When my parents were growing up, the Kon-Tiki was a top-flight Montréal resto and a true local institution. Apparently it was known far and wide and outlived the 1960s Polynesian fad by a considerable margin. It certainly helped that they were located in one of the most fashionable hotels in the city at that time, not to mention a stellar decor. Kinda wish resurrecting restaurants was a thing.
Here’s something to think about. The above photo was indicated as taken in 1959 and is pointed East along the street which would eventually become Boul. de Maisonneuve (which was largely carved out of the existing cityscape while the Métro was being constructed in the mid-1960s).
On the right side of the picture (which was taken from about Stanley Street; we’ll use Burnside as our left/right dividing line) we can see two large buildings. The one in the foreground is the Hermes Building, where Copacabana Night Club is located. Behind it, hugging the right side of the image is what was once the Mount Royal Hotel, today the Cours Mont-Royal. The intersections, as you proceed up the street is, alleyway, Peel, Metcalfe, Mansfield, McGill College, Victoria, University at which point there seems to be row houses either at Union or Aylmer. The whitish building on the right is probably the Eaton’s Dept. Store with the darker building behind it being was is today the Bay.
Just past the Mount Royal Hotel, home of Montréal’s once-famous Kon-Tiki Polynesian restaurant, is another former culinary institution, Ben’s Delicatessen, visible to the right of the street, about half way up the centre of the pic. Everything else in this picture, including everything to the left of Burnside, has been demolished. What was developed in its place was an entirely new financial core known at the time as Place du Centre, a massive development scheme which used Maissoneuve and McGill College as its focal point. Beginning with the demolition of Burnside, the creation of Boul. de Maisonneuve and the development of the Métro in the mid-late 1960s, this sector was then transformed by new commercial real-estate construction which lasted up until the major renovation of McGill College in the late 1980s. Twenty years of sustained development, based off a master plan, and almost all residential housing in this area completely erased.
I’m not sure if this is a cautionary tale – city’s need to build, and the area looks great. Still, it gives one moment to pause. If almost everything in this picture can be erased and replaced within twenty years, how will other parts of the city look twenty years from now?
And by the way, it took me the better part of an hour to figure out exactly where this picture was taken and which way it’s looking. Look at it and ask yourself where else in the city this picture might fit.
This picture shows the demolitions necessary to create Boul. de Maisonneuve to the West of Stanley, where Burnside terminated. Note that this picture, much like the last one, was taken from the roof of the Drummond Court building, in the middle of the street. As you can see here, the building stood up until about ten years ago when it was demolished, along with the old YMCA building, to make way for the Lepine Condo Towers. The city punched a hole through the building’s main floor to allow thru-traffic on Boul. de Maisonneuve.
There’s a lot more in this photo which was saved from destruction, but then again the downtown can only have so many ‘cores’ right? Two buildings stand out here, namely, the Royal George Apartments at top left (now integrated into the Concordia Library Building) and Guy Tower, before its 1990 renovation at top right (both are noticeably white on a grey background). I’d date this picture about the same time as the last one, late-1950s, though likely early 1960s.
Some pics I snapped walking around Westmount Square a few weeks back.
The Westmount Square complex was designed by Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1967. It is composed of two residential towers, an office tower and a large squat building with additional commercial office space, all of which is centered on a pedestrian plaza which is further linked to an underground shopping concourse. Access to Atwater Métro station is provided by means of a link which further accesses Place Alexis-Nihon.
Back in the day, Westmount Square was a prestige address sans-pareil. It also anchored the extreme Western edge of what’s considered downtown Montréal, further providing an interesting link between the commercial aspects of the cities of Westmount and Montréal. The success of Westmount Square doubtless led to the construction of Place Alexis-Nihon’s towers in the mid-1980s, in addition to the gentrification of Greene Avenue and the further development of several high-capacity residential towers around the site. Nowadays the entire area (focused on Atwater Métro) is in dire need of a renaissance, and Westmount Square is no longer the busy beehive of activity it once was.
