Josée Blanchette writes a poetic tribute to Atwater Market.
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Kate
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Kate
A man was found injured and unconscious at the door of a church presbytery Friday morning in Centre‑Sud, and he died of his injuries in hospital. Cops haven’t decided yet whether to call it homicide or suicide.
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Kate
A man in his 70s has died following a home invasion in Lasalle five days ago, and police have declared it the 20th homicide of the year. They’re also scouting for information from the public, although it seems odd, if they want information, that nothing more specific about the location has been given out.
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Kate
Revenu Québec, which took over a failed co-op in Cartierville in 2019, has been accused of mismanaging the properties, and tenants are concerned they’re essentially being renovicted by neglect.
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Kate
A man was stabbed overnight in NDG (TVA says Côte‑des‑Neiges but the corner of Sherbrooke and Prud’homme is not Côte‑des‑Neiges) and is in critical condition.
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Robert H
Surtout pour ceux qui vivent à proximité, c’est important de savoir exactement où. Un manque de précision paresseux à cause du fait qu’on a confondu deux quartiers distinct avec un arrondissement indistinct.
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Dominic
Used to live on that street, its small, parking is impossible, and half the units are gentrified.
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MarcG
A family member of mine paid approximately $100 a month to live on Prud’homme near de Mais with roommates in the 90s. I lived on Marcil in the early 00s with (too many) roommates for $200 a month. When I was there my downstairs neighbour and I planted a garden in our derelict backyard and when we were unpacking our stuff from the garden center I caught a guy about to run off with a bag of dirt that we left on the sidewalk. Whenever someone, including myself, suggests that something is not worth stealing, I remind them of this incident. A BAG OF DIRT. A few years later I lived a few blocks over on Old Orchard and someone broke into my apartment and stole my shitty digital camera in the dead of winter – my houseplants froze and died. I seem to remember there was a drive-by shooting in the neighbourhood not too long ago. Anyway, memory lane, good times, I love NDG despite it’s hardships.
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MarcG
Why isn’t it “it’s” in this case when it’s possessive? Language are dumbs.
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Kate
An opinion piece in Le Devoir rails against the rash of “condo towers with pompous names and marketing concepts and rapidly outdated architectural qualities” springing up all over downtown, at prices out of reach of most residents.
(Which has an air of “the food was so bad, and such small portions!” about it.)
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Ephraim
The city is responsible for the outdated architectural qualities, as it can set standards and requirements. As for the names and marketing concepts, people choose what works. But the reality is that it doesn’t matter if they are out of reach of most residents, it’s in the reach of some, who will move there and clear out of other cheaper condos, that others will move to and so on and so forth, creating more room for others to move up the ladder and take pressure off the market, assuming it grows fast enough.
Which reminds me, the (permanent) trailer park in St-Laurent has at least 2 of them for sale at under $100K. And while you have to pay rent for the land, at $331 a month for the land, it’s not a bad deal. If you don’t know the story of this mobile park, see https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/meet-the-people-who-live-in-montreals-unknown-trailer-park
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DeWolf
When I clicked on the link I thought it would be a more specific critique of new development downtown. Instead it’s one of those generalized “would you look at the state of things!” rant we get about Montreal every few months or so. And it’s like… ok.
I do want to point out that for every Victoria sur le Parc, Maestria or 1 Square Phillips, there are five more buildings going up downtown that are not particularly fancy or expensive. They’re basically the modern-day equivalent of all those 1970s towers near Concordia, which are ugly but also responsible for the fact that it’s now a thriving, very eclectic and very diverse neighbourhood.
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DeWolf
I made the mistake of opening the comments and sometimes I wonder if people walk through the city and perceive completely different realities. There’s a guy who lives in Villeray who is complaining about the pedestrianization of de Castelnau. “Y’a rien autour, pas de café,” he writes. And yet there are several cafés on that stretch, along with restaurants, a very popular ice cream parlour, etc. etc. It’s always filled with families and people hanging out. How can you miss that?
