Category Archives: Montréal on Film

Expo 67 happened 45 years ago; could we do it again?

Though of poor quality, this is still an exceptional photograph of Expo 67, specifically Place des Nations – fully operational as it was intended. You’ll notice there doesn’t seem to be anything going on in the square, and yet people fill the benches and bleachers rising around. All sorts of activity is happening here, at this crucial transit point, as the fair ground expand out in all directions, a festival of truly epic proportions.

Fifty million people came to visit Montreal and see Expo during the Summer of Love. It was an outstanding achievement, as it was the raison-d’etre for a wide variety of city, government and corporate development projects, all coming together in time for opening day. The project, despite delays, was completed on time and on budget. After six months, the fair had paid itself off in admissions and concession sales. What Expo 67 did for international consumer confidence in Montréal, Québec and Canada is incalculable, though it certainly permitted Montréal enough credo to survive armed insurrections, separatism, terrorism and two referendums on national sovereignty in which Montreal was the primary battleground. Expo bought us confidence and an internationally recognized (and enduring) image of modernism, stability and innovation. We haven’t exhausted that confidence yet, though we would be wise to out-do ourselves as quickly as possible. The amount of free publicity for the city the fair generated made subsequent tourism marketing a synch, not to mention the fact that the facilities were operational for several years afterwards as a semi-permanent exhibit, encouraging repeat visitors and locals. Today, though almost all the original pavilions have been torn down and the grounds re-developed into a gorgeous park, we as citizens still retain a massive fair-ground, and we use it every year to our advantage and shared enjoyment.

Expo’s legacy is that it is always preferential for a large city to distinguish itself from other large cities by demonstrating it’s importance in a globally and culturally significant manner. This is precisely what Expo did for our city inasmuch as our province and country. I would argue that it benefitted Montréal perhaps the most given that it resulted in net increases to the common standard of living. We all got to benefit from the Métro, inasmuch as the numerous remaining attractions at Parc Jean-Drapeau. Moreover, ask yourself if we would have had an Olympics without Expo, or whether we would have bothered to protect Old Montréal if not for the reaction it produced in tourists. Thinking big allowed us to secure investment for many years, and it provided new opportunities for growth and development. It kept people employed and made ourselves available to host the world – what power we once had, and all because we dared to dream.

Place des Nations – Overgrown and Underused, 2007

Dominion Square, 1907

A postcard featuring a colourized photograph of Dominion Square from the tower of Windsor Station, circa 1907. In this view we see, from left to right: Windsor Station (towards the bottom-left corner), Saint George’s Anglican Cathedral, the Windsor Hotel, the crest of Mount Royal with McGill and the mixed commercial and middle & upper-class residential area near the centre point. The red brick building is the city’s first YMCA, built in the early-mid 1850s, and adjacent to the Knox Presbyterian Cathedral (both buildings would be demolished by 1913 for the development of the Sun Life Building). Finally, occupying most of the right side of the photo, Mary Queen of the World Cathedral.

Consider that back then, the square would have been exceptionally important for all Montrealers. Imagine standing there facing South, looking towards the industry of Griffintown and Goose Village and the rail stations closer to the square. To the West and Northwest, the newest portion of the Square Mile, featuring many large homes on low-density plots, in addition to many protestant churches, since demolished. To the North, the retail district, McGill University and the homes of the urban middle class while to the East the commercial and mercantile centre. All these forces and contributing factors would have found common ground and a necessity to use this crucial urban focal point. Railway stations, churches and social institutions, a luxury hotel and the Bishop’s Palace, all occupying the same space. In time, Dorchester Square would become the new corporate ‘front yard’ of the city.

Note the tram line along Peel going up towards what was then Dorchester Boulevard, and how the southern end of Dominion Square is almost totally bare when compared to the thickets of trees that now define the more ‘rustic’ Place du Canada. Also, consider the layout of walkways, as they lead from all sides and corners towards an elegant centre. There would have been about a dozen churches and cathedrals within eyesight of the square back then, though remarkably few benches for a place so much foot traffic. Some things never change, though by the look of things, the city’s planning a fountain for the southern end – something we’re sorely missing in this city. Judge for yourself:

Scenes from the City РDowntown Montr̩al

Decided to go out and take care of business yesterday, and profited from the pleasant weather we’ve been enjoying. I can imagine Winter’s going to come back and slap us around a little more. What I’d give for an early Spring.

