Transit cuts bad for downtown: Castanheira
Downtown booster Glenn Castanheira says that cuts to transit services will be bad for downtown.
(I’m betting now that, if Ville-Marie gets its own borough mayor by the time of the next election, Castanheira’s name will be on the ballot.)
Well, at least visitors like our downtown and one unscientific study found that Old Montreal is the most Instagrammable place in Canada. (Imagine how much more Instagrammable it would be if cars were banned from the area!)
Ian 21:34 on 2023-04-20 Permalink
Mm yes cars – of course we always come back to that here – but maybe this is a problem that can be solved with clowns?
Kate 22:01 on 2023-04-20 Permalink
What a nightmare.
Thing about cars in the Vieux, often you want a photo but there’s a car in the way, or – worse – you’re just lining up a nice shot when someone intrudes their car. Or a shot would be lovely except for a row of parked cars.
It would be so much more charming without them.
Ephraim 22:10 on 2023-04-20 Permalink
It would also be more charming with the 500 Place d’Armes/National Bank building in Place d’Armes.
Kate 22:20 on 2023-04-20 Permalink
I assume you mean without it?
Robert H 23:06 on 2023-04-20 Permalink
I think Centre-ville is a novelty to many tourists, because they come from the blandly pleasant generic suburban environment that characterizes most North American cities. In fact there’s plenty of that in Greater Montreal. Boulevard Curé-Labelle is far more representative of the average neighborhood on this continent than Sainte Catherine Street much less Rue Saint Paul. Most cities in Canada and the U.S. have hollowed out at the core and many are struggling to build the kind of drawing power that downtown Montreal has, albeit in its somewhat diminished state.
A local flaneur strolling down La Cat will notice the vagrant and troubled begging, injecting or passed out on the sidewalk. They’ll remark the graffiti, vacant storefronts and holes in the urban fabric like the empty lots across from the Eaton Centre. I’m sure the visitors see that too, but they are also impressed by the way that people still come downtown, that there are still streets and stores full of shoppers and people going to concerts, to a museum, to school, or increasingly just because they happen to live there. Montrealers still frequent the downtown in a way citizens do not in, say, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Saint Louis and Dallas.
DeWolf 01:27 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
That’s a good point. In so many American cities, downtown has been revived only to become a kind of theme park, a place you go for dinner and a show (or a sports game) but not a real living part of the city. And it’s usually surrounded by parking lots and half-empty neighbourhoods.
And Ian, I know you’re being facetious, but there’s no good reason cars should be allowed on 90% of Old Montreal streets. Half the traffic in the neighbourhood is out-of-province tourists driving their big SUVs around trying to find a place to park.
JaneyB 09:17 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
Something that might work is having some days of the week car-free and others cars-allowed. That way people could have their good photos and immersive historical experience on some days while the people who might need a car (old, disabled, bunch of kids) could have their time too. At least, this should be tried. If tourists come to the Vieux with cars on the wrong days, they could be routed to the downtown which could have more clowns and discounted parking on those days. Seriously, this could work.
Ephraim 09:26 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
@Kate – Definitely without. That building… why did anyone approve of that in Old Montreal. It’s awful!
Kate 10:46 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
I agree. It’s not a terrible modern office tower, but it’s in the wrong place.
After your comment yesterday I went looking for photos of Place d’Armes before that building. The one that was there before wasn’t spectacular, but it was in tune with the rest of Saint James Street (as it was then) and the square. You can see a bit of it at the left here.
On imtl.org I see that construction on 500 Place d’Armes was started in 1963 and the building was completed in 1967. So it was a decision made by the Drapeau city hall, which was happily tearing down older buildings all over town.
CE 11:13 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
St-Paul has been closed to car traffic in the last couple days and it’s much, much better. Another street in Old Montreal that would be better without cars is St-Sulpice. The sidewalks and narrow and always full and cars drive very fast but don’t really go anywhere.
I thought 500 Place d’Armes would be unliked by tourists but a lot of people appreciate it for what it is. I’ve come around to it myself. I like how Place d’Armes has such a wide variety of architectural styles from various periods. I’m sure people felt the same way about the Aldred Building or the New York Life Insurance Building when they were built.
