Montreal City Weblog

Kate 18:32 on 2019-08-14 Permalink Reply  

• Faiz Imam 19:21 on 2019-08-14 Permalink

  Now *this*, is a new central park.

  Decontaminating the whole thing is a hell of a lot of work, but the potential to have something really beautiful at the end is really major.

  Not to mention, with the amount of land they have to work with, its a perfect place for many sports fields and facilities that we are lacking the room for elsewhere.

• mare 19:48 on 2019-08-14 Permalink

  @Faiz Imam NoNoNo!
  Please lt this be just a park and not a bunch of sport fields that they call a park because there’s one patch of grass in between the baseball triangle and the water square with a pick nick table. We have enough of those. (There are some soccer fields to the North of it, let that be it.)

  BTW, they promised an additional part was going to open this fall, but apparently it got delayed. The tiny bit that’s open now, about one tenth of the surface area, was opened in the spring of 2017 by Coderre, who presented it like it was his own project, even though is was already 15 years in the making. Since then some things happened here and there, like the blasting of ton of rock clifs to make them more safe and less crumbling, but not a coordinated plan to finish one section.

• Spi 20:02 on 2019-08-14 Permalink

  Actually, it’s quite the opposite of a central park. Where central park requires heavy human intervention/maintenance and has vast green lawns for people to lounge and play in.

  Parc Frederick-Back stated intention is to be a more natural parc with little human intervention, there won’t be any trash/recycling bins inside the park itself only at the exits. There will be no additional sports or recreational fields/facilities beyond the existing one at Parc Champdoré on the northern edge of the park.

  Although there are areas that are supposed to be mostly grass, you can’t exactly play any sports on a hill. There are large swaths of the park that will be allowed to grow wild (which you can already get a sense of with the eastern section that’s already open).

  From a sporting perspective it’s great for running (I run there occasionally) but not much else. Part of the initial plan was to have outdoor stages for musical and theatrical performances on the western and southern edges of the park, but since those are the last parts to be open we’ll if they actually materialize.

  At most I think it’ll be a pleasant place to go for a stroll/run/bicycle ride and maybe a picnic if you can stand the constant noise from being under the flight path of landing planes at YUL.

• Spi 20:12 on 2019-08-14 Permalink

  I forgot to mention, they didn’t decontaminate anything. All the trash is there and it’s still leaking methane (which is collected by those white alien-looking domes) All they’ve done is put on several layers of various materials to stabilize the ground, the end result is that there’s a couple of meters of rock and dirt separating you from a massive amount of trash from the ’80s beneath you.

  If I had to guess that’s the reason behind the concept for this park, there are probably serious concerns about trash shifting bellow the surface and the ability to support large crowds of people on top of it.

• Chris 08:29 on 2019-08-15 Permalink

  Pity Frédéric Back, who’s legacy is a mound of rubbish. 🙁