recently as 1975-76 and was still popular and respected when it closed its doors for good.

So why demolish it?

It turns out that the competition between Canadian Pacific and Canadian National took an interesting turn once CN completed the Place Ville Marie project in 1962. If CN could remodel a massive section of the urban core, surely CP could do it too.

And so CP planned an absolutely massive project intended to rival and mirror Place Ville Marie. It was to be more than twice as large in surface area and feature a sixty floor office tower as centre-piece, and a major national bank (in this case the Bank of Montreal, rival to the Royal Bank over at PVM Tower I) as main tenant. An additional tower would serve as CP’s headquarters, and other towers were envisioned as well, notably a luxury apartment tower and a luxury hotel tower to round things out.

So why demolish the Laurentian Hotel?

There was considerable public opposition to the plan, yet Canadian Pacific argued nonetheless that in order to fully realize their vision they would have to clear out the space of its existing buildings (including Windsor Station). They said the Laurentian Hotel blocked CP-owned lands further west from access to (what was then known as) Dominion Square (today’s Place du Canada/Dorchester Square), and thus had to be eliminated so that the new project could have a prestigious address, and access to one of the city’s most iconic urban public spaces (for a complete analysis, check out Michael Fish’s essay on the public fight to save the Laurentian Hotel from the wrecking ball).

And so despite considerable and vocal public opposition Canadian Pacific demolished the Laurentian in 1978. A pity too; it was one of three prominent Streamline Moderne styled buildings built in Montreal in the 1930s and 1940s designed by Charles Davis Goodman (the other two being the Jewish General Hospital’s main pavilion and Ben’s Delicatessen, also since demolished).

At the same time the Laurentian came down, the hotel CP said would replace it stood abandoned across the street. The railroad had managed to convince Holiday Inn to build the largest hotel in its chain here in Montreal, in time for the 1976 Olympics. It was intended to be a 900-room luxury hotel tower and was to have featured multiple exterior elevators (a design quirk fashionable at the time). The project was estimated to cost $30 million, and Holiday Inn had spent that much by the fall of 1976, with only a partially completed tower to show for it and too late to profit off the tourism boost of the Olympiad. The company realized it was unlikely they’d quickly re-coup their investment, and the political and economic situation in Montreal towards the end of 1976 wasn’t optimistic to say the least.

And so they walked.

It would take another $20 million before Sheraton finally completed the tower and outfitted the hotel six years later, and to this day the building seems boring and otherwise out of place (if it weren’t for the fact that it’s part of a cluster of tall buildings).

Despite this and other major setbacks (the Bank of Montreal pulled out in the mid-1970s, opting instead to put the bank’s operations in the tallest building in Toronto, First Canadian Place), CP pressed on with its plan to build a massive office and residential complex on the 14-acres or so of land it owned west of Peel.

And ultimately nothing came of it. After acquiring 14-acres of land, CP would change course in the 1980s, first selling the site of the former Laurentian Hotel to be developed into the new head office of the Laurentian Bank, and then selling off the rest of their land holdings piecemeal over the subsequent thirty some-odd years.

The lasting effect of CP’s plan was a lot of undeveloped or under-utilized land immediately west of the city’s Central Business District from the late 1970s until quite recently. To put things in perspective, between 1978 and 1987 you could see the entirety of Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral (which is on the east side of Place du Canada) from as far west as Guy Street. In other words, for nine years there wasn’t much more than open lots, a few abandoned buildings and several large parking lots stretching half a kilometre along the south side of René Lévesque.

Montreal 1978
Montreal 1978

In a curious way I find all that open space impressive in its desolation. A massive hole in the urban fabric.

In any event, all that said, the current Holiday Inn project couldn’t be more different from what CP had planned in the mid-1970s.

The developer, Canvar, is going for it’s third iteration of an already successful hotel base and apartment tower design they’ve already introduced to the city.

Take note: not condos, luxury apartments.

Canvar also erected the Hilton Garden Inn on Sherbrooke and the V on Bleury & René Lévesque (which features a Marriott Courtyard at its base). Also worth noting, this will mark the return of Holiday Inn to Montreal’s Central Business District, as the former location on Sherbrooke was converted into a private student residence last year. The former Marriott Courtyard was located next door and was converted into a McGill student residence a few years earlier, and Canvar’s Hilton Garden Inn project lies immediately next to those and was completed in 2008.

