There are 154 active building sites in greater Montreal after a record construction year.
Updates from January, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Workers will have just finished tidying away the traces of the last snowstorm Tuesday when we’ll be hit with another. But Monday will be very cold first.
Tim S.
I have to say, I like it when the streets are blocked by huge snowbanks because it causes drivers to be a bit more careful. This morning, with no snow but still a lot of ice, drivers seemed over-confident and I witnessed a couple of near-misses and the remains of one accident.
dwgs
Wishful thinking. NDG was never properly cleared. It just took me over an hour to get to work downtown. Sherbrooke St. was cleared after the big dump but they never came back after the secondary snow and when we had the slush they plowed it from the middle of the road and then left it. I was happy when I saw the signs for impending removal during the warmer weekend days but they never actually followed through. This morning there is no express lane because it’s full of rock hard piles of ice and snow. I did notice them putting up the signs saying they will do it tonight but…
Derek
Huge snowbanks don’t help the elderly get around very easily. And in Ville Saint-Laurent, many of the smaller streets have yet to be cleared from the last dump. Not sure how the suggestion can be made that workers are “tidying away the traces” of the last storm when there appears to be much work left to be done.
Kevin
Yeah, for some reason CDN-NDG left all its east-west arteries for last, and is supposed to finish those as the new storm arrives…
Meanwhile the sidewalks over Decarie are coated in about 5 cm of ice.
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Kate
As noted earlier, the city’s 4.6 km of archives have to move for three years while city hall is refurbished. They’re now aboveground in a relatively new building and probably better organized than they’ve been for a century.
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Kate
Via reddit, a single-page site called Try harder, STM that analyzes STM bus service to each borough by the numbers. It doesn’t take into account frequency or reliability, nor the presence or absence of metro or train service.
Ian
I guess they couldn’t find numbers for the independent municipalities, which is weird since they are still served by the STM.
EmilyG
Is CDN-NDG really that badly served by transit?
Also worth noting that much of Ste-Genevieve is a short walk away from the 470 bus that runs through Pierrefonds.dwgs
Anecdotal evidence only here but NDG is definitely underserved.
EmilyG
It’d be nice if more of CDN-NDG were accessible by metro, but the buses aren’t bad (even considering the complaints about the 105.)
Ephraim
It also doesn’t take into account how many people own cars, travel by foot, travel by bike, differences of the seasons or even how many people use public transport. It’s useless numbers.
For example, in the upper plateau, only 1 in every 2 households owns a car. Is that the same in NDG/CDN? RDP? Anjou? How about Milton Parc, how many people in Milton Parc need a bus, a car or even a bicycle… when many of them walk to McGill.
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Kate
The Centre d’histoire piece this weekend looks at a rather mundane part of Jarry near St‑Hubert. These days a building stands between Chateaubriand and the fire station, and the space to the left, behind the fence, has an old boarded-up church and a magnificent red oak tree which must have grown there since 1929. Streetview.
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Kate
A fire broke out in the rectory of an abandoned church Sunday morning and it was difficult to get it under control as equipment iced up. Item says St‑Bernardin‑de‑Sienne is a heritage site, although the church is one of the postwar Catholic efforts with little to recommend it architecturally.
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Kate
An unnamed Montreal teenager was charged on Friday with posting a Twitter threat against a school in Pennsylvania. He pleaded not guilty.
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Kate
The 514 Lifeblog has an interesting survey of construction projects around town. Can’t say I’m keen on that brown glass box at the foot of Chinatown. There are also several projects involving gutting greystones and affixing them as decor to the first couple of floors of other glass boxes. The writer of that blog is an uncritical cheerleader for all new development; I link it just for the information.
Uatu
This smells like advertising or at least like some of the “special to The Gazette” articles that are just promotional advertising with a byline. I imagine some realtor linking the blog to a customer as an example of “Montreal life” 😛
The514lifeblog
Hey Uatu! no, I am not an advertiser nor a real estate agent. If you look at my blog, it showcases future projects, future green spaces, articles on infrastructure, pictures of the city/events, articles on the economy, etc. We are living in the largest economic boom in the cities history and I am proud to witness this for myself. A.I/Tech companies moving offices here, thousands moving back downtown every year, foreign investment highest in history, tourism skyrocketing, etc… I do love all the new development even if the architecture can be bad (yellow brick highrises in Griffintown for example) but the city does need some glass towers. Plus it’s adding more life to the city as well.
Su
What a polished and professional blog. Chris must have ALOT of spare time on his hands.
