Later in February, St‑Denis between Sherbrooke and Emery will be turned into a ski hill, first for a competition, then for the use of the general public.
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Kate
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Kate
The Van Horne warehouse is going to be transformed: you can vote in a survey about your views till February 12.
Ian
Thanks for the link! I was trying to find it but every news story I found didn’t link to the survey.
While I look forward to a new use for this building I am concerned that turning it into a hotel, offices and business will lead to even more rapid gentrification of the area. Community spaces, working studios, an indoor activity centre … there are SO many better ways this space could be put to use that would help the community, not just the well-to-do elites whose interests PM seems to be representing more and more exclusively …also what’s with the early 00’s Mies van der Rohe “industrial chic” knockoff look on the new bits & the windows?Margaret
I filled in the survey and there is a space to include comments. I too would like to see some lengagement of the local community apart from “buying things” in it. A Maison de la Culture sort of dedicated area.
MarcG
Some inspiration: https://www.batiment7.org
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Kate
Speaking of mobs and restaurants, Alexandre on Peel is facing a thirty‑day shutdown over a list of issues: allowing known mobsters in, staff dealing coke, and breaking Covid rules in 2021. It is not the first time the establishment has found itself in hot water.
I’ve never worked in the restaurant biz. How does a restaurant maintain controls on banned individuals, given that turnover of staff means servers might not be familiar with specific people?
Blork
Also, how can someone be banned from a restaurant — by the law and not just restaurant policy — simply because they are known to be mobsters? What does that even mean? There are tons of people out there who are known to be involved in organized crime but unless you catch them red-handed doing something you can’t just declare that they can’t go to a restaurant simply because we know they’re in the mob.
Or am I missing something? Because otherwise that’s right out of a dictatorship or some kind of monarchy where the king is boss of everything. It doesn’t work like that in a democracy. You can’t legally deny people their rights just because you don’t like them or you suspect they do something you don’t like.
dwgs
That place is douchebag central and during Grand Prix time the douchebag quotient rises exponentially. I am pointing and laughing.
Ephraim
I’m surprised just by the fact that the Quebec government is actually doing something… anything. I mean, we all know that a certain bar owner / restauranteur got caught underpouring and yet they got a slap on the wrist, when they should have been ordered to pour into measured glasses forever. But then, maybe all businesses should be required to pour their beer into measured glasses, like they have to do is much of Europe. Their answer was removing the pour amounts from the menu… voila, no more underpouring
Kate
Blork, I don’t know, but it’s clear from the article that the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux (RACJ) can shut an establishment down for allowing the “présence d’individus liés au crime organisé” as it says. I’ve seen occasional references to this kind of thing in news stories before.
I don’t know whether “How was I supposed to know?” carries any weight with that Régie, or – as I was asking – “How was the waiter I hired last week supposed to know who that was, and be certain enough, to deny him service?”
azrhey
It’s not just “mob person goes to restaurant for nice romantic evening with gf” but also “mob person almsot had their own table assigned and is known to spend hours there conducting business”
I know of some restaurants where some people are just nearly always there with a glass of wine or a coffee and a bunch of papers with a merry go round of people walking in and walking out… business is being conducted, sometimes food is had.
Blork
@azrhey, but why is that a legal issue? How can the LAW says they can’t do that? How’s that different from students spending all afternoon in a cafe nursing one latté? (Annoying, yes, but not illegal. And if it’s a problem it should be the cafe or restaurant who bans the person, not the LAW.)
Kate
Blork, I think there’s a distinction here between law, and the rules laid down by the Régie des alcools etc., which governs whether people can have, or can exercise, a liquor license. Having a liquor license is a privilege, not a right.
Blork
I know. I just don’t get this bit where you can lose your liquor license because somebody went into your bar. Or put another way, a person can have the power to make a place lose its liquor license just by walking in the door.
What might be missing from this equation is if the supposed mobsters have actually been convicted of a crime and one of the stipulations of their punishment is that they’re not allowed to go to certain businesses, the way a pedo might be not allowed to go near a school. But all we got from the article is that these people are “known to be mobsters” and I can’t see how that alone can be the basis for any such thing.
Tim S.
Blork: restaurant owners have great discretion in how they treat their guests. As Azrehey said, if someone comes in for a normal dinner, and you don’t give them special treatment, I doubt that will cause a problem – after all, lots of establishments have probably hosted dubious characters every now and then and get to stay open. But do you great them with a giant hug, lead them to their permanently reserved table, trade complimentary bottles for massive cash tips?
That said, hopefully the Regie has a more codified working definition to prevent abuse, but at the moment I don’t think the implementation is as hair-trigger as you fear.
