Anywhootenanny, apparently Montrealers were as bored with themselves back then as we are today, and Montreal’s basic offerings for entertainment and leisure may have felt a bit stale even to locals twenty-five years ago. City’s with major tourist draws always tend to make the locals a bit cranky, as though they themselves have not delighted in the city so many tourists go gaga for. I get that feeling time and again, like I’ve seen it all, but I’m a creature of habit who’s easily entertained.
Well this mini-doc would certainly appeal to Hipsters. For one, the ‘tour guide’ Errol or Harold, seems to be the quintessential proto-Hipster, washed up on our shores from what was doubtless a less open minded community in the United States. He takest he camera crew to visit some of the various odds and ends that made late-1980s, early-1990s Montreal a lot of fun.
Third, and here’s the icing on the cake, our intrepid host takes us what then passed for seedy entertainment (like going to a, gasp, heavy metal show at Foufounes), or getting your car washed at the erotic car wash.
Perhaps my older readers could fill me in – did we all get a little strange back then? I seem to recall a proliferation of strip clubs with video arcades on the ground floor, teen prostitution rings, Jo Jo Psychic Savard, street-side erotic photography studios, a lurching Serbian strongman who pulled buses with his beard and a whole lot of other stuff seemingly all coming to fore back then.
Suffice it to say, this mini-doc is kind of adorable. In retrospect I think we really are a far more conservative society than we like to admit if this is what passed for ‘scandalous’ twenty some-odd years ago. It’s comparatively quite tame.
Peel looking south towards the CN Stockyards – late 1970s. Photo credit to La Presse
I came across the above photograph browsing Flickr a while back and was struck what an excellent representation it is of the deurbanization of Montreal’s city centre – there was once a rather vibrant community south of Saint Antoine Street. The photo above is taken about halfway down Peel Street south of Boul. de la Gauchetiere. Just out of frame along the sidewalk at left is Place du Canada. On the right, Windsor Station, which at the time was still being used as a train station. On the other side of the intersection, the Le Coloniale tavern, and further down the block at the corner of Saint Jacques, the Queens Hotel, just before its abandonment. It would be demolished in 1988 as it was infamously judged to be on the verge of total structural collapse. Richard Bergeron often remarks how he watched demolition crews slam the wrecking ball into the walls three or four times before it would even start to give. The Queens Hotel had a capacity of 400 rooms, was a heritage site and anchored an entire city block of myriad smaller buildings of diverse styles, as you can plainly see in the photo above. Further down the block the CN Stockyards, also nearing the end of its utility and presence in the urban environment. Further still, one of the areas once numerous industrial operations. This photograph was taken just over thirty years ago, at a time in which many Montrealers were only just beginning to bemoan the loss of economic status as a consequence of the deindustrialization of the area colloquially referred to as Griffintown.
Google Street View of Peel Street looking south towards ETS
Fast forward to today and you see how deindustrialization has led quite directly to a kind of strange deurbanization. The block where the Queens Hotel, La Coloniale tavern and numerous other buildings once stood is now a parking lot. The lot where the Bonaventure train station (and later CN Stockyards) once stood is also empty, while the industrial concern has been converted into the ETS engineering school. The former Planetarium in Chaboillez Square is abandoned, as is the behemoth former Dow Brewery just out of frame of the screenshot above. Everything beyond is being prepared for an assumed mass of condo and loft dwellers, and in this respect Notre Dame West seems considerably renewed, but the space allocation given to the planned amalgam of single and dual occupancy residential living in the Griffintown sector is so high that it will be impossible to regenerate a viable sense of community. Consider what the area you see above is supposed to become a doorway of sorts to a vast neighbourhood in the very centre of our city. It neither looks nor feels anything like the identifiable neighbourhoods of our city; it’s been deurbanized to be repopulated with branded living ‘urban chalets’ or some such nonsense, with commerce limited largely to corporate chains. I have my doubts a condo ghetto of such a massive size as is being proposed for Griffintown, with no planning input from the city whatsoever, could possibly become a real neighbourhood in any tangible sense. Suffice it to say I think the city should be heavily involved in every step of the area’s redevelopment, specifically mandating the limitation of block-sized projects, while promoting more small-scale residential and commercial developments.
The yellow boxes represent some of the most heavily depopulated areas of the city.