So here’s an interesting phenomenon: on the one hand the old university-adjacent hotels on Sherbrooke were repurposed and converted into student housing, and on the other hand the former ‘hotel cluster’ has been unpacked and ‘regenerated’ elsewhere in the city.

Canvar boasts the V building was 85% occupied within six months. If that’s accurate then this tower will likely be completed on time and, barring any unforeseen quick downturns in the local real-estate market, may very well expect similar results. When the project was announced in November of last year, Canvar estimated the hotel would be completed within two years (in time for the anticipated 2017 tourism spike) and the whole project finished within three. Given their recent successes I don’t doubt they’ll do it again – the idea works.

The concept of pairing a hotel base with a residential tower is advantageous for multiple reasons. First, it’s unlikely a medium-sized Holiday Inn will fail with such a choice address. Second, the tower can be scaled down (or eliminated) if there’s a major shift in the market. Third, the pairing of high-end apartments and a hotel in the high-density business core of the city is efficient and immensely practical for the range of business tourism needs in Montreal.

The new Holiday Inn will be built next to the YUL project, which includes two 38-floor towers featuring 800 condo units (excavations for which have begun) as well as 17 townhouses and the renovation of the Lafontaine Mansion into a single-family home (!!!). Within five years there’s a pretty good chance the entirety of the Overdale block will be redeveloped, with thousands of new residents living in a space that had been vacant or underused for the better part of twenty five years.

Opinion isn’t unanimous as to whether Montreal can support the number of condo projects currently under construction, and there are some who are warning of a potentially disastrous shift in the market, particularly in smaller markets with less than stellar economies, that may be very difficult to absorb. However, these warnings have been repeated ad infinitum for several years (a decade ago people were worried about too many condos, some things never change). The developers are bullish, I think at least in part because the new generation of homeowners simply won’t have too many other options: on-island house values are very high, and sprawl has pushed ‘affordable suburbs’ to the very edge of what most are willing to endure in terms of a daily commute. Congestion on our roadways, coupled with major construction projects and the high costs associated with car ownership all make urban condos that much more attractive and infinitely more practical to young professionals.

And then there’s the fact city living is infinitely more rewarding simply in terms of accessibility to all the fun stuff the city has to offer. If all these new residential projects come to fruition, the city will be able to offer thousands of people quality housing with a strong re-sale value and all within walking distance of every conceivable service, major cultural institutions and entertainment, retail and leisure districts, not to mention the majority of the city’s major employers.

An attractive offer, and with plenty of variety to suit diverse tastes and lifestyles. Even if branded lifestyle condo-dwelling isn’t your bag, it may serve the needs of tens of thousands of people, the vast majority of which would become property owners and tax payers to the City of Montreal.

Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Perspectives on the City, Photographs

Montreal Photo of the Day – April 15th 2015

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Place du Canada staircase

Thought I’d try something new; I’ve got a ton of photos of the city, so I’ll add a new one every day from here on in.

Took this photo on Sunday April 12th, arguably the first really nice day of the year.

This staircase links Rue de la Gauchetiere with the Place du Canada complex.

It’s not obvious as the staircase is actually partially masked by the large slab of granite that hosts the Place du Canada Chateau Champlain sign at street level. In any event, it’s located between Place du Canada’s Gauchetiere street entrance and the entrance to the hotel.

The staircase leads up to a large open space that surrounds the Chateau Champlain’s tower that serves as a kind of overhead public plaza, in turn leading to the park across the street, which was once upon a time called Dominion Square but has been known as Place du Canada since 1967. So there’s a public park, a plaza and an office tower/hotel complex all referred to by the same name. At least they’re all in the same place…

The ‘sky bridge’ that links the Place du Canada complex south of de la Gauchetiere with Place du Canada to the north is unique in Montreal (or at least I can’t think of another viaduct that connects two public spaces over a city street), not only due to its inherent novelty, but also because it allows access to the office tower at the same elevation as Boul. René Lévesque despite the maybe 30-40 foot drop in elevation between the edge of the park and Saint Antoine further south.

Odd too that it was built during the reign of Mayor Jean Drapeau, who apparently wasn’t keen on the idea of elevated pedestrian walkways.

