I’ve noticed before that hot weather makes people stabby. A man was stabbed Sunday afternoon at Tupper and Sussex, near Cabot Square, and a woman has been arrested.
Updates from July, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Radio-Canada has a text-and-audio piece this weekend featuring urbanist Gérard Beaudet, on gentrification and what it means.
Robert H
Embourgeoisement or gentrification is a knottier phenomenon than much of the discourse about it would indicate. Professor Beaudet at least acknowledges the good that can come of it as well as the bad, but that equilibrium of which he speaks is a very difficult needle to thread. Montreal is becoming a wealthier city, but of course that benefit is not equally distributed. I was interested by his anecdote that that people have left the city not only for the suburbs, but to re-establish themselves in equivalent, cheaper neighborhoods in smaller Quebec cities such as Trois Rivieres. I wonder if the people already living in those places see the arriving ex-Montrealers as an invading horde who will price them out of their homes. With money, you have agency, but without enough of it, it’s hard not to feel like a helpless victim of vast economic forces.
I walk through gentrified quartiers and I think they look beautiful. I like the new business, renovated buildings, and chic, designer homes. But fat lot of good that does me. I may as well be a piece of paper blowing around in the wind. And I know I’m not alone in that frustration.
Kate
If it’s a general facelift, maybe. But we don’t see a lot of respectful facelifting going on. Griffintown has been steamrollered by highrise condo buildings – maybe it was time, since the area had been choked of life for years because of the feud between Frank Hanley and Jean Drapeau. But the Shiller-Lavy approach is not really gentrification, unless you pare that idea down to rental revenue as the only indicator.
I don’t find it an improvement if locally owned cafés or bakeries or shops are pushed out to leave a storefront empty for months or years while the owners wait for a Lululemon or Starbucks to find it attractive. (Sudden flash here: who exactly is behind the push to get rid of bagel bakeries and chicken rotisseries, anyway?)
Over time, of course, the S-L thing will cut itself off at the knees. They’re depending on the diverse attractions of the neighbourhood main streets to make their properties valuable. But they’re getting greedy, and once they’ve damaged the streets sufficiently by killing off the smaller players, even Lululemon and Starbucks won’t see any appeal in their properties. By then even the locals will have given up and be shopping elsewhere. Everybody loses. But it takes years of churn to make this apparent and meanwhile, it’s disheartening and impoverishing for the whole city.
Spi
@Kate
Unfortunately, we keep going back to the Mile-End example when talking about gentrification in Montreal, yes Shiller Lavy is pushing out businesses but I think we need to question the diversity of businesses in the area. I’m still seeing new cafés opening in Mile-End when it’s the last thing the neighbourhood needs.
People keep raising the example of Lululemon and Starbucks, but the Starbucks on Laurier and Parc has been there for over a decade now, well before mile-end got overhyped and is in its own right a community space a lot of familiar faces regularly in there working away and less fortunate people sitting there charging their electronics. The Lululemon hosts and organizes weekly runs for locals and supports community groups in the city which is a hell of a lot more than the Aesop is doing down the street.
Successful businesses in mile-end are catering as much to locals as out of towners. That’s the only way you can have a café (or two) on practically every block along Parc/St-Viateur/St-Laurent and they all survive. I was at Drawn & Quarterly recently and it must have been 1/3 maybe even 1/2 tourists in there. I suspect it’s the same for the vinyl store across the street.
There’s finally some research that pushes back on gentrification being as everyone would like to believe, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/07/gentrification-effects-neighborhood-data-economic-statistics/594064/
Ian Rogers
As long as the lunch crowd from Ubisoft continues to exert its influence over Saint V we will continue to see nothing but bars, lunch counters, and cafés succeeding.
When people complain about Mile End gentrifying they really mean Saint V and Fairmount. Nobody really gives a crap about Bernard or Parc except the locals and yeah, you’re right, the Starbucks is the only good free wifi in the area if the library is closed.
Anyhow as far as your article goes, I had an intersting discussion with some friends on another channel about it earlier this week and the one big problem is that its central metric is education levels – we can see lots of example even here in town where education level doesn’t make for a liveable neighbourhood, like the McGill Ghetto (high crime rates, bit of a food desert, overpriced everything) or the UdeM stretch of north CDN (again, retail and food desert)… no, gentrification isn’t inherently evil but it does need to be tempered with social housing and accommodating long term residents, not just business needs. This is why the Point is resisting overgentrification in a way that Mile End is not. At least we’ve got the PA and free wifi at the library.