Evidence of this can be found in the plaza, which is starting to look a little worse for wear. It could use a clean-up, a spruce-up, new vegetation and it would be nice if the fountain was operational – something to draw people into the interior plaza, or possibly, something to serve as a focal point in the middle of the plaza to draw people’s attention towards walking across the plaza. Unlike other more successful examples, such as the plazas at PVM or Place-des-Arts, Westmount Square doesn’t seem to be able to draw many pedestrians into its centre as a means of diffusing traffic away from the street. Perhaps this is a result of fewer people working at Westmount Square, and fewer still are both employed and live in the area. One can tell by walking around the plaza that it would have at one point in the past had significantly more thru-traffic.
It’s fascinating to note that the site has many access points, including a Métro access on Greene Avenue and another on Wood, pictured here. I wonder if other Atwater Métro access points were developed later, or if at one point there were simply more Métro users living in Westmount. These obviously high-capacity entrances always seem to be devoid of people.
In terms of future planning, both the City of Westmount and the City of Montréal would be wise to collaborate on a design master plan for the entire Atwater/Cabot Square/Westmount Square/ Greene Avenue area. It’s already well connected to the Métro, and has a wide variety of diverse spaces – including institutional, medical, educational, commercial and residential. That being said, the area seems to lack a major anchor, something the Forum once provided. A major cultural space in the area, coupled with new apartment or condo towers, may just do the trick, but there would have to be a sincere effort made to diversify the types of units available. In other words, concentrating on expensive condo units won’t work in and of itself. In addition, a cohesive design scheme, one that would identify the entire area as a distinct neighbourhood/community would be ideal, but again, this would require a heretofore unknown degree of cooperation between these two distinct communities.
Food for thought – most of the work is already done, but Montréal and Westmount need to keep up with the pace of development and urban renewal taking place elsewhere in the downtown. An area like this ought to be an unparalleled focal point for diverse activities and economic activity, but this won’t happen as long as development is done piecemeal, which is kinda how this area feels. Westmount Square stands head and shoulders as the true gem of this collection of tall buildings, but when viewed as part of the whole, stands out for its uniformity and coherence in a neighbourhood seemingly developed according to market whims, rather than good urban planning.
It’s funny, I look at the above picture and wonder how it’s possible that the Sun seems to be setting on the East side of the Bridge, and then I remember that Montreal’s Sun rises in the South. It’s amazing how we’ve survived this long working with a sense of direction based on initial observations by surveyors in the 17th century. It’s a mistake in planning and design that we carry to this day, and influences more minute details about life in Montréal than I think anyone cares to imagine. We’re unique because of a mistake, an accident, perhaps even idiocy – it’s hard to say.
I also look at the photo above and think to myself – why don’t we have this instead:
If you’ve ever crossed the Jacques-Cartier Bridge’s pedestrian crossing, you know it’s rather severe limitations. Despite having both a bike path and a pedestrian path and a newly installed suicide prevention barrier (which kinda gives it a Gitmo-esque feeling, albeit without the razor wire), the bridge doesn’t seem to attract much in the way of pedestrian traffic, unless its closed for the fireworks! When this is the case, more than 50,000 people tend to use it, not necessarily crossing it completely, but at the very least walking across a portion of it. Imagine if the Cartier Bridge were returned to its original design, which incorporated tram rails (though they were never used) and equal sections devoted to pedestrian and vehicular traffic. It just so happens that the bridge is book-ended by Papineau and Longueuil Metro stations – a tram running along the bridge connecting both stations seems elementary, and could potentially allow for a reduction of vehicular use, which would undoubtedly help to prolong the lifespan of the bridge. Moreover, by re-focusing bridge use so that it is comfortable for pedestrians to cross, you also develop a stronger relationship between communities on either side, and can help foster a conceptual understanding of Longueuil being a walkable extension of Montréal proper.