In any event, the plaza this staircase leads to is never terribly busy, and is blocked off from Place du Canada (the public park) as the latter is undergoing major renovations at the moment. I don’t seem to recall an entrance to the hotel from plaza level, though there are several exits from the building out onto the plaza. It’s a pity too; there’s a wrap-around walkway that leads to a terrace on the Peel Street side, and the space would make for a great setting for a restaurant in my opinion. From what I recall there’s a plaza level addition to the hotel, possibly the gym, that somewhat clumsily cuts the main plaza off from the generally sunnier terrace on the Peel Street side.

That said, highly recommended location for shots of the city’s Dorchester Square area, good vantage point for a lot of the taller towers and a refreshingly peaceful location if you just want a nice quiet place to think or read a book in the very heart of a bustling metropolis.

Commentary, Cultural commentary, History and Culture, Kondiaronk - My Montréal Experience, Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Perspectives on the City, Photographs, Scenes from the City, Social commentary, Urban Redevelopment

Yesterday and Today

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The bell tower of the former Saint Jaques Cathedral and the parking lot that preceded Place Emilie-Gamelin, 9th of June 1976. Photo by Vincent Massaro, credit to Archives de Montréal
The bell tower of the former Saint Jaques Cathedral and the parking lot that preceded Place Emilie-Gamelin, 9th of June 1976. Photo by Vincent Massaro, credit to Archives de Montréal

This is Berri Square on June 9th 1976, the year of our Olympiad.

I find this photo significant for a few reasons. First and foremost is that UQAM had not yet built its main campus.

That came three years later.

It only took three years to build UQAM’s main campus.

Let that sink in and think about how long it has taken the province to build the MUHC. Or finish the Dorval Interchange. Or complete the Train de l’Est.

Need I go on?

Why don’t we build as fast as we did thirty some odd years ago?

Warts and all, I find the Latin Quarter far more inviting and appealing today when compared to the photo above.

Back in 1976 there was no Grande Bibliotheque nor UQAM’s main campus. There was no large public space either (Place Emilie Gamelin would only be completed in 1992).

To think that the roof of Berri-UQAM was a parking lot for all those years…

This doesn’t feel like the transit and institutional hub I know, it feels barren and disconnected.

I guess that’s the second thing I find fascinating about this photograph – it’s deceptive.

There seems to be a lot of stuff missing, and the openness and lack of any kind of green space makes the area feel impoverished, and far less significant in terms of its function within the urban environment. This appears to be almost some kind of accident of urban planning.

But then you have to consider Berri-de-Montigny station (as it was called back then) had been completed a decade earlier and would have been as much of a transit hub as it is today. Consider Saint Denis would have been similar to how it is today in terms of its reputation as an ‘entertainment district’. UQAM’s main pavilion hadn’t yet been built but the university was using the building facing the bell tower of the former Saint Jacques Cathedral. The old bus depot would have been newish back then, and the large warehouse across the street was the main distribution centre for a major local grocery chain, and doubtless was humming with activity all night (it was later converted into a roller rink and concert venue). Place Dupuis would have been relatively new as well, offering high end commercial and corporate real estate as well as the Hotel des Gouverneurs, one of the first large hotels in the are aside from the old Gare Viger railway hotel.

Even though there’s virtually no green space (and consider as well the grounds around the remnants of the cathedral were closed to the public), the area nonetheless has a more open feel. I can imagine this area felt very different with all that open space and open sight lines allowing perspectives of the city that have been lost to time. Montreal would’ve looked different back then, and perhaps arguably looked better at a distance than it may have been up front.

That said, I think we need to be careful in how we look at Montreal’s urban past. This photo was taken in 1976 and a sizeable chunk of downtown Montreal looked a lot like this – large parking lots, large open lots, a lot less green space and fewer major institutions occupying the centre of the city. How could 1976 have been any kind of a ‘golden year’ in our city when so much of what makes our city great today simply didn’t exist at the time?

I’ve often argued we look at our past, particularly as it concerns our urban environment and urban quality of life, with rose coloured glasses.

Sure, we hosted the Olympics, the Habs were winning Stanley Cups left and right, the city’s economy was stronger and a Montrealer was Prime Minister.

But consider as well the exceptionally higher violent crime rates of the era (i.e. a hundred homicides a year), or that Montreal police morality squads prowled for young gays on Mount Royal. Consider the mansions and historic neighbourhoods replaced by skyscrapers and obliterated by highways, or the population shift to the suburbs and a downtown that turned into something of a ghost town after 6 pm. Imagine Montreal without Le Plateau or a resurgent Saint Henri, or any of the prized urban neighbourhoods we so covet today; we are a far more livable city now than we were then.