There was a discussion about Prince Arthur on one of those Facebook groups that shares old photos of Montreal. One guy said he recently took a walk down the street and there was nothing there, it was completely dead, like a bomb hit. And there was a woman pointing out that the street has undergone a real renaissance over the past year. And indeed, I walked down Prince Arthur at 9pm last night and it was full of people. People sitting at the picnic tables, people dining on terraces, at least half a dozen new businesses that have opened in the past two years. Again, how can you miss that? Are they wearing VR goggles when they walk around?
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Kate
DeWolf, that’s mad about de Castelnau. As you say, do they even go and look at the places they’re wrought up about?
This is like the people on Facebook groups (specifically about Montreal’s history and related topics) going on about how Ste-Catherine Street is a ghost town. I think these people may have last seen the street in the late 1980s.
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Robert H
Right, DeWolf. Mélissa Anctil has written a Journal de Montréal style cranky rant about How Awful The City Is Now. Or as a commenter replied, «Encore un joyeux pleurnichage de dénigre-Montréal : Montréal, c’est l’enfer, je ne peux plus y circuler librement avec mon char.» 1 Square Phillips, Maestria, and Victoria sur le Parc won’t be places I can afford to live but I think it’s great that developers perceive a demand to live in Centre-ville sufficient to make such investment; most North American cities are dead at the heart or struggling to attract the sort of activity downtown is seeing now. My problem with many of the high-rises there is more aesthetic than anything else. I’d love to demolish all of those 1970s concrete towers to the west of Concordia you mentioned as well as their 21st century equivalents going up now (hello Le Square Children’s, EstWest, quoiqu’on l’appelle maintenant).
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David666
Both Ephraim and Chris are exactly right: construction of these higher end places lightens the load on demand for the next tier down, there’s still plenty of stuff being built at the lower tiers (though almost in spite of the city’s plans), the new towers going up – especially around the Bell Center and in Griffintown are perfectly analogous to the Concordia village building boom in the 1960s and 1970s and will leave a permanent stock of affordable housing as time wears on, and the net benefit of denser and more interesting hoods is real . . . even if people who haven’t been there forever or who just hate change/aesthetics/progress/etc. want to pretend like this is negative.
Hail growth! Hail Montreal!
And, just from the aesthetics, who in their right might would take a parking lot over pretty much any other use, maybe other than a service station? Just great!
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Kate
The municipal election campaign officially begins Friday at midnight for the polling day of November 7.
Candidates of both Ensemble and Projet have to be vaccinated.
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dhomas
Are they allowed to have signs up already? Because I saw Coderre’s mug all over downtown last night.
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Kate
i don’t think so, but this jumping the gun has happened before, and even if they’re fined they probably figure it’s worth the expense. And they may never even be fined.
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Kate
It’s already Friday so here are some notes on weekend driving.
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Kate
Gilbert Rozon is fighting back, bringing a $150,000 lawsuit against actress Patricia Tulasne, who had accused him of raping her in 1994. Tulasne is not alone in accusing the producer of sexual aggressions.
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Kate
Denis Coderre held a presser Thursday on the site of the recent shooting in St‑Michel the day before. TVA says bluntly Élections municipales: les hostilités sont lancées.
Why are guys are going around shooting their guns at nobody? I wonder who’s been putting them up to that.
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PO
Some jokingly suggested once that the best way to keep rent from rising in one’s neighborhood was to fire a few blank rounds in the area every once in a while.
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Kate
It crossed my mind that Coderre may be shooting himself in the foot. He’s always wanted to do the “world class city” shtick, but pushing hard on law and order risks making the city sound much more dangerous than it is. Notions like this get into international news and social media, and the next thing you know, people are asking on social media whether Montreal is a safe place to visit.
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PO
Also crossed my mind- it would be hilarious is Coderre was paying some hired goons to fire off guns across the city at random just to make it an issue he can campaign on. Seems like a very Coderre thing to do.