The sidewalks, almost universally, are covered in that awful combination of road salt, sand and gravel that stains the snow brown, and eventually black. Sometimes I wonder why we don’t pay the fire-department to hose down all the roads and sidewalks during a thaw to clean things up a bit. Anyways…

All that to say that the air was perceptively warmer than usual and walking around was thoroughly delightful. The afternoon was a little dimmer than what I had expected; the clouds hung low and thick. I snapped this shot from Phillips Square, looking up towards the new Altitude Condo project and PVM rising behind it. Place Ville-Marie celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its completion this year.

Here is the elegant Royal George Apartment building, integrated as it currently is into the Concordia Library Building on Bishop Street. Forcing residents out caused a bit of a stir back in the mid-late 1980s, though there was a case to be made that the building, aside from having a beautiful facade, was in poor shape when acquired by Concordia. Though an effort had been made to protect the building as a heritage site, it for some reason never extended past the facade, which in turn was all that was saved.

Of note, a preliminary design of the LB Building featured a library stacked in roughly equally-sized ‘blocks’ rising from the corner of de Maisonneuve and Bishop, wrapping and rising around the Royal George like a massive staircase. This design featured multiple large outdoor terraces on the roofs on each block, the idea being that the expanding urban university should have an appropriately urban solution to limited open-air green space. Moreover, in conjunction with the planned atrium, sunlight would be able to reach the apartment building inasmuch as the interiors of the Library. The final design incorporated some elements of the original design, though the terrace component was never fully implemented. One of the consistent obstacles preventing green-space development on the upper levels of Concordia University buildings is the apparent fact that university students are an insurance liability, and thus rooftop cafés and gardens, though often discussed in development plans, never come to fruition. This is the line I was tol and I have reason to believe it. It doesn’t inspire much faith in insurers though, or the university for that matter. Con-U students could really use the space.

Rue de la Montagne, looking south from Boul. de Maisonneuve. Moving up from Boul. René-Lévesque Ouest, the street features the Centre du Commerce Electronique, Le Crystal de la Montagne, a house John Wilkes Booth may have stayed at some point in 1864 (today an Italian restaurant, if I’m not mistaken), the Novotel and many other restaurants and boutiques. It is largely defined today by its many prominent hotels. Academie Bourget and O’Sullivan College are locate below Ste-Catherine’s, as is Ogilvy’s Department Store, the Loews Vogue Hotel and the Hotel de la Montagne. Upwards towards Sherbrooke, condos, boutiques, office space and then the Ritz-Carlton.

Drummond Street, with the Bell Centre in the background, and the Drummond Medical Building at centre. Conceptualized and built in the late-1920s and early-1930s, this building symbolizes an interesting solution to the problems of urban multi-levelled parking. Back in the 20s and 30s, the city enacted laws designed to prevent the construction of above-ground parking garages (because they wanted to limit the number of cars in the city and thought parking garages were ugly, go figure). Thus, a multi-level parking garage was built behind an eleven-floor medical office building. The idea of a purpose-built medical office building was an architectural and design innovation typical of the era. Elements of the design, including floor layout, elevator placement, waste-disposal systems and building services were all incorporated so as to benefit a building specializing in private medical care. The parking garage would serve to provide the building with a constant source of income to defray building maintenance and renovation costs.

It’s funny, I’m reading Richler’s Son of a Smaller Hero and just read a passage where the young adulterous couple, Myriam and Noah, walk up and down the streets of the city one night, and the visible stretch of Ste-Catherine’s you see in this photograph features prominently. There’s as much neon today as there was back then, it’s just far subtler now (back in the 40s and 50s, a lot of signage was designed to protrude outwards and perpendicular to the building). But Ste-Catherine’s has indeed lost its former character as the city-spanning entertainment and night-life thoroughfare. Today’s its character is principally retail oriented. Gone are the once numerous theatres, night-clubs, diners and cocktail bars which left such an indelible impression of the city’s character. I wouldn’t mind seeing the street evolve in such a fashion that an equilibrium is struck between what it was once famous for and what it is today. There’s no denying how important and interesting this street actually is.

The CIBC Tower, also celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The 45-floor tower was built on the former site of the original Windsor Hotel, the Southern wing having burned down in 1957. It is particularly slender for a modernist office tower, but benefits immensely from a far more ornate facade, which includes the use of Green Slate as well as other stones in the spandrels between glass curtain-walls. It’s position on the plot in relation to the intersection and Dorchester Square makes it extremely prominent without being imposing.

It’s too bad – the building once had an observation deck on the top floor, which was closed in the 1970s. If I’m not mistaken, it features prominently in a scene in Jésus de Montréal.

