Category Archives: Urban Redevelopment

History and Culture, Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Urban Redevelopment

North-South Axes in Montr̩al РPerspective on the City { No.9 }

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The Plaza at Place Ville-Marie - work of the author, Summer 2010

The plaza at Place Ville-Marie was most recently renovated in 2005, which resulted in its current configuration with significant new green space, flora, planters and glass skylight/entrances over the staircases leading o the shopping concourse below. Back in 1968, this space was the site chosen by Pierre Trudeau to hold a major election rally. As it was far more open-concept back then:

Pierre Trudeau's 1968 election rally at PVM - not the work of the author
Construction on St-Urbain, Summer 2009

Looking down St-Urbain with the ubiquitous summertime construction going on. I suppose the new concert hall is going up immediately to the right of this shot. Anyone know if the entrance will face St-Urbain or will it face inwards to the plaza at Place des Arts? Any chance there will be both?

I’ve always felt this stretch of St-Urbain is without much character, or at least there’s not much unifying the streetscape. It’s unfortunate that it serves as a continuous ‘loading dock’ for several blocks. Still, pretty to see the Aldred Building, rising steadily like a self-conscious fountain – never ostentatious as its almost invisible from ground level, muted in context when seen from a distance.

The view of the city from McGill Street, looking North towards Square Victoria

I love the view from this spot; so much character and bold vitality. Since the renovation and opening of Square Victoria circa 2002-2003, this area has become more ordered, though curiously this order provides better vistas along McGill, Beaver Hall Hill and within Square Victoria. Not to mention the covering of the open trench along Viger helped mend a terrible tear on the urban fabric. Now, this axis connects the uptown corporate and retail hub with the International Quarter downtown. Make no mistake, this is the link which will allow for continued development of the Faubourg des Recollets/ Griffintown region of the CBD, along with the Duke Street developments on the other side of the Bonaventure Expressway. Is it possible that the Montréal of the future will have two pronounced southern-reaching ‘arms’ of office towers and condos, tapering down along McGill while tapering up along Duke?

A key component to successful redevelopment of this area will be the introduction of more ‘street-level’ services and some low-density housing. Moreover, it could certainly use public services, such as schools, community centers, theaters, libraries etc. No city is built uniquely of condos, lest we wish to look like Toronto.

History and Culture, Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Montréal Stories, Unrealized development projects, Urban Redevelopment, What were they thinking?

Perspective on the City { No.8 }

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McGill College Avenue during a snowstorm - work of the author

McGill College, once upon a time, was a narrow one-lane street, crumbling on both sides with the remnants of the residential buildings and small-scale businesses once typical of St. Andrew and St. George’s ward. By the 1970s, a good portion of this stretch featured surface parking lots.

The redevelopment of McGill College Avenue was a long and drawn-out process, thanks in part to Jean Drapeau’s insistence in developing a new concert hall for the OSM on the site.

Almost thirty years later, McGill College Avenue is a wide-open success story, acting as a central north-south commercial and retail artery with plenty of tall buildings making the best of this prestige address. Along the avenue, you’ll notice that the two tallest buildings north of PVM are positioned diagonally across from one another, and a variety of building heights permits generous amounts of sunlight to flood the space (enjoy a nice outdoor lunch here in the Summer). Oddly, it’s not the most traveled street, and can be transformed into an open plaza on occasion. It’s long redevelopment saga involved many prominent figures in the local architecture and urbanism scene, including Phyllis Lambert, who opposed the development plan of a company she partly owned. Even more bizarre, the two architects Ms. Lambert engaged to build the CCA, Peter Rose and Errol Argun, both played significant roles in the redevelopment of McGill College. Rose worked on the renovation master plan while Ergun designed the Place Montréal Trust tower (currently, the Astral Media Building, which used to be co-located at the LaSalle College building in the Shaughnessy Village on Ste-Catherine’s, which was also designed by Ergun).

As you can see, the back-and-forth between the city, the developers and the public continued for some time, featuring a wide variety of different proposals, which included some plans to block off the view of Mount Royal entirely, while others proposed odd looking bridges to connect retail shopping centers and department stores overhead, and then underground.