Not an impossibility for a guy who more or less wiretapped a journalist.
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Kate
The Musée Grévin, which displayed effigies of famous people for eight years here, has closed its doors. When it opened I remember thinking that a wax museum was too 19th-century for the 2000s. We’ve had them here over the years – the Eden Musée on the lower Main, long gone, and the Art Deco building on Queen Mary at Côte‑des‑Neiges, which closed in 1989 and is now a pharmacy – but I didn’t think we needed a new one, and as it turns out, we didn’t.
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Thomas
Yeah, I thought it was weird when it opened too, but I take a ‘when in Rome’ attitude to most things in Montreal as I’m not from here. And I actually forgot the place existed until I saw your post; the Grévin in Paris is the equivalent of Madame Tussaud’s in London, but I don’t think it necessarily had the same name recognition here.
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EmilyG
I went to the wax museum soon after it opened. It was amusing, but I didn’t see much point to it beyond that.
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Ephraim
Is a Yankee Candle opening in the space?
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Max
Good riddance, Grevin. Any business that willfully chose to use the face of Jimmy Kimmel as a supposed attraction in their advertisements, deserves to have died a long time ago.
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MarcG
Their ads in the Montreal Mirror always struck me as way out of touch and my brain, in order to fit them into reality, assumed they were intentionally ironic.
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Kate
MarcG, I don’t think they can have advertised in the Mirror. That paper shut down in 2012, while the Grévin here opened in 2013.
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Thomas
I am going to admit at this point that I just got Ephraim’s joke. Well played lol
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Uatu
Wouldn’t be surprised if they convert the entire space into moar condos
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MarcG
Kate, it must have been in CultMTL then, I get them mixed up.
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Kate
Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery has limited its opening hours and this is annoying some, especially since it’s now closed Sundays and was locked up for all of Labour Day weekend.
As it happens I’d gone over to take a walk under the trees that weekend, having checked the hours a few days before on the website. No weekend shutdown was mentioned when I checked, so I arrived to find it unexpectedly locked up on a Saturday, and as I stood there several others walked or drove up to the gates and turned away nonplused.
And you can be fined if you manage to sneak in. I like the woman’s observation here: “Staffing shortages are hard to believe when there are personnel on site whose job it is to tell us they don’t have enough staff to let us in.”
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Kate
Not surprisingly, wealthier neighbourhoods have more trees, according to an analysis by CBC News. One exception is Old Montreal, where residents tend to be wealthy but which has very few trees because of the urban geography.
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Blork
This article seems to present this fact as some sort of mystery, or implies that somehow wealthier neighbourhoods are treated better by the TREE AUTHORITIES because of some vast conspiracy to un-tree the poor. When in fact the obvious reason is simply density (which correlates to wealth, but correlation is not causation).
Look at TMR vs. Park Ex. TMR is mostly single-family homes, with front and back yards. Those yards have space for trees, and the vast majority of those trees are on private property. Park Ex, on the other hand, is mostly apartment blocks with very little in terms of front or back yards. Most trees in Park Ex are on city property.
The same applies to Beaconsfield vs. Pierrefonds. Drop your Google Street View guy down on any street in TMR, Beaconsfield, etc. and you see trees galore, and 90% of them are on private land. Drop the guy in Park Ex and Pierrefonds and you’ll probably see about the same number of public trees, but very few private trees because there’s no space for them, and where there is space, nobody wants to pay for it.
Old Montreal is the exception in terms of wealth, but it is NOT an exception in terms of density. Old Montreal is mostly multi-unit buildings with very little in terms of front or back private yards.
Also bear in mind that trees are expensive to maintain. Landlords in poorer neighbourhoods are probably reluctant to take on the expense of planting and maintaining trees because that affects their bottom line.
As you know, I live in Longueuil, which is hardly the land o’ the rich, but my neighbourhood is as tree-filled as TMR because there is space for the trees.