Forget about Montreal’s Golden Age. It hasn’t happened yet.

Commentary, Cultural commentary, History and Culture, Kondiaronk - My Montréal Experience, Montréal Architecture, Perspectives on the City, Photographs, Scenes from the City, Social commentary, Urban Redevelopment

A Thousand Words for this City in Time

Aerial perspective of the City of Montreal, ca. 1963 - Archives de Montréal
Aerial perspective of the City of Montreal, ca. 1962 РArchives de Montr̩al

I don’t know for certain but I’m guessing this shot was taken in the summer of 1962 or 1963.

It fascinates me because it shows our city at a crucial moment of transition.

Look closely at this photograph and think about what you don’t see.

No Bonaventure Expressway. No Ville Marie Expressway. No Métro. No Expo. No Tour de la Bourse nor Chateau Champlain.

And consider what you do see. Large neighbourhoods now lost to time; the Red Light, Griffintown, Goose Village, Faubourg à m’lasse.

This is Montreal right before the slum clearance gets thrown into full swing, before the era of the wrecking ball. Les Habitations Jeanne-Mance has already been built but despite it’s arguable success as a housing project, would never be replicated in our city. There were many other massive, somewhat utopian housing projects intended for downtown Montreal, but the few that were ultimately realized, like Habitat 67, would wind up condos auctioned off to the highest bidder.

For many this was not a particularly good time to live in Montreal, even if the economy was arguably stronger and there were greater local opportunities. For far too many, this photo is of a moment right before mass expropriations and the intentional destruction of urban neighbourhoods in the presumed name of progress.

Dorchester Boulevard has been widened by this point and serves notice of the next phase of apparent urban renewal – the highways. You can see the blacktop cutting a nice wide swath through the downtown, reminiscent of the Lachine Canal further south – neat and boxy, the next commercial artery. Dorchester was widened at the expense of its former estates and grand churches throughout the 1950s, expanded from a quiet and meandering tree-lined residential street into a stately minor highway.

The construction of the Bonaventure, Decarie and Ville Marie expressways further hampered the livability of the city for a considerable period of time, and we’re fortunate that there are plans in place to a) eliminate the Bonaventure expressway viaduct downtown and b) continue covering over the Ville Marie. In time we can only hope the remaining exposed sections of urban highway that have so thoroughly divided the city are eliminated as barriers. It’s a crucial component of our city’s urban rehabilitation.

This is Montreal at a crossroads. The end of the North American colonial metropolis, the beginnings of both the international and the self-conscious city.

The city you’re looking at was much smaller, geographically, than it is today, and when this photo was taken in 1962 the city’s population was only about 1.2 million people. The population of Montreal would grow to nearly 1.3 million people by mid-decade, but then depopulated by about 300,000 people over the course of the next thirty years. The population of Montreal didn’t surpass the high water mark of 1966 until 2006, and only as a result of the municipal reorganization and forced annexations of some populous on-island suburbs.

The reason I point this out is because this photograph represents the kind of built environment that developed to accommodate a city population that was once far more tightly packed at its core.

Consider this. Were you to get in an airplane and fly to the same spot today and take another photograph and compare the two, you’d see there were once many more buildings in this city, though today we have many more tall and otherwise large buildings occupying massive pieces of urban real estate. In the photo above you see a downtown where commerce, retail, residences, industries and institutions existed practically one atop another. Today you’d see a largely corporate sector that in some respects has very little to do with what Montreal actually is. Industry and residential areas have been pushed to the periphery.

Zooming in you can see Montreal’s downtown was once filled with a great variety of smaller office buildings, not to mention traditional triplexes, in places we no longer associate with small businesses or neighbourhoods. Much of the human scale architecture, the fundamentals of city-building, was gutted in the name of civic improvement, and worse, was done so in an area of exceptional architectural variety and vitality.

But such as it is, it’s history. What’s done is done. We would be wise not to develop our city so haphazardly and inconsiderately in the future.

Now, all that said…

Looking at this photograph I also see just how far we’ve come. In the thirty years after this photo was taken downtown Montreal transformed into a massive parking lot and the urban vitality of the city suffered. All too often whole blocks were wiped out before the intended replacement project had even gained funding (Overdale immediately comes to mind). Complexe Guy-Favreau, as an example, was an open pit for much of the 1970s. At one point the intersection of McGill College and Boul. de Maisonneuve was four parking lots and the Champ de Mars was a parking lot too (before someone had the bright idea to turn it back into a commanding public green and local historical site). Demolition teams tore strips through the cityscape to install Métro lines and highways, obliterating nearly everything in their paths with no concern paid to the negative effects it would have on local livability.