In essence, what we have today is the result of many, many compromises. And despite some bruised egos and a lot of frustration twenty some odd years ago, today we’ve got something that works, and is unmistakably Montréal.

Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Political commentary, Urban Redevelopment, What were they thinking?

The STM is planning on selling you out…

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Hector Guimard's Métro entrance at Square Victoria - credit to Wally Gobetz for the great shot

The STM recently announced its intention to solicit corporate sponsorship for the Métro, something which has never been done before. This is not the same as posting advertisements; the new plan seeks sponsorship of the individual lines, with branding occurring pretty much everywhere, from the ubiquitous, landmark Métro signs to the ticket kiosks to the maps, branding, branding, branding everywhere.

Andy Riga has excellent coverage of this issue, which can be found here: Metropolitan News

I think Michael Fish really nailed it when he asks if the corporatist elements of our society have any shame left. No, clearly they don’t – the STM won’t make more than $155 million over ten years. When you compare that to the billions of dollars per year in the operations budget, you begin to get that queasy feeling the corporate branding will be going to line the pockets of city administrators and STM corporate governance. It certainly won’t speed up the deployment of our new trains, that much is certain.

As you can imagine, both Projet Montréal and Transport2000 have come out against this plan. I for one am also against it – our Métro was conceived as being sponsorship-free, or if you’d prefer, people-power is the sponsorship. Frankly it’s bad enough we have to contend with television, advertisements, scrolling-advertisements and the variety of people actually handing things over to you, do we really need to ‘ride the Bell line to switch at Monsanto Station?’ Moreover, do we really want the pride of Montréal’s public-transit network sponsored by, say, General Motors Corporation?

Enough is enough Рif the STM really wants to increase overall revenue, they should stick with the original plan, that is Рto gradually extend the M̩tro to cover the entire metropolitan region. Doing so would allow the STM to collect revenue from more than 3 million people, as opposed to half that number currently.

The system was designed to put art and architecture to the forefront, but gradually, we’ve let the STM remove artwork and alter the design of the stations without adequately consulting the artistic community which designed the stations in the first place. Initially the system was designed to act as a new kind of public art gallery, in which each station could be experienced for its own artistic merit. What happened to that?

Think about the lost artwork the next time you’re in McGill Métro station, where the stained glass mural has big gaping holes which never get fixed, yet the rest of the station can be covered in advertisements overnight.

I strongly encourage my fellow Montréalers to resist this invasion and manipulation of public space. I for one will deface any corporate sponsorship I see. Let’s see how much of that $15.5 million per annum they can save when they have to contend with rider dis-satisfaction and a population hell-bent on vandalizing corporate sponsorship.

History and Culture, Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Urban Redevelopment

Perspective on the City { No. 5 }

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Fountain - work of the author, Summer 2009

This is the PNB-Paribas building on McGill College at the corner of Boulevard de Maisonneuve. It, along with almost all the other major developments on this avenue, is the product of a major urban renovation project initiated by the city with Vincent Ponte having worked on some master-plans back when he was designing the multi-level systems of Place Bonaventure and Place Ville-Marie. The avenue was widened into its present form, with a total of six new tall buildings, not to mention the Eaton Centre, constructed between 1976 and 1992, with the majority of construction occurring between 1980 and 1988. This was one of the primary urban redevelopment projects of the late-Drapeau years, and it created an entirely new focal point for the city, not to mention creating an awesome vista and monumental avenue, visually linking the Mountain, the Cross, McGill and Place Ville-Marie.

The re-development of McGill College Avenue itself spawns from two other re-development projects, including the “Place du Centre” development project of the early-mid 1970s. As Drapeau described it, it was Montréal’s ‘second-phase’ of urban renewal, and as we can see here, the sector extending east from McGill College over Boul. de Maisonneuve until about Union was still raw and exposed from when the Métro was carved through in the early 1960s. Hard to imagine this area was, a mere forty years ago, barren, open – yet another open trench on a cityscape that was once badly scarred in the name of urban renewal. I never really knew the city in this respect, but the demolitions and excavations necessary to complete these projects had at one point led to a generally chaotic feel in the city, in addition to a profound awareness of the multi-lateral nature of the city. Moreover, these specific projects would’ve contributed to a far from homogeneous urban fabric, and the removal of these gashes, or should I say there slow erasing, will provide the city with endless make-work projects.