And how it looks today – many, many more parking lots, far fewer small and medium sized buildings. Too many empty lots and comparatively large empty buildings. Wasted space. Highways and viaducts joining together as a massive wall neatly slicing Griffintown and the Sud-Ouest off from the downtown. There’s a lot of potential here, but any desire amongst the citizenry to use this space responsibly (so as to develop a cohesive and sustainable community) will necessarily require direct city involvement. Someone needs to develop a master plan; this area could support thousands of new residents if developed properly.
Here we get a better idea of what drove the urban scheme back in the 1940s, when this area immediately south of the current downtown supported a far, far larger population. As you can see there was once a considerable port function located west of the Bonaventure Viaduct, where the Lachine Canal joins the Saint Lawrence River. Top left you can see the passenger platform at Windsor Station and the stockyards further south. In the centre of the photograph, where the short-lived Canada Post mail-sorting facility once stood, you can see the collection of docks and piers that supported the grain trade. Bottom centre and towards the bottom right corner, the vast CN yards in Pointe-St-Charles. This was the epicentre of the nation’s trade in bulk resources, where rail met steamship, a twenty minute walk south from Place du Canada. A disproportionate amount of heavy industry was concentrated here, as was a considerable working class population, and enough diverse office space to manage the whole affair.
For a very long time this space was closely associated with the economic strength of an entire nation. Such common psychogeographic associations can have a profound social effect; when this area began its transformation in the 1960s it was interpreted by the public almost as though the city’s economic guts were being torn out. The reality was that maritime transport, port facilities and rail infrastructure was undergoing their own transformation, and the large-scale projects favoured by the Drapeau administration made the change all the more dramatic. The photo at top shows the area when it had already large been depopulated; within ten years it would be largely deindustrialized as well.
And here it is again as things stand today (actually, I think this flyover took place in two parts, one in 2004 and another in 2007, but it’s close enough). There’s still a lot to play around with – a diverse quantity of existing buildings (which if older than fifty years ought to be considered for preservation) and myriad different sized lots. If necessary some should be purchased by the city and divided up to encourage more human scale developments, as I fear far too much of this space will be allocated to condominium projects that all too often become self-contained urban gated communities. I wonder sometimes if it wouldn’t be wise to knock down most of the large-surface area light-industrial buildings to give the area a ‘clean look’ for redevelopment. In any event, I digress, just some food for thought. I’d like to see more before and after shots of the city where empty streets and mega-block constructions get replaced with something that actually looks and feels like a balanced urban environment.
The first thing I really took notice of was a geriatric sitting in a pink jumpsuit, slumped ever so slightly over on one side, an oxygen tank leaning against her high chair. She had a neon yellow elastic chord attached from her jumpsuit pocket to a debit card locked into a one-armed bandit, pressing the button as though in a trance.
These are not the people we want in our casinos (admittedly I’m making a jugement call here, but she did not appear to be a high-roller; she looked like a senior citizen gambling away her pension cheque). Adding drink to the mix will make this problem worse. We want other people’s money – tourist money.
When it opened, it was supposed to be classy. The restaurants were top-notch, the chefs and wine selection unbeatable. There was even a dress code – jackets and ties for men, no hats, no jeans etc.
I think this is something we should maintain. Everything about our casino, as initially intended, was almost designed to de-emphasize the gambling. It’s not a big gray box. It doesn’t disorient the patrons by omitting windows. It invites patrons to step away from the gaming, to go outside and get some fresh air. These are design elements we should continue to value.
I suppose it’s not so bad if it’s rich people who’re losing their money – they can afford it.
But all too often casinos wind up preying, even if indirectly, on the poorest elements of society – they people most desperate for a financial break are all too often those with bad finances and who exercise poor jugement with their money. And whereas there once were controls – like the dress code and limitations on drinking on the playing floor – these have been shelved to accomodate the poor yet regular patrons who provide the bulk of the casino’s revenue during a prolonged period of economic instability, such as we’re experiencing right now.
But my question is this. Is this really the best way to increase revenue? How much extra coin could this actually produce?
And why look to locals as our main source of casino revenue?
But where would we build a hotel? Ile-Notre-Dame doesn’t have much space to support a large hotel, and construction may render the island temporarily unusable.
Permanently mooring a cruise ship or ocean liner within proximity of the casino presents us with an interesting possibility to get everything we need for a major casino expansion without having to build much. It would allow us to rather suddenly put a lot of hotel space more or less in the centre of the city’s park islands. Rather than building new we simply tow a full expansion into position. It would look good, it would be exceptionally unique and would further serve to provide a lot of direct financial stimulus for our otherwise underused (and at times worn-down) parc Jean-Drapeau.