Then I look at a picture like this and think, couldn’t we build a box over the roadway, or stack two roadways one-atop-the-other with a five-lane wide pedestrian/cyclist ‘plaza’ extending across the bridge?
Major repair work is required for both the Champlain Bridge and the Mercier Bridge, which is apparently going to have its entire deck re-surfaced, something which hasn’t been done since the bridge was built in the mid-1930s. The fact that there hasn’t been new South-bound bridge construction since the 1960s is another problem altogether, and unless we begin major new infrastructure projects by ourselves, we’ll have to wait until the provincial and federal governments can get their collective shit together. And remember – talk is so very cheap these days.
This seems to me to be part of a larger problem here in Montréal; we’ve become excessively dependent on sponsorship from two levels of government outside of ourselves and can’t do much in terms of large-scale infrastructure planning over a long period of time. Consider how we plan to develop the Metro, piecemeal segments and politically motivated extensions where three local mayors have to compete for the public’s support. With the bridges in the state that they’re in, a Yellow Line extension deep into the South Shore may be an ideal first move for the STM, but I doubt that construction will be as fast as it was in the mid-1960s, when 26 stations were completed – each with its own architect mind you – in four years.
Without well-stocked local coffers and a large though balanced tax-base to provide new investment funds, both the city and metropolitan region are handicapped by requiring outside sponsorship, and therefore must engage in the kind of backroom politics that have created the extreme amounts of corruption and collusion currently found in the halls of power. Moreover, this atmosphere of corruption and nepotism make it unlikely the voters would support city-administered revenue-generating endeavours, such as citizen’s bonds, municipal shares and various other investment tools the city ought to be using to stimulate funding for infrastructure projects and economic development. In short – the reigns of power aren’t in our hands, and we’re held hostage by this.
Perhaps it’s time to start a ferry service.
Who’s got a canoe?
They sway and swing gently, as if they were being carried by gusts of wind. As they dance their eerie industrial ballet, a structure rises around them. Will they call it White Elephant?
It reminds me of an anecdote once related to me by Prof. Matthew Barlow at Concordia, who taught me the ‘Irish Experience in Montreal’ back in 2006. Great course, though I wish I had paid more attention at the time. In any event, he told us about bringing his ten-year-old nephew out on a walk through the city a few years prior, and the child was astounded to the cranes then more prevalent within the downtown core. He asked incredulously what kind of buildings they were, what kind of purpose they served. The response, that they in essence assisted in the construction of tall buildings took a while to sink into the youth’s head – he had never seen a construction crane before, despite growing up in the city. This point was, as you can imagine, rather significant for my professor.
I spent the better part half an hour trailing this guy and several of his compatriots one beautifully sunny Saturday morning a few weeks back in Westmount Park. It was funny, I had never come across such curious squirrels before – they seemed intrigued by me, and enjoyed mugging for the camera. Maybe they’re vying for a much sought-after Disney contract. I’m sure Rescue Rangers is probably going to be revived sometime soon.
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I had the immense pleasure of once again providing note-taking and picture-taking services to a local NGO. Here’s an atypical view oft he Con-U Library Atrium. It’s weird, I don’t think it nearly looked this good whenever I was walking through there as a student. Bizarre how quickly a perspective can change. Admittedly, I tended to spend little time sitting around in the Atrium, and rarer still were the opportunities to do so with the sun coming in as it did that day. It reminded me in fact of the very different building I first encountered in the summer of 2004, as I prepared to begin my academic journey at Con-U. I remember sitting in the Atrium reminiscing on where I had come from and thought about where I was going. I had no idea, but at least the building made me feel confident and at ease at the time.
Basically I thought it was a prime snapshot of a stereotype I’d heard about, but then I heard them speak.
I can’t ever imagine living somewhere in the city without a balcony, terrace, porch or rooftop to go hang out on. This summer I’ve got an unprotected nook. Adding that to the list…
Never been completely sure what to make of this. I don’t like it, but I don’t mind it either. I’m glad it’s there, but it seems superfluous and out of place.