1. The Ville-Marie Expressway divided Montréal’s West End from the ‘city below the hill’ when it was constructed in the late-60’s and early-70’s. Far more divisive than the raised highway further west was the tunnel and open trench system beginning around Rue de la Montagne. Until the early part of the last decade, the open trench cut Beaver Hall Hill off from Square Victoria. The International Quarter, completed between 2000 and 2003, largely addressed this issue.

2. Boul. de Maisonneuve was essentially carved out at the same time the Métro was constructed, as they effectively follow the same trajectory from Place-des-Arts to Atwater. Not only did it connect several different streets, it also created this architectural oddity:

The Drummond Court - so much a hole they put a hole through it

3. The grand-daddy of them all was the open trench from Cathcart to René-Lévesque, atop which Place Ville-Marie was built. For over fifty years city politicians, CN and various real-estate developers argued over what could be done to re-connect this space with the city around it. The end-result: perhaps the defining focal point of our city, and the epicenter of the Underground City.

4. The Decarie Expressway is likely the next main thoroughfare slated for a major renewal effort, as it cuts the West End suburbs from the city core and has made the space through which it passes unfortunately utilitarian. In other words, it could be spruced up, and I for one have always thought a massive linear park would cause area real-estate value to rise significantly.

More on this issue later…

History and Culture, Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Urban Redevelopment, Worth reconsidering

Montréal in 1900

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The Royal Victoria Hospital, Montréal ca. 1900

I was gifted a picture-book from around 1900, technically a ‘souvenir’ book all about Montréal dating from the turn of the 20th century, a few years back, but never got around to scanning the pics. It’s amazing how things have changed, though I’m certain you’ll all be glad to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s fascinating how elements of our culture, society and general characteristics haven’t changed a bit, even though in some areas the urban environment is completely different, seemingly changing with every generation. What a paradoxical city we live in! With regards to the above, notice how clean it looks, the well-manicured lawns and the subtle curves of the paved walk. Also, check out the gatehouse. Is it any wonder, upon visiting my brother for the first time here in 1988 I asked my father ‘why we were visiting a castle?’

Place d'Armes, looking Southeast, ca. 1900

Here’s the financial centre of Montréal, circa 1900. The New York Life Insurance Building, to the left, was the first skyscraper in Canada. Built between 1887 and 1889, it would house the premier legal library in Canada on the 9th and 10th floors, just below the clock. Also found on this square back in 1900, the Bank of Montréal’s head-office, the Post Office, numerous smaller banks and insurance companies, let alone the still-dominating twin spires of Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Bank of Montréal head-office and Post Office building, Place d'Armes ca. 1900

Sherbrooke Street, ca. 1900

Even though it clearly states ‘looking West’, I can imagine it would’ve looked about the same facing East. Can’t figure the cross-street though. Love the residential character of Sherbrooke Street back then.

Peel Street High School, where the Cours Mont-Royal now stands

I wonder if downtown public schools will ever make a come-back. It feels odd living in a city where the only downtown schools are generally private, or FACE. May become a necessity if the city is successful in encouraging more people to emigrate back into the city.

Harbourfront, Montréal ca. 1900

This picture looks as though it should be in the dictionary next to the expression ‘hustle & bustle’.

St-Catherine's looking east from Peel

Again, notice the residential feel to some of our busiest, highest capacity urban streets. Seems quaint by comparison.

Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Urban Redevelopment

Perspective on the city { no.3 }

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November Rain at Phillip's Square - work of the author, December 2008

Had this conversation with a good friend many moons ago. Should the city have lighting regulations? Perhaps even individual building lighting uniformity and/or some sort of municipal agency tasked with ensuring the highest quality natural and artificial lighting throughout the metropolis? This may sound crazy, but good lighting can make or break public space, and in certain circumstances, can create some rather striking street scenes. If you have a chance, take a walk down de Maisonneuve near Peel and Stanley and see the new lighting set-up there. Also, is it me or is it terribly discouraging, aesthetically-speaking, to see an office tower with all kinds of different lighting. Especially when it comes to all-glass modernist towers, bad lighting makes the building look uncared for. Just a thought…