Inter-island Channel, Parc Jean-Drapeau
And wouldn’t you know it, we could park a cruise ship or old ocean liner right here between the inter-island bridges. One would fit perfectly (though we might have to dredge the channel and temporarily remove one of the bridges) and I think in a broader sense fulfill a grander scheme for the park islands. I’ve often felt that this grand playground lacks any unifying cohesiveness – it’s simply the space we put all the stuff we can’t place elsewhere. We’ve purposely concentrated a lot of diverse entertainment in one space and have done well in maintaining that space’s utility within the public conception of the urban environment. Yet it’s still very detached, isolated even, from the rest of the city.
I feel a floating hotel solves more than one problem, using the location’s relative isolation to its advantage. For locals and people from the region, it could provide a much-needed ‘urban resort’, a place to get away from it all that’s oddly located in the middle of everything. For foreign tourists or families on vacation, it provides a hotel in a controlled environment almost exclusively dedicated to family friendly activities. Re-instituting the dress code and prohibiting drinking from the gaming floor in this newly expanded casino could serve to help sell the image of a classy and unique vacation experience catering to a wide variety of tastes.
Think about it – Parc Jean-Drapeau is a large multi-use park with a considerable natural component, occupying roughly the same amount of space as Mount Royal Park (2.1 square kilometers). It features, among others, a beach, an aquatics centre & rowing basin, manicured parks and trails, an amusement park, a historic fort and a premier outdoor concert venue. Placing a hotel in the middle of it, associated with the aforementioned casino, would surely drive up revenue not only for the casino but everything else going on at the park as well. It could conceivably make the park more useful during the winter months and provide sufficient new revenue so as to redevelop the Biosphere, Helene-de-Champlain restaurant and give the whole place a facelift too. And I don’t think it would take much of anything away from the city’s existing hotels as, from my experience, parc Jean-Drapeau is nearly exclusively used by locals, being perhaps a little too detached for tourists.
SS United States by Wikipedia contributor Lowlova
For your consideration, this rather handsome looking (and famous) ocean liner, the SS United States, can accomodate 5,000 people and is in desperate need of a buyer to keep her from the breakers. The idea of permanently mooring an ocean liner somewhere in the Old Port isn’t entirely new either. Aside form the fact that it’s already been done elsewhere, our own Mayor Drapeau wanted to use an ocean liner to house Olympic athletes during the `76 Games, with the idea being that the ship would be converted into a floating hotel, casino and convention centre afterwards as part of a broad facelift for the Old Port. His preferred vessel was the SS Normandie.
Definitely worth reconsidering, in my humble option.
If you happen to be looking to buy a cruise ship, look no further.
Not the pricks swinging their dicks and busting heads out in the street.
And the image is of him, his name, a bloody bullet hole in his forehead, and the tag ACAB (all cops are bastards).
Of course – what a logical image. Killing the mouthpiece of the police force is a surefire way to investigate and eliminate police brutality and corruption, not to mention ease tensions between cops and activists.
This is the kind of message I’d have included if I had been in her shoes, or something to that effect which could be said in 140 characters. Or maybe nothing at all.
What I most certainly would not have done would be to include hashtags of two different, common spellings of the commander’s surname, nor include the SPVM hashtag, or Montreal as spelled in two languages. I think that’s where documentation crosses the line into making a statement, and this statement advocates cop-killing.
Whether an individual would be incited to act upon seeing this image isn’t really the issue. I see it as simply being this – people have the right to feel threatened, even the cops, and they have the right to have their concerns addressed.
Also, I certainly wouldn’t have reminded those who follow me on Instagram that all cops are bastards while also hash-tagging the cops. That’s a fight I’d rather not pick.
It’s like calling a cop a pig to his or her face. Yes, you’re technically allowed to do it – you can do whatever you want – but you can’t turn around and blame the cop who punches you in the nose in turn.
We can’t act like the cops are so far removed from society they wouldn’t pick up on these kinds of things. Ostensibly, that’s what we’re paying them to do – pick up on the details. I think it’s silly not to expect the police to react very negatively to such a thing, and if she’s already been ticketed for whatever the fuzz busts people for these days (standing, waiting, looking etc.) then she should expect the police to be watching her. They saw an opportunity to pick her up for questioning and they did so. From their point of view they’re giving her a scare that may prevent people from circulating similar images in the future (directed at anyone, for that matter).
I remember avidly reading various publications issued by the COBP and the old anarchist bookstore (among other tracts I consulted when I was an activist) concerning what to do when confronted by police. This was later confirmed by books such as David Simon’s amazing Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.