Ian
The law is mostly to prevent places from becoming hotbeds of criminal activity. That said yeah Alexandre is pretty douchey. For example, female staff are encouraged to be “friendly” with select patrons. That said, the coke and mob thing is true of pretty much anywhere downtown that isn’t a student dive.
The place I used to hang out before it got set ablaze had two managers – one who sold the dope, one who sold the coke.
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Kate
Metro considers four dossiers concerning Montreal that will come up in Quebec City now that the National Assembly is in session again.
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Kate
The STM has relaunched plans to find a contractor to build the southern extension of the SRB Pie‑IX between the Olympic park and Notre‑Dame. Quebec’s in, even though its original plan to pass the REM de l’Est along Notre‑Dame is not happening.
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Kate
La Presse’s André Dubuc reports that nobody has nibbled on the city’s project to build social housing on the old Blue Bonnets site. Dubuc says developers claim the city is asking too much, but not giving guarantees about a gradual development of the rest of the site, meaning any first project built could stand there in isolation for a long time. A professor also chimes in saying the city’s imposing too many conditions on any project proposed there.
jeather
I understand no other development is guaranteed but it is right next to a Walmart and not far from Namur metro, restaurants, actual grocery stores, it’s not exactly horribly isolated.
Blork
It’s an odd site, surrounded on two sides by railroad tracks and a third side by light industrial buildings. There’s no through traffic, so it can feel a bit like something bolted on at the edge of the world. From the mid-point it’s still almost a 1km walk to the Namur Metro station.
I wonder if the concern is that with a lack of mixed use or higher-end residences that it might become some kind of low-rent ghetto like there used to be in the 1960s and 70s with what were then called “housing projects.”
jeather
Yeah it is a weird site, and it is a bad distance from a metro — a bit too far for an easy walk, a bit too close for a full bus schedule. This is not going to be a higher-end residence location unless, I guess, something spills over from the Royalmount project.
Blork
I think the original vision was probably that developments like we see in The Triangle would spill over into that area. As in, a bunch of different condo buildings of different types, all connected by landscaped green bits and nice footpaths and low-speed roads, with little shops on the ground floors, etc. I’m sure someone envisioned a little urban utopia in there, with the lack of through traffic actually being a plus (i.e., no cars racing through; the only traffic being local).
That could still happen I think, but it will require a special kind of visionary, and would take involvement from a bunch of different parties (real estate, developers, the city, retailers, etc.) and they would all have to agree on what they’re doing, and they’d have to have the flexibility to be creative. I doubt any of that is going to happen, especially with the competition from The Triangle and Royalmount right there.
Kevin
I still think the largest issue will be getting trucks in and out of that area, considering the only access is through two of the worst traffic bottlenecks in the country.
James
In 2009 when the city released the report about the cote-des-neiges tramway, the terminus in phase one was at Jean-Talon and Cote-des-neiges. Phase two planned to extend it westwards into the Hippodrome area. Unfortunately, the tramway idea came to nothing. This would have been the primary method to ensure that the area was pedestrian-friendly.
On re-reading the “Plan de transport 2008” adopted by the Tremblay administration, only 2 1/2 projects didn’t happen:
Orange line extension to Bois-Franc
Tramway network
Pie-IX SRB all the way to downtown (only goes to Pie-IX station)
The airport to downtown train planned for was replaced by the more ambitious REM project.
Not too bad…
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Kate
Gentile Pizzeria in Westmount was hit by gunfire overnight.
mare
Interesting, they start combining the “gunshots with no victims’ with arsons.
You never hear that all those arsons of restaurants and other businesses that happened over the years have ever been solved, and a protection racket rolled up by the police. (Or if they did, they kept it very quiet.)
Will this one fare better, now it fits in the current ‘narrative of interest’?
Chris
What “narrative of interest” are you alluding to?
Ephraim
@mare – The Pizza Huts in St-Leonard and Anjou used to have a sign on the door saying that they were corporately owned and had no control over buying.
Kate
It’s a long-standing grift in this town: the mob wants to control pizza toppings – the cheese and the pepperoni in particular – and force pizzerias to only buy from them. It sounds like a comic mob movie setup, but it isn’t.
Tim S.