What can I say, I’m glad Global and the Gazette are in the same building – if only they collaborated and focused on developing local original content together. Could you imagine what that might do for the local entertainment and news-media industries, and in turn what this beautiful building would come to symbolize?

Somewhere I have a USB-key filled with images I scanned at the CCA, pertaining to the ground-breaking 60s: Montreal Thinks Big exhibit back in 2004. Among others I found a massive number of projects and proposals that never got off the ground, including a plan by Mies van der Rohe to demolish the Dominion Square building, replacing it with a street-spanning overhead plaza and two tall office towers. I like his work, but I’m glad it never panned out.

The Dominion Square building was one of the first in the city to feature an indoor shopping arcade – it’s original design, much like the Mount Royal Hotel, featured numerous retail spaces with interior and exterior access points. The ‘mirrored-E’ design of the upper floors allows for many interesting layout possibilities, numerous corner offices and an exceptional amount of sunlight for a building of its era.

The Kondiaronk Belvedere atop Mount Royal, viewed from Rue de la Montagne. With the candelabra communications tower rising, always menacingly, behind. The belvedere and Mount Royal Chalet were constructed during the Depression as a city-sponsored ‘make work project’ to replace the previous look-out, which by that time had become dilapidated. One key feature of the old look-out was that it was a) accessible via a funicular railway, b) covered and c) it projected out from the mountain’s side, offering a wider panoramic view. The new belvedere, by contrast, is far larger, and the openness of the space is appropriate given the majesty of view beyond.

A perspective that won’t last much longer – the Tour de la Bourse viewed from the grounds of a former orphanage adjacent to Saint Patrick’s Basilica, through the space soon to be occupied by the Altoria Condominiums. The building currently being demolished used to be an important local print shop, and if not mistaken, this building had an infamous history in the local gay community, given that a raid on a party located here resulted in Montréal’s equivalent of the Stonewall Riots, the Sex Garage Raid. As party-goers exited onto Rue de la Gauchetiere, they were met by the SPVM, ID tags removed, batons in hand. The subsequent beat-down and two days of protests and additional mass ass-whippings put too many in the hospital with too few SPVM officers indicted for assault. What did change was public sentiment towards the local gay and lesbian community, as video footage of the SPVM using excessive force against unarmed civilians interspersed with images of Mohawk blockades and stories of bloody beatings by SQ thugs in Oka. It was a perfect storm for local media that drew the public’s attention in a heretofore unseen fashion, focusing on numerous local civil rights abuses at the same time. I would argue video footage played a significant role in turning public opinion away from the established authority and pushed support for the minorities and oppressed in our society.

I stood here a couple days ago and watched this machine rip pieces of wood, brick and plaster from the building as a small crowd gathered below to watch it happen. This has been happening a lot – crowds gathered to watch demolition or construction work.

Makes me wonder why we don’t use explosives to quickly demolish buildings as opposed to systematically ripping them apart. I suppose the latter option poses fewer problems to surrounding buildings, yet we regularly use dynamite when clearing the foundation – I heard some go off near the Le Chateau Apartments just a week ago. I’d really like to find out what the rules are with regards to this.

It’s too bad this place is pretty much exclusively used as a cathedral – something tells me it could be an excellent performance venue. Maybe not, I don’t know what the acoustics are like inside, but if I had to guess I’d say they’re probably quite good.

That and I can imagine opera and theatre could make excellent use of the interior for some very interesting experimentation.

I like knowing that I have this image, and I’m trying to get a little collection going of short-term perspectives on the city. Soon, a thirty floor glass curtain-wall condo tower will make this view impossible, yet also bring new life to the old Paper Hill sector. I can only hope that the resulting building is worthy of its location on Square Victoria, and that the ground-level floors in some way reflect the earth-tones of late-19th and early-20th century buildings in the area.

Moving Forward

From the top floor of the Aldred Building, Place d’Armes

Ola amigos –

So you’ve doubtless noticed a bit of a slow down in terms of my output. A lot of this has to do with the fact that I’m working two jobs and am still somehow under-employed. On behalf of the thousands, if not tens of thousands of talented, frustrated young Montrealers such as myself, I can only say thank you to the cabal of international financiers and American con-men who helped destroy the global economy, leaving us fighting each other for shitty scraps of former jobs. In case you’ve been asleep it has been more than three years since the first signs of trouble and very few people have gone to jail for creating the greatest international economic shit-storm since the Great Depression. It’s clearly far from over and we’ve only just begun to appreciate the implications.

