A collection of interesting, otherworldly views of scenes at Frédéric-Back Park aka the old Miron quarry.
Updates from February, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
98,5 Sports claims that the site for a stadium for the “Expos” is definitely going to be at the Peel Basin.
Faiz Imam
Aka “the group of wealthy businessmen who are preparing a run a massive campaign to get public approval for a new team have gone all in on this one site, with the message that if they don’t get it there is no future for a team”
That’s one of prime pieces of developable land in the core of the city, right next to a rem station and next to griffin town with its great lack of schools, community centers or much public services at all.
Berk basin would be an amazing place to *properly* plan the next great neighbourhood, which would be of benifit to all the areas around them.
Instead we’d get a giant black hole that brings in people 80 afternoons/evenings a year but will be otherwise abandoned.
Su
I wonder how much they will be paying Canada Lands to acquire the property. It would require an access to information clearance to get that info I suppose. It would be reassuring to know that we got at least market value for that prime piece of land.
Kevin
Do these baby boomers really not realize that nobody else cares about their sports nostalgia?
The average audience of major professional North American sports continues to drop while the average age of the audience increases.
Baseball’s audience has dropped each year for the past six years, and last year’s was the lowest in 15 years.
The only leagues with an average audience under 45 are MLS and the NBA.And nothing is going to crack that. Not even the Super Bowl — that supposedly mega-event — affected the audience for Netflix on that day.
Sorry fogies, society has left you behind. The kids would rather play Minecraft, Fortnite — or watch Twitch.
Uatu
Seriously. I remember when the world series dominated the media and broadcast time. Now it’s just a footnote on a newsfeed. It’s just going to be another black hole for public money.
John B
In that rendering a fairly heavily used bike path & bridge is removed.
Blork
@John B, I wouldn’t put much faith in the veracity of that rendering. It’s very crude; looks like it was banged out in five minutes. There’s nothing put in place that would block the path, so it’s more likely a matter of them just not adding that level of detail.
Morgan
Montreal has previously said it wants the area to become an employment hub, not a residential one.
The people in charge have (I believe) said they also want to develop the area right next to the stadium, presumably with restaurants, hotels etc.
I think the success would depend on the type of project. I think it would be cool if the stadium could also be used for other stuff besides baseball.
david100
I’m skeptical that Montreal can pull this off, but SF ballpark (for example) is a massive success on every level, and anchored a massive redevelopment that is successful on every level, by every measure. Yeah, demand for housing in SF meant that housing would have development would have happened no matter what, but the specific form was really ballpark dependent.
Surprisingly, I disagree about the appeal of a baseball team, but with a big caveat. I’m not at all a fan, but I could pretty easily be drawn into attending night games if it were not too expensive. The real problem with sports in Montreal is the super high cost of attending live games. The soccer games are funner than the depressing experience of attending Habs games (it’s like being in Vegas nowadays) but the price is still not all that low, and baseball would be more like that but potentially with much lower attendance costs. Tickets for baseball games can be as low as $5 bucks in a lot of US markets even today, like the Expos were back 20 years ago, and I’d gladly pay, say, $20 for an okay seat every few weeks, even though I care nothing about baseball. It’s anecdotal, but I’m sure that if someone as bored with sports as I am would be in, the demand for (affordable) tickets could be quite high. If students could get $10 tickets, I could see it being a pretty popular thing, regardless of what anyone thinks about baseball. Just something different and fun to do in a neat environment. And as demand rises, so would the cost of tickets – I believe baseball teams were the first to introduce “surge” pricing, ie. fluctuating ticket prices based on demand.
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Kate
Madonna della Difesa in Little Italy is celebrating its centenary. It’s in an architectural style unique in Montreal and definitely worth a look, even if it’s just for a peek at Benito Mussolini on his horse.
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Kate
Rosemont has passed a bylaw protecting shoebox houses but with provisos that citizen referendums could force an agreement to alter or demolish individual ones.
Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve has also passed a similar bylaw.
david100
Wonderful. Protect property values, increase gentrification, off load demand for housing onto more neighborhoods, incentivize landlords to do dodgy evictions to capture the value created by the artificial land shortage. Genius move.