I remember awhile ago the RCMP, I think, set up a currency-exchange shop as part of a sting operation to catch money launderers. How hard would it be to set up a pizza place and see who comes asking for protection money?
shawn
Yes it’s no joke. I spoke with someone from the Italian community who told me that early on people had no choice but to buy cheese from Saputo. It’s a legit company now but its mafia ties remain a contested topic: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-dairy-mogul-lino-saputo-had-secret-past-dealings-with-u-s-mobster-joe-bonanno-then-lied-about-it-1.5428629
Kate
Tim S., now that IS a mob movie setup.
dwgs
That currency exchange was on de Maisonneuve at Peel, right across the street from where the money launderers had an office. The office was, perhaps not coincidentally, on the second or third floor of the building where the temporarily shuttered Chez Alexandre is.
mare
@Chris The increase of shootings without victims or perpetrators that was the reason to add millions to the police budget.
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Kate
CBC has a piece on how cuts at the Gazette are bad for English news, and they speak to editors of smaller papers. It’s telling that one of the editors admits her readership is all elderly. It’s also telling that Gazette editor Bert Archer wasn’t talking about the situation.
Ephraim
Traditional media is all elderly. A few months ago, Variety printed an article https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/the-cw-age-average-viewer-broadcast-1235342962/ about the average age of viewers for live TV. The CW, which aims at the youngest audience had an average age of viewership of 57.
Personally, I haven’t bought a paper newspaper in well over a decade, maybe 2 by now. I haven’t bought a magazine is about that long (other than when I bought some for my late mother to read at the hospital and it was hard to even find a store that carried them anymore) and I don’t usually even watch the TV news anymore.
It’s unfortunately, oddly enough, it isn’t the newspapers which really do the digging anymore. It’s the local TV news and as they cut it corporately and centralize news, we get less and less of the local stuff, which is what made people watch in the first place
Blork
It doesn’t help that the web versions of corporate news sites like the Gazette and CTV provide such awful user experiences, as has been noted here several times.
The amount of advertising is almost unbearable, but what’s worse is the auto-playing video that follows even after you scroll past it, and the text jumping every few seconds as ads refresh and their container sizes change, plus all those shitty clickbait programmatic ads at the bottom, which degrade the site’s brand and seriousness (as far as I’m concerned).
Also, corporate media sites are usually not very searchable and have terrible archiving. It’s as if they’re still locked into the old newspaper way of thinking that “today’s news is all that matters; leave the archiving up to the librarians!”
No vision at all, other than “get as many ad impressions as possible!” It feels like they are run entirely by end-of-career general managers who went back to school for a year in 1998 to upgrade their “information superhighway” skills and haven’t looked forward since.
Kevin
I enjoyed this Twitter thread although I disagree with part of it: https://twitter.com/richardwarnica/status/1618623883845996546
One problem is that companies that used to spend money on local advertising now give it all to a couple of massive international behemoths. A second is that there is widespread fraud in digital advertising so that companies never really know where their ads are appearing, or even if they are being seen by actual humans.
shawn
I’ve currently been on hold with Postmedia for an hour trying to update my Gazette payment and account info. Not to cancel-just update. Automated callback not working either. Everything just seems to be hollowed out, there.
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Kate
A fight broke out Monday evening in Montreal North, leaving one man in critical condition. Police say the fight was over drugs.
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Kate
The Saint-Sulpice bar, a hub of the Quartier Latin since belle lurette, is closing at the end of February and no announcement has been made of what will become of those venerable graystones. Expensive condos, or a hotel?
qatzelok
A Museum of Nightclubbing?
Kate
They’ve struggled for nearly two decades to find a museum vocation for the building that used to be the Bibliothèque Saint‑Sulpice so I doubt they would be able to manage a museum for the bar of the same name.
Ephraim
@Kate – If I remember correctly from the Centris listing, the building with the bar actually owns the land all the way back as well, so it’s a rather long lot
DeWolf
It would be nice to see a project that carved the complex up into smaller spaces for a variety of businesses, while keeping the back garden and opening it up to the alleyway (which is technically a street, avenue Joly) to create a public plaza. With its various lanes and small streets branching off St-Denis, the Latin Quartier has the potential to be a kind of fine-grained neighbourhood with a lot of interesting nooks and crannies, kind of like Kensington Market or Yorkville (though hopefully less upscale).
Kate
It looks that way on the map, Ephraim. That’s an atypically squared-off block.
When dipping into newspapers from the 1930s, I found some pieces on a plan of the era to build a classical concert hall behind the Bibliothèque Saint‑Sulpice, and – looking at the map – they had the room for it there. In the event, Place des Arts came about decades later in another location, and the classical hall decades after that, and now the Bibliothèque is slowly falling apart in place.
H John
The co-owner, Maurice Bourassa, explained this morning to Paul Arcand that he wants to create student housing.
https://www.985fm.ca/audio/537598/les-comportements-ont-change-face-aux-bars-maurice-bourassa
Kate
It’s a nafural location for student housing, but I wonder whether students would be able to afford the expense.