The only answer anyone should ever give to a cop’s question is: I need my lawyer.
I need my lawyer.
I need my lawyer.
I need my lawyer.
Like a mantra until the cops get you your court-appointed civil-defender.
It’s what you should do, it’s what I hope Ms. Pawluk did.
Because that at the very least would have been a smart move. Calling Lafrenière out was a foolish move, one which has now earned her some kind of an arrest record, which may or may not come back and bite later on.
And all of this is aside from the key issue – even if you didn’t articulate the message, be mindful of what you might re-articulate. In this context, even though I don’t think she was personally indicating she would consider utilizing violence against a civil servant, she nonetheless gave her appui to the notion violence (or perhaps the aesthetic of violence) can be a useful political tool.
The reason our protest movements go nowhere is because violence, be it physical or rhetorical, is all too often used as first, rather than last resort. It discredits the message and erects needless walls, isolating those advocating social change from the society they seek to change.
I remember a little while back the PQ announced they would not go ahead with a planned ‘urban boulevard’ along the western edge of residential development in the West Island, part of a planned route that would link highway 40 with the 440 in Laval, cutting across Ile-Bizard. Have a look at the image above and trace your finger along the grey edge of development from the 40 to the 440 and you get an idea of the scale and potential impact of such a route. Yes, it would offer a new connection between the West Island and various northern suburbs, but on a high-capacity scale where currently nothing but pastoral low-density bedroom communities exist.
Seems like overkill to me.
I breathed a sigh of relief – finally, one thing our government has done I actually agree with. Quite frankly I think we need to discourage the construction of high-capacity autoroutes, especially if they happen to cut across some of the remaining natural wilderness we still have in this city. I understand why, from a very top-down perspective it would make sense to create additional ring-roads, especially to divert highway traffic away from already congested roads. But in this case, I fear the potential for environmental degradation and endless suburban sprawl is too great. Besides which, as you can see here a bridge could more-or-less connect the 40 with the 640 with a span the Ottawa River joining Hudson with Oka, offering a far larger arc and a method to both bypass the islands, intersecting with key north-south highways further away from already jammed residential areas.
But this is off point.
Of course, there are the more practical issues to consider that may explain why this project was kiboshed – like Pauline Marois’ multi-million dollar Ile-Bizard estate, most of which is located on land allocated by previous governments for the proposed highway extension.
How Ms. Marois came to build such a magnificent house on land that’s supposed to be the property of the transport ministry is a good question I’d sure like to know the answer to.
Regardless, the big winner here is what remains of the West Island’s once fabulous wealth of wilderness. Low-density development should slow down anyways, what with all this talk of a local housing bubble.
Thinking about these recent developments gave me something to wrap my head around.
We still need a means to get from the West Island to the 440, Western Laval, the North Shore suburbs etc. The issue is why we seem locked-in to planning large, complicated, high-capacity thoroughfares when far smaller, simpler, bridges could be used to efficiently connect residential traffic schemes in one suburb with the virtually identical designs across the water.
In sum, the Back River shouldn’t be the barrier it is, and multiple small bridges could be used to provide a ‘back-door’ from the West Island into ‘West Island-adjacent’ communities northwest of Montreal.
And though such constructions would not facilitate commuters heading towards the highways, it may serve to better connect the West Island in general with the AMT’s Deux-Montagnes Line, by providing access to the four stations further west along the line.
Currently, the West Island uses two AMT stations, even though four other stations could be within car, cab or bus-ride range of a considerable population of West Island residents – as long as we built some small bridges to connect otherwise disparate suburbs. I honestly believe some two-lane causeways is all it would take to introduce far, far greater interaction between several diverse communities and further serve to more evenly distribute AMT Deux-Montagnes Line users, not to mention offer new opportunities to expand the STM’s West Island transit scheme into Laval and Deux-Montagnes/St-Eustache. From where I live in Pierrefonds, Deux-Montagnes is roughly as close as Fairview Pointe-Claire.
More bridges on the back river offer superior traffic diffusion and may serve to get commuters heading north along our three primary vertical axes as opposed to heading south towards the already over-capacity highways.