It’s funny that in Quebec and Montreal, the one thing that everyone agrees on is that once you have your place, the ladder comes up. It’s all perfectly clear for Mr. Activist until he graduates to a place in life where he might try to buy a flat for more stability, and realizes that he’s spent 15 years pushing hardcore anti-growth policies that have priced him out of his own neighborhood. Hey and, by the way, that triplex is now a single family home, as is what used to be a shop, and much of the high street.
Nice work, Project Montreal, preserving these stupid shacks because nostalgia is a believable mask for what’s really going on: a corrupt bargain between anti-development owners who are interested only in their property values and economically illiterate activists who view even fixing potholes as triggering/suggestive of a move to displace them. Hopefully, Legault proves himself useful and straight up strips the city of the ability to make restrictions like this.
Kate
I don’t think it has to be catastrophized, david100. The neighbourhoods where these houses are found are changing, but gradually. These protective laws mostly mean rapacious developers will think twice before seeing the houses basically as prey. If someone owns such a house and wants to expand or demolish it, there will be a mechanism to apply for that – it simply won’t be made easy. Property ownership is still paramount in this society.
mare
Almost all shoebox houses in the streets surrounding my place, in a booming part of Petite-Patrie are mostly owned by rather marginal people, judging by the loads of crap in their large front yards. Shoebox houses are tiny, don’t have rental income and were cheap homes to buy. City valuation is low so they are very popular with developers who demolish the tiny building and build 3 condos with parking garage on the lot. I think it’s good that they can’t do that anymore; a small, one story house with a larger front yard here and there breaks up the monotony of a street.
Bill Binns
Although I’m not exactly an opponent of gentrification, I agree with David100 above. I have seen this over and over. Whenever a neighborhood or municipality passes fussy architectural rules to “protect” a type of residential property or a small village feel or whatever, invariable those protected properties get bought up by folks who like to see their homes in architectural magazines. Cape Cod is full of adorable little 2 bedroom cottages in former working class areas where you now need a permit from the Historical Preservation Committee to install a new mailbox. it is exactly this type of neighborhood cultivation and uniformity that attracts the terrible terrible rich people.
Hamza
David100 – It’s truly a tragedy that the opporunity to buy a flat (I.e. condos) has become so rare in this town. Surely if we built more of these rarified anonymous condo blocks gentrification would be defeated.
/sThere’s a fine city called Toronto down the 401 if you want that sort of stuff. I’ll stick with my ‘stupid shacks’ and anti-developer activists thanks.
david100
You won’t “stick” anywhere with anything, because you’ll be priced out and forced to move. The flat you rent will be sold, and you’ll be evicted for an owner move-in. Then you’ll find that, wow, it’s a lot more expensive to rent than it was when you got your rent controlled unit. So, after weighing your budget against the cost, you’ll decide you have to move to another neighborhood. But then you find that years of under-construction and multiplying restrictions have dumped excess housing demand into all the hoods surrounding yours. So, where do you end up? In the pool of people bidding up the cost of what housing is allowed, and moving ever farther away. Or if you’re poor enough, you end up on the social housing lists, most of which have years of wait list.
This has already happened to Mile End and much of the Plateau, it’s happening in Rosemont, it’s moving north.
The idea that it’s progressive to keep the quaint village is absolutely and totally based on the understanding of a different era.
Tim S.
David100: I get your logic, to an extent, but does this mean we can’t have quaint little villages anymore? I was reading an urban planning-type book once that made the point that one reason why people are leaving Hong Kong and Chinese cities and trying to settle here is that our cities are nicer. It would be nice if there were different options – say, making suburbs more attractive.
david100
People have this idea that we have to turn Montreal into Toronto or Hong Kong. The truth is that we just need to allow a gentle increase in development, and keep costs down. Lift the two- or three-story cap to four- or five-stories north of Sherbrooke. Prohibit new parking ingresses in most neighborhoods. Let the city build massively in the areas best connected to transit – Ville Marie should be taking 50% of new starts. The best example of construction in all of Montreal right now isn’t the area around the Bell Center, it’s Bishop Street between Sainte-Cath and R-L, where we have some of the only street-wall midrise build since the war.
Except for when I was growing up, my only Montreal residences have been on the Plateau, and it has changed. A lot of that was inevitable, but if some of the empty lots, say on Saint Dominique, Marie-Anne, Mont Royal, etc had been built at 7-8 story structures with 40-60 units instead of triplexes, you’d have taken a lot of pressure off the neighborhood housing stock, and supported a lot of the existing neighborhood businesses.