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Kate
Facing a second accusation of sexual misconduct, 78‑year‑old Cardinal Marc Ouellet has announced his retirement at the head of the Vatican bishops’ office and La Presse is reporting that the official reason is that he’s past 75, the retirement age for bishops, anyway, which seems to soft‑pedal this as a response to the accusations.
Ouellet used to be considered papabile. Would he be off that list now?
azrhey
Well he will stop being eligible when he turns 80..so like bit over a year for the questions to become irrelevant.
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Kate
The World Health Organization has decided that Covid is still an international health emergency but this doesn’t change Canada’s response.
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Kate
The city has announced it will plow streets but hold off on snow removal till the snow stops.
…sometime in late March?
The Journal has some brief notes on where the snow goes.
Joey
The snow stopped on Thursday morning, yet the city only got around to plowing some of the major arteries (e.g., Parc, St-Laurent, St-Urbain, St-Joseph) yesterday. Is it just me or does it seem like the city is taking longer to start its snow removal this year? I thought it was because the first two big storms happened on Fridays, which might have meant lots of overtime $ if removal started right away, but this most recent experience undermines that logic.
Anyway, I get what they are going for but there’s been so much snow this week, I don’t think they can hold off much longer (and there are crews currently doing snow removal, notwithstanding the story)… like the piles on street corners are just too big, cars are parked too far out into the street, etc.
Kate
I know. I’m even wondering how Lufa will get my box of groceries over the massive pile of snow between the road and my front steps.
The Weather Network says we’re close to the record for snowfall in January.
Kevin
This weekend as we were walking around, my wife and I helped multiple seniors get out of snowbanks because they were stuck and could not get to the sidewalk.
I expect snow removal to be terrible following the first storm of the season as crews and managers relearn this essential task, but removal has been so bad this year that I am wondering if it’s deliberate.
This morning bus lanes weren’t cleared, there were lanes on thoroughfares that were impassable, and multiple streets where school buses let out students haven’t been cleared.
jeather
How do you plow snow but not remove it? All you get is street icebergs which can’t be removed until they melt in the spring.
mare
The courtesy of citizens to clear (and keep up) the passages from the street to the sidewalk seems to have been lost some time ago. This despite the fact that a lot of people have cordoned off their carré des arbres, to prevent the chenillettes from removing the snow (and top soil with plant roots). In that case I think [old person waves cane] that you have the duty to do some snow maintenance.
My neighbour and I are virtually the only people that do this on a large stretch of our street, so we have four passages over 20 metres, and we don’t even have a car or park on the street. [Insert self-righteous pat on our backs…]
The main reason I do it so I can get the compost, recycling and garbage bins to the street. And my bike if I’m lucky and there’s an opening in between the cars.
Few openings at the moment because people only do the bare minimum when digging out their cars and leave a lot of snow behind when they drive away. They shoot themselves in the foot because there will be less parking spaces available when they come back, and they’ll have to drive around in circles and be lucky to find a spot nearby.(Unpopular opinion) I personally think the city should spend less money on snow removal of *free* street parking. Let car owners do more themselves. Montreal’s yearly snow removal budget of 160+ million dollars is enormous and you could do more tangible things with even part of that money. Hire more cops for example. Or reorganize streets so they’re safer for pedestrians (most drivers are pedestrians too) and cyclists.
Kate
mare, it would take me all afternoon to dig a channel out from the sidewalk to the street here today.
jeather
I wouldn’t object to digging out channels if the snow removal trucks didn’t later block them right back off.
I do not think we need to hire more cops. At all.
Mark Côté
I get incensed by people who dig out their cars or plow their driveways and leave all the snow on the sidewalk after the chenillettes pass. It’s annoying to climb over but far worse if you have a stroller or mobility issues. Such rude, antisocial behaviour.
mare
@kate Yeah, if you start now it’s a bit much. You have to keep it up with the snowfall.
@jeather That was sarcasm, but that obviously didn’t translate very well in an internet comment.
jeather
Sorry, because the “reorganise streets” part seemed sincere.
Tim
@mare: where is all this *free* street parking located? Montreal has lots of areas that require permits which I would not qualify as *free*…
Ian
@mare “The courtesy of citizens to clear (and keep up) the passages from the street to the sidewalk seems to have been lost some time ago.”
I live in a Hassidic neighbourhood, they get their kids to dig those entryways and keep them clear. I chop them out with my ice cutter too.
On another note I was quite pleased that I got to deliver my first joke in Yiddish, as I was shovelling out my walkway yesterday, a guy walking past me was talking on is phone, complaining about all the snow. I said “only a little snow” nur ayn bissel shnay. He laughed, I’m practically Mel Brooks now.