Downtown is definitely a novelty to tourists, as are the surrounding neighbourhoods. People are surprised that people live the way we do here. Although, over the years, I’ve also heard people describe the density of the city as “sad” or depressing, especially people from suburban areas.
Blork 11:19 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
500 Place d’Armes/National Bank building in Place d’Armes should be seen as a cautionary tale. Specifically, don’t get too caught up in the zietgeist of the moment when making big decisions with long-term implications.
At the time it was built (early to mid-60s) few people cared much about the old building in Old Montreal. They were run down and emblematic of bygone days. People in the 1960s were interested in PROGRESS and the FUTURE, not historical preservation of buildings that felt dated and parochial. A modern skyscraper would REVITALIZE the area and bring a modern sensibility to the area and to the city. THE FUTURE WAS MODERN! Etc. etc. etc.
At the risk of starting a flame war, that cautionary tale should be considered whenever we plan for the utopian futures we all dream about. The current zeitgeist is all about densification and public transit. Those are good ideas, but it might be useful to also take a breath and think about the variety of futures that might lie ahead before we bulldoze those rowhouses and replace them with multi-story buildings full of tiny shoeboxes that make us go “yay densification!” today but might be seen as a really bad idea 40 years from now for a variety of reasons that we’re not even thinking about.
DeWolf 13:57 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
@JaneyB Pedestrianization almost never means unilaterally banning all vehicles from a certain area, with no exceptions. There would still be access points for deliveries, parking garages and pick-up/drop-off areas in front of hotels. But most streets would be limited to pedestrians, there would be no street parking taking up an ungodly amount of space, and through traffic in the heart of the area would be banned.
With the right mix of pedestrian and low-traffic streets, nobody would be more than 50 or 100 metres away from the nearest place where they can get into a car. It’s the same approach taken in the old towns of most European cities, which have the same scale as Old Montreal, but little of the obnoxious traffic.
@CE I fully agree about 500 Place d’Armes. That square is a particularly eclectic collection of buildings from different eras. In many regards the Aldred Building is just as alien as 500 Place d’Armes.
@Blork I don’t think you’ll find many people, aside from property developers, who advocate demolishing historic rowhouses or triplexes so they can be replaced by high-rise condos. Most densification in Montreal is happening on vacant lots, parking lots and strip malls, or else it’s the very picture of “gentle densification” such as replacing single-storey shoebox houses or single-family houses with new multiplexes. It’s a different story in Toronto, of course, where new projects tend to be extreme in scale. But that’s because the supply of land that can be densified is artificially constrained by the fact that the vast majority of the city is zoned exclusively for detached single-family houses, so developers have no choice but to go big or go home.
Kate 14:12 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
DeWolf, what you say in response to Blork is true now, but he’s right about how it wasn’t true then. They demolished hundreds of units of affordable housing in historic rowhouses in the early to mid 1960s – Goose Village, the Red Light, the Faubourg à m’lasse – the quartiers disparus. Yes, a few of the buildings were probably not in great shape, but looking at the photos taken in those streets then, there’s not much difference between them and parts of the Plateau, Hochelaga and St‑Henri that are still standing now.
The turning point here was the demolition of the Van Horne mansion (1973), which startled people because it was the sudden loss of a well-known building on a major street. It was only then that Heritage Montreal got started and people began to campaign to save older buildings.
DeWolf 15:52 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
The justification for those 1960s-70s demolitions wasn’t densification. Just the opposite. Thousands of homes were replaced by empty space and parking lots. It was a completely different context.
Blork 16:16 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
Folks, I was only using densification as an example of something that seems like a good idea now and fits into the zeitgeist, the same way building MODERN seemed like a good idea and fit into the zeitgeist 60 years ago. I wasn’t picking on densification specifically. Just noting the cautionary tale aspect of going all-in on an idea that seems perfectly reasonable at the time but might not seem so later.
Blork 17:02 on 2023-04-21 Permalink
The point being that we shouldn’t get to cozy with the assumption that everyone in the past was wrong but now we have it all figured out. Because today’s “now” is tomorrow’s “then” and it is certain that some of the things we’re doing now with full optimism will be seen in the future as colossal mistakes.