I say all this only because I won’t be able to write nearly as often as I once did, and until I find regular, decent-paying work, posts will be coming in irregularly at best. I also say this because I want you to ask yourself if you are currently doing what you love in life, and if not, what it will take to get you there. I don’t mean to sound like a nagging parent, I think it is a legitimate question everyone should ask themselves. I ask myself this question all the time and rarely offer myself a satisfying answer. I know that writing offers me a lot of joy but until I find a way to make coin off of this, I have to get my funding from other sources. I’m not complaining; I still have my health and I’m relatively certain we’ll make contact at some point during my life-time (so here’s hoping!)

Anyways, moving forward I can only say this. One day I will run for mayor of this city, and if I am elected I plan on guaranteeing this city’s financial strength and prosperity in such a fashion that we could weather any storm. Among other things I’m keen to introduce municipal bonds and shares to allow citizens to invest in the city, in addition to a city-administered micro-finance banking system available uniquely to citizens. We must break the mould of reliance on transfer payments from various levels of government and the charity of a few large corporations – where is our entrepreneurial spirit? My city of the future will have an unending supply of funds for the development of new businesses and initiatives, and this will be done by securing citizen investment.

But more on that plan later. For the time being, enjoy the picture above. In case you’d like to see a neato perspective on our city, I’d recommend heading down to the Aldred Building (the unmistakable Art Deco masterpiece and ‘Ghostbusters’ building located at 507 Place d’Armes); go on a weekday and take the elevator to the top floor – view is open to the public. I work in the building and will pass by with some windex in the next few days so as to allow for better photographs.

Quality Local Content: Abdul Butt Visits the ‘NHL Français’ Demo

Local satirist and vlogger Abdul Butt went down to cover the Movement Québec français demonstration last Saturday night in front of the Bell Centre. As one might expect, he uncovers that the group is composed of old people fighting a linguistic battle from over forty years ago. Plus there was some chanting that seemed to indicate the crowd was interested in the NHL conducting more of its affairs in French, and further that it would be nice if the Habs hired more Québecois players, something made rather difficult by the way players are selected, salary caps, individual free agency, the NHL draft etc. I took this as another sign those demonstrating were out of touch with reality. It’s almost as if they have no knowledge professional ice hockey has become an internationally lucrative entertainment industry spanning a good chunk of the Northern Hemisphere and that Québec is not the sole provider of hockey talent.

I’ve seen a common sentiment repeated often in various comment forums online; could you imagine if a bunch of English-speaking Canadians in Calgary showed up in front of the Saddledome to protest the number of Russians or Francophones in the NHL, and that individual teams would perform better if they were unilingual, perhaps even monocultural?

I typically hate these kinds of comparisons, because they are all too often used inappropriately or out of context to such a degree that the comparison is absurd to begin with. The French language must be preserved and promoted, inasmuch as French, Aboriginal and Commonwealth culture should be preserved and promoted as elements of our shared cultural experience. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Habs or the NHL.

And if you find the analogy above distasteful, perhaps racist, then you’re probably right. And therefore, Québecois have to put their collective foot down, and tell these old fools they’re no longer welcome in our integrationist, cosmopolitan city. We don’t need to tolerate intolerance.

I’d probably have been upset if I had been there, so big time kudos to Mr. Butt for seeing this for what it ultimately was and poking a lot of fun at it. For what it’s worth, it seems as though some of these old fogeys got a kick just by getting out of the house. At least one seems to have caught on that their complaint maybe isn’t as serious as they were initially hoping.

Final point – true to form, several people interviewed didn’t seem offended in the least with Mr. Butt’s slightly exaggerated Anglophone accent, and were keen enough to speak in English too. We’ve come a long way from the drive-by arguments and insults of the 1980s and 1990s.

A Snowstorm in the new Place d’Armes

Place d’Armes, Montréal – December 23rd 2011 (renovations recently completed)

Looking North-Northwest from the plaza, with the Place d’Armes Hotel at centre and New York Life Insurance Building (1887) at right.

Montréal’s Notre Dame Basilica (1824-1843)

A focus on the 1948 addition to the Bank of Montreal Head Office, replacing the old Central Post Office. A fascinating minimalist late-Art Deco construction opposite the more elaborate Aldred Building (1927-1931)

As you can see, the recently completed renovations now feature a tile motif on the ground demonstrating the area occupied by the original Notre Dame Church

Kinda like a snow-globe eh?