This predicament illustrates our over-dependence on high-volume traffic systems at the expense of low-volume, tactical and in our case far more convenient connections. A simple pedestrian crossing attached to the existing bridge and an illuminated pathway is all it would take to save thousands of commuters from this operational inefficiency and further permit traffic diffusion by providing an alternative for everyone now within walking distance of Ile-Bigras, meaning fewer cars jamming up the intersection of Pierrefonds and Gouin boulevards during rush-hour, a problem which far too frequently results in major traffic jams (and on that note, aside from making this strip of Pierrefonds boulevard uni-directional towards the train station at rush hour, why not see if we can extend Pavilion Street through to Gouin Boulevard through part of the landscaping firm’s outdoor nursery here – both of these measures would allow for superior traffic diffusion between the confluence of major inter-suburban boulevards and the principle arteries of the residential expanse north of Gouin).
But on a broader scale it would be better still would be to extend Riverdale Boulevard north of the tracks towards the northwest, intersecting with an extension of Perron Street towards the CN Bridge, ultimately connecting to Chemin du Mistral on Ile-Bigras and then on to Chemin du Bord-de-l’Eau in Western Laval. Far less expensive than a highway and does a better job connecting Pierrefonds with its neighbours, resulting in new commuting possibilities, access to more schools and services, not to mention new business opportunities. The vast, exclusively residential riverside hinterland of Pierrefonds would suddenly have enough through-traffic to support numerous local small business initiatives. There’s no question Pierrefonds would change, I would even argue somewhat dramatically so. Making it easier to get around, and providing new trajectories and traffic patterns with the aim of opening new yet hyper-localized vectors of exchange, would serve to change Pierrefonds by making it more useful, more usable, and further still, more economically sustainable. By adding little bridges a bedroom community can transform itself into a hub of activity.
And a bridge seems to have once been planned to extend Marceau Street to Rue Cherrier in Ile-Bizard, as you can see here in another logical place.
Consider the numbers – there are 14,000 people who live in Ile-Bizard, and they are connected to Montreal via one bridge, two bus lines and a seasonal ferry that can carry but a few cars on a ridiculous two-minute trip that could completed in a matter of seconds in a bus or car. A bridge built at that location could provide 14,000 people access to the AMT’s Deux-Montagnes Line, and Ile-Bizard is one of the few places left in the West Island that can support new low-density development while still retaining a sufficient proportion of undeveloped wilderness.
I’m not 100% sold on it, but heard it the other day and thought, what the hell, let’s post it.
I discovered it was featured in what I can only describe as an overly dramatic Hockey Night in Canada intro from a few weeks back. For your consideration:
Though I enjoy the aerial shots of the city, Sweet Christ, this was laying it on a bit thick.
But the fans got a kick out of it I suppose. I think it was a step in the wrong direction to Americanize our game by developing story-lines for pro sports. This notion that multi-million dollar professional athletes are engaged in near-Herculean struggles to provide you with a vague sense of home-town pride is a tad laughable. The overt commercialization of professional sports doesn’t really allow for a tangible link between team and town as players and management personnel are bought and traded in proportion to the success of the club’s marketing department, and the relative success of their efforts to sell you on someone to root for. It’s always been like this in one way or another, but there was a point in time in which hockey, in this case, didn’t really need to be sold to anyone at all. Build an arena, form a team, people will come and watch. Back then the people out on the ice could very well have been your neighbour. Hell, even the rink typically involved public investment – those bonds don’t quite exist today.
It’s all a crafty pastiche of old-school sports journalism, re-packaged as a soaring montage that will very quickly cut to the show’s principle beer sponsor.
Doesn’t it feel great to drink this smooth Canadian lager? Mmmmmm. Patriotastic.
As to Maida’s song, well, it’s clear he likes Arcade Fire, but I would argue he probably likes a couple other local bands too, both past and present, who crafted similar sounds with backing brass. Harmonium comes to mind. Ron MacLean referred to Maida as a Montrealer, which I was not aware of but welcome nonetheless. I wonder if he was inspired to move here by another well-known 90s Canadian alt-rocker, David Usher of Moist, who made a bit of a fuss back in the 1996 when Moist ‘officially’ relocated to our city (I’m not sure how long it lasted either, but I digress).
Not in my opinion. The lyrics are very open, lovely in their way, but in my opinion not overly profound (though I’m no lyricist, not by any stretch of the imagination).
But it’s simplicity and straightforwardness gives it its universal charm, as Montreal is largely irrelevant, or at least there’s no link (in my eyes) between the city and what the characters are going through – as I said, it could be anyone, under any circumstances – it could be the cold winds of Timbuktu, or Chicago. Sufjan Stevens might consider giving this the Hootie and the Blowfish treatment, if you catch my drift.