Hamza
Your whole theory is based on a fake premise that condos will prevent gentrification. More development, especially of the high-rise kind, is the opposite of a solution. Ask st-henri or Griffintown if development helped or hurt. Regular folk who’ve lived in the *densest neighborhood in the country* and other desirable neighborhoods do so because they don’t want the same kind of development as you’re taking about.
While Toronto and Vancouver and other major cities have gone the route you speak of, we’ve mostly avoided such excess and kept rents and cost-of-living reasonable while keeping quality-of-life at a peak.
Nothing is broken. Only the irrational desires of developers to make profits and destroy neighborhoods to ‘save them.’
Tim
Hamza: do not limit the greed to developers only. Municipal governments salivate at all the revenue generated by the property taxes associated with condos. They can’t wait to jump into bed with developers.
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Kate
Maestria, the project now planned for the site of the old Spectrum, is going to go even higher than originally planned and be purely residential. Whether it will have to follow the Plante administration’s new guidelines for social, “affordable” and family-size units remains to be seen.
Jack
Can someone help me out on this blog. This project gets pulled out of this developers …, it isn’t approved by any Montreal city planning officials or the mayor, and its currently advertised as a “fait accompli”. This is the same company that created Griffintown’s urban footprint. So frankly I wouldn’t let them build a sandbox. Whats up?
https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/montreal/542013/projet-immobilierBill Binns
@Jack – “it isn’t approved by any Montreal city planning officials or the mayor”
Does a developer require any of those approvals? I’m not sure here but in other places I have lived, as long as the project fits within the regulations set by the zoning of the neighborhood it is quite difficult to stop it from being built. The city can try to drag it’s feet on permitting but can be sued over that.
Douglas
If the developper submits a project that is within the guidelines, the CCU has to act in good faith to accommodate the project. Not throw roadblocks.
If developper is asking for more than zoning requires, then he is at the mercy of the city.
qatzelok
What’s the point of reading Jane Jacobs if you then sit back and watch the Robert Moses’ of the world continue their pillaging?
This ugly archeology of a building will obviously negatively impact this part of the city with shadows, wind tunnels, and vertigo.
Jack
That building would make me proud of being from Dubai.
david100
I’d love it if this were built, but it won’t be. Tail end of the boom, Chinese capital controls leading to slowdowns worldwide, interest rates rising, speculators receding from the market, but without any significant reduction in the cost of construction, and several towers in much more desirable areas coming online (Griffintown, Old Montreal, Cabot Square, the area around Overdale/Bell Center, and even the Bleury/Sherbrooke towers).
Still, would be pretty neat. Think about how recognizable these would be on the skyline. It’s not too well known, but there’s also a couple of towers proposed pretty much right across from this, on the site of the demolished old children’s home/school that’s now a grass lot next to the SNC-Lavalin building. In addition to this, you have a very real possibility that the Yaccarini tower next to Cleopatra goes up, as does the next Bleury/Sherbrooke tower. If all of these were constructed, we could be looking at 2000+ new units in the area, which would do wonders for virtually every business in the central city, and would put improvements like pedestrianization and tree-planting into hyperdrive. What’s not to like?
david100
Sorry, units for 2000+ residents.
Kate
david100, shadows and wind tunnels, and the unpleasant sensation of being like ants walking around under huge buildings. Bleury is too narrow to have buildings like that on both sides. You can do it on René-Lévesque but not on Bleury.
david100
Every housing unit that’s built down there is one that’s not being bid up in the neighborhoods. Everyone in Montreal (aside from landowners looking to sell) should be cheering residential development in the core.
Every extra person living down there supports and sustains neighborhood-anchoring shops, and shifts Sainte-Cath back into what many of us remember it being – not the chain shop dystopia so much of it is today.
Extra population forces the city to make pedestrian/resident-focused improvements, from which we all benefit.
The Desjardins complex is Montreal’s answer to the Rockefeller Center. The PdA is Montreal’s answer to the Lincoln Center. Let this new project be Montreal’s answer to some of the higher end super towers going up now on W. 57th, the Hudson Yards down off the High Line, or even the Upper East Side.
