Rentrée traffic snarls are pre-dreaded for you by TVA.
Passing curiosity: when I was a kid, school didn’t resume till after Labour Day. These days, everyone going back to school starts a week or two before the long weekend, but media still talk as if the rentrée only begins the Tuesday afterwards. Is there some reason for this discrepancy that I’m not seeing?
The New York Times reviews a Montreal hotel with robot room service, but which falls short technically in other ways.
In its ongoing series examining various ridings, Le Devoir scopes out St-Laurent and its many families.
La Presse has started doing a sort of police blotter style, rolling up incidents in the Plateau and Verdun. Report says there were several fights at bar-closing time, including a minor stabbing, and a fire in Verdun.
The Gazette has recently switched to a mode where they hold a gun to your head and demand you turn off your ad blocker. So I did. This is the result. Now, I know news media are in trouble, but this makes it hard even to find the news, let alone read it. Click on the image to get the full effect:
The Chinese community fought for a long time to revamp a building on Clark Street as a community centre, but it was closed again in 2014 after some mismanagement whose details remain obscure. Then the city rezoned the building so it could be rented to a business. Now the community wants it back and, according to Global, is worried about gentrification; the Journal’s headline even suggests the future of Chinatown hangs in the balance.
I think they’re wrong. The Chinatown we have now is not residential, it’s a few cross streets with typical businesses – restaurants, herbal medicine shops (fewer and fewer of these all the time as the clientele gets older and dies off), tchotchke shops, food stores. This is all good and nobody wants it to disappear, but demographics show a couple of things: the old Cantonese-speaking culture that used to live around there is gone, and newer arrivals mostly live in St-Laurent or on the South Shore and patronize businesses in those areas. It isn’t news either that a new Chinatown exists between Atwater and Guy along Ste‑Catherine and environs.
I don’t know what the ultimate answer is. A hundred years ago, that part of the Main was Jewish. In living memory, it’s been Chinatown. The nature of the Main and environs is always in evolution.
The new festival Mile Ex End is in the news with two days of music followed by a day of comedy, under the Van Horne viaduct.
Some refugees are housed in the old Royal Vic, but the media are not allowed to visit to see what the conditions are like. Lots of examples are given that journalists are allowed to visit refugee camps in other countries, but not here.
Paolo Renda, said to have been consigliere to the Rizzutos, disappeared in 2010, assumed kidnapped by his enemies, although no trace of him was ever found. After first refusing to do so in 2013, a court declared Renda legally dead last winter in a ruling the Journal writer admits went unnoticed till now.
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