We don’t develop like this anymore, and it seems as though a lot of recent attention – broadly speaking over the course of the last twenty years or so – has been placed on rehabilitation and rejuvenation, both of the core and the first ring suburbs (like NDG, St. Henri, the Shaughnessy Village, Plateau and Mile End).

There’s no doubt in my mind Montreal is a superior city to live in today than at any point since this photo was taken. The city has more to offer its citizens today than it ever has, and I hope we soon start to realize this. For as great as past achievements may have been, they do not compare to what our accrued potential has made us capable of.

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What a Night it Was

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6:15 pm on a Friday night and Lionel-Groulx is busier than I’d expect. Throwback jerseys abound. Suburban knuckleheads on pilgrimage, smiles and high spirits all around.

The train arrives packed and we press ourselves in tightly, as though compelled by some invisible Tokyo subway platform attendant at rush hour. Squeezed in I find myself face to face with old friends and a common agenda.

Baseball. Lost opportunities. Nostalgia. Hope. Rebirth. Novelty.

Being there…

The Métro took it’s sweet time snaking it’s way through the tunnels of the city centre to Pie-Ix, pausing longer and longer as we slowly crossed the city, each time an increasingly agitated brakeman telling us, for the love of god, to let go of the antique mechanical doors that not a week ago nearly halved the head of some old woman.

It was slow and uncomfortable and no one cared. For the first time in a decade there was a baseball game to attend and that’s all that mattered.

Disembarking at Pie-IX I quickly lost track of my friends in the absolutely massive crowd surging its way to the stadium entrance. I had never seen the station ever look quite so busy, and a line stretched from the M̩tro turnstiles to the stadium and back again, pulsing to the beat of the Bucket Drummer. My heart sank Рwas this the line to get in?

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We quickly learned that this was the now infamous will-call wait line, thousands strong and perhaps the single longest line of human beings I’ve ever seen in my entire life. My pace quickened. Tickets in hand we’d waltz right on in.

Walking into Montreal’s Olympic Stadium is very much like stepping back in time. Almost immediately I noticed my cellphone reception was shot, and that the seething mass of vendor kiosks and food carts reminded me not so much of baseball as it did a kind of food court you’d find in the middle of an epically massive 1980s video game arcade. Pink and baby clue neon lights and harsh overhead lighting stands out in my mind. Oddly appropriate and cacophonous Techno music was playing in the background as an assorted gaggle of sports fans – many of whom wearing Alouettes and Montreal Canadiens jerseys and caps – slurped down overpriced poutine and pizza slices from carts seemingly shipped over from La Ronde.

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Security guards and staff were decked out in clothing that must have been designed in the late-1980s and stored in boxes since the Expos’ folded. This, in conjunction with the overall retro aesthetic and lack of technology (no cellphone reception, no Interac, too few and generally outdated ATMs, antique scoreboards etc.) only re-enforced the strangeness of the situation. It was utterly bizarre.

I overcame the bewildering scene and propelled myself towards the upper deck seats behind home plate with my name on them. Moving swiftly through the bowels of the Big O comes naturally enough – the shape and size of the immense structure compels movement, the ramps almost make you want to run – it was apparent enough to all the children racing around.

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When I get to the upper deck with my date we discussed whether we should grab our seats or get something to nosh on. We both had an admittedly absurd craving for a ballpark frank we knew we’d gladly pay a hefty sum for just to say we’ve had the experience of doing so. Eating a hotdog while watching an MLB game in the Big O.

Strike that off the ‘things to do in Montreal’ checklist…

Such occurrences are rare these days.

We decided to take our seats imagining there would be vendors working the bleachers, and besides, the game had already began. That’s why we came here after-all.

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And not a moment later there I was watching something that hadn’t been seen in our city in just about a decade and I personally hadn’t witnessed in twenty-seven years. I wasn’t much of a baseball fan growing up, I preferred hockey, and later rugby. My interest in and appreciation of baseball came much later, and is nearly entirely as a consequence of the saga of the Montreal Expos as a franchise and the lasting impression the club (and to a greater extent the sport and the stadium) has had on our city.