And before you density warriors get your knickers in a bind, all of the above is presented as simple facts without judgement. It’s a simple fact that you cannot fit a tree and a building in the same space, and when the space is packed with housing, there’s not much room left for trees.
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Blork
Update: Park Ex is a mix of apartment blocks and rows of triplexes. Same rules apply. Drop you Google guy on any street in Park Ex and you’ll see plenty of trees going up and down the street. But you won’t see trees between the buildings because there IS NO “between the buildings. And front/back yards are very small, with not so many trees because there isn’t much room for them.
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Kate
Blork, I didn’t read it as quite so stridently lefty as you did. But the fact is, the wealthy have higher standards for municipal services, and in general I think would be more likely to call or email their councillors and make their request for more trees on their street known. Whereas poorer people are not likely to see their neighbourhood landscape as something they have a right to make demands about.
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DeWolf
Kate hits on an important point here. Rather than comparing Park Ex and TMR, it’s worth comparing Park Ex and Villeray. Same built density, both developed at roughly the same time (1920-50), but Villeray is whiter, more gentrified – and much, much greener. Over the years, the city has invested more in trees, along with other public infrastructure, whereas in Park Ex there are many streets with narrow sidewalks and no street trees at all.
A big thing these days is building saillies de trottoirs (corner bulb-outs) which can add tons of greenery to a street while also improving pedestrian safety. Park Ex has very few of these whereas Villeray has plenty. Same borough, different standards.
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Blork
Kate, you’re missing my point. TMR and similar places don’t have more trees because the residents asked for it; they have more trees because they have more privately-held space, and that space tends to have more trees.
To DeWolf’s point: compare the Plateau to Mercier. Plateau is much wealthier, but Mercier has way more trees, for the simple reason that Mercier is less dense, has more single-family houses, and therefore more front and back yards with trees.
My point is simply that it is way more about density (and the associated style of buildings and the amount of land between them) than it is about wealth. If you just survey TREES ON MUNICIPAL LAND you will probably not find much difference.
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mare
I live in a dense neighbourhood (Petite-Patrie) and I’m currently sitting under a large ash tree that is still doing okay after two treatments against the emerald ash borer. Before the ash we had a big maple, and we have three more trees in our yard to take over when the ash has to be cut down. Planting the maple was cheap, but cutting it down when it got sick was expensive. $100 for a permit and $1500 for arborists to cut it down and turn it into firewood and mulch. They couldn’t remove the stump because the stump cutter couldn’t access the site without demolishing half the garden. So we now have a elevated rock garden over the stump.
When I look at the quite big back gardens of the other 2 and 3 stories buildings on our alleyway I see only a few gardens with trees. Most have just a patch of grass (and three have swimming pools!) and then a tarmac area that fits as many cars as possible. One building has six cars and a huge Tempo in the winter, no idea how they manage the access of the double row of cars.
In the front of the building we have large trees on city property that are very nice, despite being mercilessly trimmed by Hydro-Québec. We’re lucky to have a variety of trees, unlike some adjacent streets where almost all the trees are ash trees that are sick and dying 🙁
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Blork
Mare, you live on one of the most lush streets in your borough, with largeish back yards and wide swaths of public land between the sidewalk and the street. Very unusual for the dense neighbourhoods of Montreal. You can’t compare your street to any street in Park Ex. So your neighbourhood has a lot of density in one direction (side by side) but not so much in the other (front and back). The neighbourhoods in Park Ex tend to be dense in both directions, so there simply isn’t room for all those trees.
DeWolf makes a good point in that places like Villeray have invested more in public greenery, but as he also mentions, Park Ex has more streets with narrow sidewalks and apartment blocks, so there simply isn’t space along those streets for trees. There are certainly some nooks and crannies and corners and whatnot that could be greened up, but overall the layout and bidirectional density is different.