I was not aware that the Bonaventure strip thing is considered “Greenspace”. Does that mean it is included in the official greenspace preservation tally ( which I tbink is 17%) ?The514lifeblog
Hey Su! No, I don’t have a lot of spare time, hence why there are 20-30 postings a year and a usual post takes 1-2H max to complete. And yes, it is considered a green space by the city of Montreal, it’s nearly 6 acres of land (261K sq ft). If the city and citizens call the former Domtar gardens a park/green space, then this constitutes as a quite large park!
david100
Since people are down on these, I think it’s important to underline some of the good things.
1. The Chinatown projects fill important and unsightly gaps. Everyone wants some highly stylized 1930s pagoda inflected structure to keep it “real” but the convention center and Victoria Square business district is slowly swallowing up this area. To this end, we’re looking at a lot of new hotel space and event capacity in exactly the area we need/want it. What’s sad here is that there’s no real discussion of capping the Ville Marie here. That trench is like some remnant of a war, and the city won’t be whole again until it’s gone (well, covered).
2. That Lincoln St. project is great for density and form, it’s a block from Concordia and doesn’t bring in any new parking spaces. Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll be losing the commercial uses, which is very lame – the Concordia ghetto is the city’s densist area and the area most in need of commercial space, everything should be done to maximize the number of commercial units, so as to keep the cost of leases from increasing, with the knockout effect that smaller businesses will be squeezed out. Since Montreal seems dead set against taking any action to restrict formula retail (ie. chains), the City should at least try to level the playing field by forcing builders in this area to do commercial uses, lest central Montreal go the way of Toronto with Pharmaprix and Pizza Pizza on every block. But other than this, we’re looking at new student housing stock in exactly the right area for it.
3. That MacKay St project is part of a giant, sweeping change in that whole area. We all know about the Bell Center projects, the Overdale projects, and the projects on the area between the two (on the Lucien L’Allier block), but the projects on this block aren’t so well known. Directly adjacent to this project is another tower currently under construction on MacKay, and one that’s starting in a couple month at the old (and beloved) Maritime Hotel. There’s also a nearly finished project across the street on MacKay, and one adjacent to that at that weird old seafood restaurant site was just cancelled, likely to be rejiggered. There was another project at 1215 MacKay completed a couple years ago, and the last stretch of empty land, the BBQ Barn parking lot, is surely up soon. In total, we’re talking about at least 500 new units of housing just in this little area. What a transformation. Speaking of the Concordia ghetto, this is what it must have felt like when entire blocks went highrise back in the 1970s, just an amazing transformation of the urban form.
Kate
david100, I don’t think anyone wants kitsch Chinese pagoda effects, but the brown glass box is so passé. A good architect could subtly suggest a form or motif consonant with the neighbourhood without sticking dragons all over it.
We all know about the Bell Center projects, the Overdale projects, and the projects on the area between the two (on the Lucien L’Allier block)…
We do? Where do you keep yourself informed on all this?
The514lifeblog
Actually Kate, that small project in Chinatown will have the same materials used at the new Four Seasons hotel/condos (black glass, gold) and the grey prefab as well. These materials (the prefab) are actually considered by the city of Montreal as “high-quality materials”. In fact, they said the same thing about the Hampton Inn going up across the street. These two projects will add hundreds of people and tourists plus commercial shops to an area in downtown that desperately needs it. As for the other projects, the blog posts about that as well as every skyscraper website.
Faiz Imam
There are quite a few people (i imagine quite a big overlap of readers of this blog) that read the mtlurb forums or skyscraperpage. It’s definitely very pro-development, but I find it the best most active places to talk and learn about construction in the city.
Kate
Lifeblog, I don’t really care what the materials are. I do care whether new buildings respect what’s already there and are designed with an intention to foster the life of a neighbourhood. I don’t believe you can judge a building like a model standing alone – you have to see how it fits into its surroundings, does it bring something to the street life or is it locked away in its own little world? Glass boxes, by and large, are fortresses.
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Kate
Radio-Canada says one man was shot in the foot in an Old Montreal bar at closing time but TVA mentions two victims, neither wounded fatally. Police are trying to untangle the story.
Faiz Imam 15:37 on 2019-01-28 Permalink
A lot of good news here. most of these are in the core of the city, most are higher density and mixed use projects near transit.
More importantly for me, they note that developers in Montreal are very interested in this sort of project and see that many buyers want them. That’s a key element in seriously shifting our overall land use, especially to lower the pressure on peripheral suburban greenfield developments.