Alex
Just to make a point, its not just the lunch crowd from Ubisoft anymore, there are many large studios in the Gaspe and surroundings buildings that are part of that crowd
Ian
I was being flip, but yes, the bougie office crowd is growing faster than the local residential population.
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Kate
Heavy rain Sunday morning caused part of autoroute 40 to flood around Langelier.
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Kate
Summer slows down the history pieces from some sources, but this week everyone is looking back 50 years ago to Apollo 11. A Quebec firm played a part in design and construction of the legs of the Lunar Excursion Module.
The Gazette keeps on with its “through our eyes” feature, which has recently included pieces on Doudou Boicel and the Rising Sun, a look back at the July 1987 cloudburst which drowned the city for a day – a piece of local meteorological history almost as memorable as the ice storm – the start of the Oka crisis and more.
Michael Black
I still have clippings from the moon landing, including the front sections of various newspapers, and magazines like “Look” and “Life” that covered the landing.
Simpsons downtown had a space boutique on the main floor. I dont’t kniw how long it lasted. They advertised something I wanted, so I got my.mother to take me. As I recall, we didn’t go downtown much in the summer, though it wasn’t far. I got what I wanted, but have no memory of what all the boutique carried. I do remember *Aquarius” by the Fifth Dimension was playing.
The live feed from the moon was low definition, due to bandwidth, and on a small crummy b&w tv set was very grainy. Luckily the film and movie cameras were full definition.
I was nine, saw them and, took a nap, then woke to see them walk on the moon. A big event then – still is.
The movie “The Dish” is about setting up a ground station for the live feed in Australia, but it does a good job of showing the anticipation felt at the time.
I think I had a LEM model and a Saturn V model, but those memories are fuzzy.
One of the grocery stores was selling “paintings* of the three astronauts, in a plastic frame, I had that in my wall for years.
Michael
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Kate
Although the CTV headline here says that, despite the heat, the city won’t roll out emergency measures, it immediately goes on to quote Craig Sauvé explaining how pools, splash pads and some air conditioned facilities will be staying open longer.
Where I’m sitting, the rain seems to have given some relief from the humidity, at any rate.
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Kate
A worker is accused of having made porn video at Sacré-Coeur hospital where he worked, including images of some of the staff. The suspect has spoken of his intention to take revenge on women who rejected him.
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Kate
La Presse editorialist Agnès Gruda bluntly calls real estate speculation a cancer damaging our neighbourhoods and calls for means to rein it in as in some other cities.
Robert H
“D’une certaine manière, Montréal est victime de son succès. Son économie va bien, les taux d’intérêt sont bas, et certains propriétaires immobiliers flairent la manne.”
Ouais, comme des requins qui sentent le sang dans l’eau. D’accord, c’était un peu cynique, mais je suis à la recherche d’un nouveau chez-moi et je ne peux pas m’empêcher d’être obsédé par ce sujet aujourd’hui. Ca m’agace et j’en ai déjà marre de chercher. Je me considère comme un capitaliste mais je ne suis pas un fondamentaliste du marché. Je ne suis complètment d’accord avec Mme Gruda mais il devrait y avoir un contrôle sur la spéculation pour le bien-être d’un quartier aussi bien pour ceux qui ne sont pas riche, et enfin pour la santé mentale de ceux qui cherchent un logement.
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Kate
A man was shot in an alley in Verdun late Saturday afternoon, no arrests yet.
Later, there was a fight in
VilleraySt-Michel involving about twenty people, in the course of which two men were badly wounded including one who got stabbed in the head.Update: The man wounded in the head has died. The brief CP piece still calls the location Villeray, and says it’s the eighth homicide this year on the island of Montreal.
Jonathan
Kate, you used to be a stickler for media mis identifying neighbourhoods in Montreal! That stabbing happened in Saint-Michel, not Villeray. The easternmost border of Villeray is Papineau. #justsaying
Kate
Thank you, Jonathan. Curiously, the boundary with Rosemont borough runs right along Bélanger there too. I’m not sure I could’ve sworn to the line between Villeray and St-Michel either – some of the strict boundaries escape me, like the one between Petite-Patrie and Rosemont, and the one between Côte St-Paul and Ville-Émard.
I was going to make some further remark in this post about how long it had been since the last homicide, at the end of March, then I had a look at Kevin’s homicide map. Somehow I missed mention of this homicide on June 28 in Pointe-aux-Trembles. So we’ve really only gone six weeks or so without one. Previous to that, the last one was March 29.
Ian Rogers
That’s a pretty weird place for a full on street brawl. Crazy to make it to the age of 50 just to die of a stab wound to the head in a relatively quiet part of town… I’d love to know what that fight was about.
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