Baseball in Montreal isn’t entirely about baseball. It’s about the city and its people.

Baseball is symbolic. Baseball is metaphor.

And resurrecting the Expos, long shot though it may be, has everything to do with people power and nothing to do with baseball as a business.

And yet, sitting there, one of 46,000 fans who filled the Big O on Friday night, I couldn’t help but think Warren Cromartie and the Montreal Baseball Project had succeeded at least in rounding first base as far as they’re own business case was concerned. They had proved that, ten years after the loss of the Expos, professional baseball could still draw significant interest in Montreal. Then they proved it again Saturday afternoon when 50,000 people showed up to the second part of the Jays-Mets pre-season double-header.

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Think about it – what kind of a game was this? An exhibition game between the Jays and the Mets, with the ground crew sponsored by the Quebec Egg Council, at the stadium that’s always been ‘too far away’ to be of any use? A total no-frills affair of no real consequence for either ‘away’ team? Just this first step alone was a bit of a long-shot in its own right. The stadium looked like it had just been re-opened after being completely shuttered for the last decade; the back bleachers were dusty with old cigarette butts still lying where they had been extinguished underfoot decades past.

But none of these minor and major inconveniences mattered. Everyone was happy to be watching a ball game. The stadium was nearly full, and it has more than twice the capacity of any of the other major sports venues in our city. No one was bitching about politics, or even this year’s endless winter. The crowd was as diverse as the city, with fans cheering both teams despite the assumption we’d be rooting for the Blue Jays out of some kind of misguided patriotism. The most awkward moment of the night was doubtless the half-hearted attempt to get a bunch of Montrealers to sing the Blue Jays’ version of ‘take me out to the ball game’ but even though I find group sing-alongs fascistic in nature and couldn’t possibly cooperate the crowd was in one of those typically Montreal ‘anything goes’ moods and saved face by joining in at the end.

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The game itself was great and provided plenty of excitement, but I can’t help but wonder how many spectators were thinking to themselves, pretty much all night, ‘how long will we have to wait until this happens again?’

After all, we don’t want to be teased, and Montrealers are sensitive enough as is.

What I saw on Friday night was step in the right direction and proof not only of baseball’s viability, but of the Olympic Stadium’s utility as well. I imagine the next step for Cromartie and the MBP will be to secure one or more regular season games to see if they can replicate their recent successes. From there planning would shift to next year and a set of exhibition and regular season games played at the Big O on a set schedule, say eight games over the span of four months to see if baseball can be sustained past the novelty stage. If all that works they’ll have much of their business case already made and all the evidence they need to support it before seriously starting the MLB-courtship, franchise-development and stadium design and financing stages.

So we shouldn’t get our hopes up we’ll see the Expos return any time soon, but I think it’s a safe bet we’ll see more baseball at the Big O in general.

My personal hope and desire is that the people in charge over at the RIO (Olympic installations board) get funding for minor aesthetic and functional improvements and do all they can to secure more sporting events at the Big O generally speaking. In a really ideal world some kind of a deal would be worked out to secure a set number of CFL and MLS games (with anticipated over-sized crowds), in addition to more exhibition and/or regular season MLB games and maybe even an NFL exhibition match too. Why not? It’s a sports venue, the people in charge of it should be in the business of ensuring it’s used for large-capacity sporting events.

The experience made me think the Big O could be the kind of ‘people’s stadium’ with local teams playing a few games each season at the Big O with heavily discounted tickets for the upper deck sections so as to encourage high attendance (and further ensure pro sports remains accessible to the people who have helped subsidize their development, both directly and indirectly.

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On a closing note, two other things worth mentioning. First, when I ordered my franks I concluded the transaction in French, my mother tongue. The vendor, upon hearing my Anglophone accent decided to switch to English. I continue speaking French, to which he apologized. He said, ‘I’m sorry, I thought you spoke English’.

I said I do, and that I speak French as well and I typically just go with whatever’s most instinctive at a given moment. I told him he should never apologize for being so accommodating, it’s far too stereotypically Canadian.

We shared a laugh.

Much later on, travelling back home on the Métro, I noticed the determined stride and Lupine-blue eyes of Gilles Duceppe leaving the crowded Métro train in a huff. I said, rather too excitedly, ‘hey look it’s Gilles Duceppe!’ to which the crowd responded with ‘ooohs’ and ‘awwws’, such as it is when local aristocracy tread too close to subterranean common-folk.

What a night it was…