Canadian armed forces reservists are holding a military exercise this weekend on the Îles de Boucherville and other islands in that part of the river.
Updates from October, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
François Cardinal points out scathingly that the plan to renovate the Lafontaine tunnel has been known since 2019, so why are people panicking and improvising now, in a disorganized scramble, on the eve of the partial closure?
Some options for Monday morning for anyone facing the tunnel and a list of the measures being taken by the city and by public transit to work around the limitations.
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Kate
Another longtime feature of the old Main has closed permanently. Charcuterie Fairmount, on the Main just north of Roy, has closed after a fire in the shop meant they had to either upgrade or go out of business. The owner, who opened the shop on his arrival from Hungary at 21, is now 86.
walkerp
Oh that’s really sad. It was a great butcher shop. Constantly under pressure from the food authorities whose standards were based on factory scale issues (where they forced them to put their sausages at a certain temperature after the Maple Leaf e coli scandal even though they had been making safe sausage their own way there for decades) and now finally done in by these stupid codes. That was one of the best smokers in town. I never knew his name until now, but Joseph was always pleasant and charming at the counter. They had the best butcher blocks, worn concave over the years. Delicious little meat buns and cracklings. Really, really sad.
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Kate
Residents in western Villeray are mobilizing to save Ste‑Cécile church not as a place of worship, but because it serves as a community hub for senior and youth groups. But the parish may be forced to sell the building because it costs too much to keep up.
It’s a pattern we see all over town. The builders of these huge structures assumed hordes of parishioners would go on tithing forever. They didn’t foresee a time when most people wouldn’t be practising religion any more, but would still need spaces for community activities. And these churches include features like towers and tall spires with heavy bells that can become dangerous and unstable over time (cf. St‑Zotique on Notre‑Dame in St‑Henri and St‑Esprit on Masson in Rosemont).
Maybe architects need to work on projects to partially deconstruct these buildings, removing the unstable and dangerous features but leaving the church hall and a part of the open church space for performances and big meetings. Get on this, somebody.
DeWolf
These are historic structures, and they should receive funding for upkeep like any historic structure. (Putting aside the fact that Quebec doesn’t have a good track record of that in the first place…) The problem is that most of them have no heritage grading and therefore no protection.
I’m not religious and neither are many (most?) Montrealers, even the ones that profess to be Catholic, but these churches were the crucible of the city’s development. The trickiest elements to preserve, like the steeples, are exactly what need to be kept because they have defined the urban landscape for hundreds of years. A Montreal without a skyline punctuated by steeples and towers is not Montreal. The sheer density of church towers here is one of the things that sets it apart from so many other North American cities. Letting a critical mass of them disappear would be like knocking down Old Montreal or scrapping the rest of the Golden Square Mile mansions.
I’m not dogmatic about this, though. Being turned into condos like the St-Jean church in Little Italy wouldn’t be bad, although a community use for Ste-Cécile would be best, given that it anchors its immediate neighbourhood. But the important thing is to preserve these churches and their main architectural elements to keep Montreal from being completely denatured.
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