Also, Kate, while I respect your opinion on a lot of issues, I have to disagree with you (and many others) on the development of Bleury. There’s nobody forced to live there, and if the places are truly oppressive, the market will reflect that by pushing the price of rentals/condos there down. But the fact of continued demand for units there at prices that pencil for new construction means that, clearly, lots of people want to live here. And this is great! Proximity to tens of thousands of others, to the metro, to top shelf amenities, walk to work, walk to the Fleuve if it’s not too cold. The fact that shadows or light on Bleury may be more or less than what some folks living in the neighborhoods may feel is appropriate should be a very secondary (or, like, octiary) concern when measured against the value that this form of urban development brings.
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Kate
It’s impossible to ignore the wave of news about SNC-Lavalin especially now that it seems Quebec may also be bringing charges against the engineering firm.
Anyone following news here will have been aware since the MUHC scandal and other stories that SNC-Lavalin was shaking off accusations a little too often. But despite the flaws in the Trudeau administration it will annoy me a lot if this scandal lands us with another Tory government in reaction to it.
Some interesting thoughts on bribery in corrupt countries from CBC’s Neil Macdonald.
Update: Quebec may be investigating SNC-Lavalin over a contract to refurbish the Jacques-Cartier bridge. It might be simplest just to tell us which of their contracts were not truqué.
Chris
Or maybe it’s time we stop limiting ourselves to Liberal and Conservative, and vote for another choice like NDP, Green, Bloc, PPC, or whoever.
Fortunately, as promised by Trudeau, the next election won’t be first past the post, so maybe people will feel more free to vote for who they really prefer!
Kate
Thing is, most of us know that a vote for such parties will count for nothing. If I thought my NDP or Green vote would go towards some representation in Parliament, it would be more appealing. But we don’t do things that way.
Michael Black
Puglaas has resigned from cabinet, I’m assuming a realization that things aren’t working out so well.
I saw read an interview with her father, he was proud of her, of her “stubborness”. Hopefully her being in cabinet helps teenagers like Tina Fontaine have this great role model.
Remember, she’s not accused of doing something wrong, but of upholding her cabinet role, and being punished by the move to another cabinet post.
It mattered to me that she’s from the Pacific northwest, and she was minister of justice, since of course my great, great grandmother’s brother was chief justice in the provisional government. Someone torched his house once the expeditionary force got to Red River.
Lim limpt to Puglaas.
Michael
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Kate
The city has created a hiring program for first nations to meet part of its promise to diversify its workers.
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Kate
The same journalist who reported last month on the Place des Festivals needing repairs now gives us the estimate: nearly $400,000 to repair “normal wear and tear” on the slabs and mortar. The damage is done by the water jets and the sheer weight of the temporary stages brought in for events.
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Kate
The Gazette says Mayor Plante is on the defensive over the Children’s Hospital redevelopment site, where a woman was killed by a truck in December. A local spokesman says nothing has been done to make the site safer, and that heavy trucks move at high speeds through surrounding residential streets.
La Presse says the same spokesman says warnings were given before the incident. This piece hints there’s a hot potato going on between Montreal and Westmount because Atwater is the border between the two cities.
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Kate
CBC uses Valentine’s Day as a hook for a story about the city’s wholesale flower market, a thing I never knew existed.
Clément
Wow, thanks so much for sharing that.
My very job (with a paycheque) at 15 was working at the Interprovincial Flower Market (in addition to washing dishes at the Hawaiian Palace). It used to be on Brunswick, near Sources. Our shift started around 4am to prepare for the 7am auction and we’d be done around 8:30. School at Polyvalente des Sources started at 9am, so it was the perfect part-time job for a morning person like me. There’d be an auction on Tuesdays and Thursdays. More during busy periods (Valentine’s, Easter and Mother’s day). I’d show up at school smelling like roses, carnations and potted plants!!!
The analog clock shown around 0:15 is the old one that was used at the Brunswick warehouse. It would go counterclockwise until a buyer pressed a button to stop at their desired price. Whoever pressed first saw their seat number light up and they’d buy the lot, whatever it was.
Our job was to empty the freight trucks (that had arrived overnight) before the auction to showcase the merchandise and, during the auction, to distribute the purchased lots to the buyers and help them load their trucks.
Tim F
Huh. I always assumed the city’s flower market was at the southeast corner of Marché central.
Mr.Chinaski
Does the MTL flower auction works the same way (reverse auction with a clock where you press a button) as the Aalsmeer Flower Auction ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUJoRMD0B-Y
Kate
Mr.Chinaski, the article says their system is based on the Dutch one.
Clément: thanks for the memories!
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