Drop your Google guy down in SIMILAR STYLE streets in Park Ex and Villeray and you don’t see much difference. E.g., Querbes just below Saint-Roch in Park Ex and Drolet near Gounod in Villeray. Not a huge difference. You do find some streets in Villeray with more lush greenery, but they’re almost always streets where there’s a bit of a front yard in front of the triplexes, so there’s more room for trees (and those trees are most likely on private land). E.g., Saint-Gérard. Villeray also has pockets of single-family houses, where there are front and back yards as well as space between the houses, which means more room for trees.
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Joey
This assessment could really benefit from some slightly-more-advanced stastical analysis. “Nicer neighbourhoods have more trees” is hardly a news story, nor is the half-assed (quarter-assed?) attempt to imply causation – CBC contends that wealthier neighbourhoods have more (and more diverse) trees, but it’s plausible that areas that have always had better vegetation have grown wealthier over time. I would imagine a fourth-year stats student could do some quick multivariable analysis to examine what factors are really determinative once you account for various demographic data (income, neighbourhood development age, density, etc.).
Perhaps a more interesting piece would compare where the city/boroughs have invested in trees, curb extensions, street furniture (looking at you, area in front of Kem Coba), etc., with areas that lack adequate tree coverage. My hunch is that event recently, spending flows toward the wealthier neighbourhoods that need the least – even if you recognize that making Park-Ex greener is a lot harder than greening alleys in Mile-End.
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Blork
BTW, Kate; funny, I wasn’t even thinking “stridently lefty.” I recoiled against the sense that stories like this always need to find a boogeyman, and that boogeyman is usually “the wealthy.” (Although to be fair, the boogeyman often is “the wealthy.” I just don’t think that’s the case here.)
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Kate
Blork, funny you should compare Park Ex and Villeray in that way, because my section of Villeray, the quadrilateral between St-Laurent and St-Hubert, Cremazie and Jean-Talon, is pretty thickly treed on the street. This whole area has back alleys, and they’re less solidly planted, partly because (as has already been observed) yards tend to be small, and some are paved, or partly paved. But I walked this neighbourhood a lot for the census and was agreeably surprised at how well shaded most of the streets are.
Park Ex is very different – its streets tend to be on the stark side.
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Blork
No doubt Park Ex and Villeray are are different, despite the similarities that DeWolf points out. My point is that you can’t compare the most-treed street in Villeray with the least-treed street in Park Ex because you’ll most likely find that those streets are built differently. You need to compare streets that are built similarly in terms of building size, distance from the sidewalk, etc.
The other thing to keep in mind is we probably have more trees in the city now than in any time in its modern history. Look at any photograph from the 1920s or the 1940s or even the 1980s in any neighbourhood in the city. Then look up that location now in Google Street View. We’re practically living in a jungle now as compared with any time in the past 100 years.
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Kate
Blork, you’re right about that. We’ve come to value the shadiness of a well treed street more than our parents or grandparents did.
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Kate
The Gazette’s Bill Brownstein reports on Time Out listing Montreal as one of the world’s best cities. I’d seen this news, and wondered if it wasn’t just Time Out talking up cities where they had established one of their food courts.
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Kate
The Canadiens are planning to educate players on consent following the reaction to their drafting of Logan Mailloux, convicted of a sex offence in Sweden.
Do adult men really have to be told not to sexually assault women, or – as Mailloux did – record their sexual encounters so they can brag about them to the boys? Apparently in some cases they do. If this kind of thing saves anyone (of any gender) from assault, good for them. Let them get on with it.
I just hope it’s more like “you don’t assault people because you shouldn’t assault people” and not “you don’t assault people because it makes the organization look bad.”
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azrhey
The thing is they, nearly all, already know you shouldn’t assault people…what needs to be taught is what IS assault. “I didnt assault her, was just trying to convince her” , “that’s not assault, it’s just a joke” etc…
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Kate
Good point, azrhey. Thank you.
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