As a car owner I have to admit I was annoyed that the scheduled day plowing was cancelled today on my street (both sides) in the evening as I had to spend a lot of time cruising around for a parking spot on a street side that wasn’t scheduled to be cleared – when in fact none of them were cleared. F’ing Great. This also means I will have to dig my car out to go to work tomorrow morning again – & even the dug out spots are starting to be full of that nasty half-snow that has the texture of mashed potatoes that is impossible to walk, drive, or bike in. When the Hassidic ladies start pulling the strollers instead of pushing them you know the snow is ridonkulous. This is where we are. Delivery trucks are just stopping wherever, not even attempting to park. It’s crazy out there.
I’m still using the INFO-neige app – it was extremely annoying to search all over my parking zone to find a spot – only to find that in fact nothing is getting plowed tonight. Better than getting towed I suppose but I’m going to have to bring my ice cutter & good shovel 3 blocks over to get my car out at 5:30 tomorrow morning.
Kevin
The snowthrower ensemble just went down my street, followed by ANOTHER PLOW BECAUSE THEY LEFT SO MUCH BEHIND.
I am hoping the ‘thrower returns soon.
Joey
@Kevin that’s not new – for a while now (at least a few years) the big plows have been followed by smaller plows and chenillettes to pile up most of what remains, then they haul it away.
@Ian right there with you. Also the sirens at 6:45 AM when snow removal doesn’t actually get started until 8:15 are a nice touch.
@mare most car owners around my street dig their cars out and leave piles of snow either in front or in back of their car, not so much on the sidewalk (though it happens). Where exactly would you have these people put the snow?
Mark Côté
@Joey assume you meant to direct that last one at me. What you described is the best case and, I should note, the most common one. We’re bound to lose a few parking spots until the snow is cleared up. But on every block there’s always a big pile of snow right in the middle of the sidewalk, presumably from someone who couldn’t even bother doing what you said and just dumps shovelfuls of snow wherever is most convenient to them.
Kevin
@Joey
No, you misunderstand me.
The normal procedure in NDG is a trio of plows to push the snow into a long line, with the final step being a snowthrower putting snow in a truck.Last night my street had plows then a snowthrower, but there was so much snow leftover they needed to run another set of plows and another snowthrower to finally clear it.
Joey
@Kevin that’s exactly how they’ve been doing it on my Mile-End street for a couple of years now – plows make a huge hedge in the middle of the street (if you’re parked ont the other side, you can’t get out). Then a few hours pass. Then the thresher comes with the dump truck next to it. It churns up the giant hedge and spits it into the dump truck. Then a regular tow truck with a plow and some chenillettes come by and pile up most of whatever got missed. Then that gets tossed into a dump truck.
Also it feels like a good 10% of the snow being tossed into the dump truck never quite makes it in.
Kevin
Joey.
Okay…. This is the first time in 15 years that they’ve needed to have a snowthrower come along twice on my street.mare
I just saw a snowblower get stuck. The mountain of snow they had prepared for it was just too dense and high. It had to back up and try again, but just didn’t have enough traction. It was actually quite funny, but no one was laughing.
@Joey @Tim In my street in rosepatrie we don’t have vignettes en a wide space between the sidewalk and the street, 4 metres or so, so plenty of space to drop the snow. And still car owners leave it on the street, and only shovel away the snow one half side of their car and then drive off. Not all streets are this wide.
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Kate
The commentariat thinks it means Carey Price’s time with the Canadiens is over, now that he plans to sell his house here and return to British Columbia.
Ian Rogers
Maybe that gun advocacy in advance of the Polytechnique Massacre annual memorial came back to bite him in the ass. Underperforming & politically unpopular opinions is not a good combo for a local sports team under such scrutiny as our Habs.
DisgruntledGoat
Good riddance. Insert man taking out the trash .gif here.
Joey
It’s not so much his time with the Habs that’s over, it’s his career. The man can’t walk up and down stairs without pain. His last surgery didn’t help. Career’s done, time to move back west and be a hunter or whatever living on a golf course.
Kate
The Canadiens do like to pick out a messiah every now and then who’s going to restore the team’s old glory – then destroy him.
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Kate
The Quebec City mosque held a ceremony Sunday – for the first time at the mosque itself – to mark the sixth anniversary of the shooting that killed six of its members. The gathering was addressed by Ayman Derbali, rendered paraplegic in the incident. Justin Trudeau attended; François Legault did not.
walkerp 10:44 on 2023-02-01 Permalink
Okay that’s kind of awesome.
mare 11:12 on 2023-02-01 Permalink
Let’s visit the cinema on skis!