CTV covers once again the woeful story of why downtown is somewhat depressed, especially given how some neighbourhood commercial streets are thriving. The article mentions Wellington Street in particular as a contrast. Similar in French from CP.
Updates from December, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
On reading this dreary, boomery Bill Brownstein year‑end piece sneering at Projet’s plans for the Camillien‑Houde, it began to sound very familiar. I very rarely link Josh Freed, for similar reasons, but he wrote substantially the same column back in September.
Neither man seems to understand that the OCPM undertook consultations and wrote reports at all stages. They simply hate the idea of limiting car access to Mount Royal and will happily feed the biases of those who feel the same way, without actually doing any journalistic inquiry into the situation.
I’ve noticed over the last few years that tendency for some people to demand consultation when city hall is doing things they dislike, often only after they have ignored consultations that have been held. But does anyone really want consultation? When only 38% of eligible voters can even stir themselves to vote in municipal elections, you have to wonder.
Ian
To be fair the city did ignore the very first recommendation from the consultation, ostensibly the most important … so maybe you’re right, there’s no point in consultations especially if it’s just for show.
Ephraim
And these consultations are what drives up the cost of housing and essentially why we can’t afford social housing.. after WW2 they just built, no months and months of conditions by every NIMBY group. That drives up costs. Like those moving in to a noisy neighborhood demanding it be quiet. There is a cost
Ian
This isn’t housing, it’s a multimillion dollar bike path. Hopefully the réfection won’t render the mountain inaccessible from rthe Outremont side for years on end, that’s the side I like to walk up from …
Ephraim
It’s everything. We have consultations on consultations with ever increasing costs. Look at Quebec city and the third link and tramway. Nothing built, but report after report. Where’s the pink line? Consultations.
Mark Côté
I read a very good thread about these kinds of obstacles the other day.
Kate
Yes, Mark Côté, that thread really sums up a lot of the problems we have in Canada.
Ephraim, here’s a good Le Soleil cartoon on that theme.
A.C. Rowe
It’s a lot more than a bike path. It’s the complete reimagining and modernization of the entrance to parc Mont Royal from the northeast avenue Mont Royal entrance to the park. (But haters gonna hate.)
Ian
We already had a lengthy and detailed discussion pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of this project but one thing we mostly agreed on is that the OCPM study’s very first recommendation in their report is being ignored, that there is no real accessibility advantage and a lot of people won’t go to beaver lake any more without bus access, but that it will be a great bike path. There’s still no clarity as to what the city expects from the STM or how it will be funded, and now the Mount Royal cemetery is making noises about having to close the upper gate. It’s not a question of “haters”, and that kind of hand-wavey dismissiveness does nothing to dispel the notion that Projet just does what they want and if you don’t like it, screw you.
I do like hiking, plantfinding and birdwatching in the Outremont woods below the lower belvedere though, and welcome a link to the upper woods as long as it doesn’t mean playing Frogger against MAMILs to get there, or a multi-year construction project that prevents access by anyone.
Taylor
I use newspapers.com for a lot of my research
It’s frustrating to see how many people writing for the Gazoo 40 years ago still have their jobs, be it in Montreal or elsewhere, and how few new/young voices have ever even been given a chance
And they wonder why subscriptions and advertising are falling
EmilyG
And I think it’s sad how many people have recently lost jobs at the Gazette, and in media in general.
Ian
Indeed. It’s a tough row to hoe. I think the longevity of the boomerati is simply the familiarity of a “legitimate” newspaper’s tone.
I don’t think even their own families give a flying heck what they are on about anymore.
“Sir you are going to have to stop talking and move aside, this is the ordering line for an Arby’s”
Blork
Taylor and Ian: are you suggesting writers should be fired when they reach a certain age?
dwgs
Carrousel for journos!!
Ian
Not so much age but a distinct lack of relevance. You could use declining readership as a metric, for instance.
Blork
Ian, maybe. I suspect the decline in readership is based more in younger people having no sense of connection to old-style newspapers combined with abysmal user experience (Post Media in particular). As such, newspapers (even online versions) are irrelevant to people under 50. As such, the old-timers with their tedious old-timey yarns are actually what’s keeping the old readers connected. In other words, if they switch to younger writers they won’t attract new readers and they will lose what readers they still have.
…unless they were to do a complete do-over of the reader experience. (Minimal pop-up and video intrusions, search that actually works, sorting/filtering that works, archives that actually contain archival material that can be found and read, etc. etc.) But that’s not going to happen.
Kate
You do have things like CultMTL and 24hrs, which at least try to keep some semblance of relevance to people under 50. But I don’t know what kind of revenue they make or how sustainable it will be.
In retrospect, how on earth did newspapers thrive for so long, with their huge staffs and printing presses and all that, based on a bit of advertising and classified ads?
Taylor
@blork – abysmal user experience – this, a million f*cking times
I write for America’s leading socialist/progressive publication, Jacobin, which, unlike The Nation, has a much higher production value, and no ads. It’s also a generally younger audience. It’s a well-designed quarterly with an equally well-designed website. Since its creation about a decade ago, subscriptions in print and online have grown steadily, as has the staff.
All that to say, young people will pay to read and pay for print.
I think the Gazoo has several problems, one of which is a hard to read website, the other is that NatPo content is being stuffed down your throat, and I think that was a major miscalculation, because I don’t think Montreal Anglos are nearly as conservative as your typical NatPo reader.
But the other issue is an inability or unwillingness to develop new writers. Without that, there’s no hope of building relationships with new generations of readers.
I suspect that if the Gazette wasn’t under the financial pressure imposed by Postmedia – i.e. if they had managed to stay independent, or at least more autonomous over the past two decades – they likely would have addressed everything Blork mentions. I think they would have transitioned more easily and effectively into their role as newspaper of record for the Anglo community, and would have banked off that. More history articles, more arts and culture, but also more books (remember when the Gazette used to publish their own books?)
There’s no natural reason the Gazette shouldn’t be twice its size and compete effectively with other mediums – the ‘lack of interest, loss of audience’ argument is too often the one favoured by the corporations stripping newspapers for parts and forcing them to run alienating content that does well as clickbait but fails to satisfy people who enjoy reading.
Shame too, because the Anglo community has essentially lost a core component of its history in the process. Tearing down monuments isn’t erasing history, running a newspaper into the ground in the blind pursuit of profit is.
Ian
I do have a subscription to Jacobin, but cancelled my subscription to the Gazette in 2003 becasue it sucked even back then and had more value as a means to become infuriated by the editorial tone than anythign resembling keeping up with current events.
It’s been a very long time that the Gazette has been a cryptofascist rag barely fit to line a birdcage.
Kevin
Kate
Advertising and classified ads were HUGE revenue generators before Craigslist came along and blew them out of the water. Even the independent weeklies were raking money in hand over fist through the classifieds.Back in the ’80s, there were days when the classifieds made up two full sections of the Gazette, and almost every page had at least one box ad.
Ian
I actually had one landlord in the early 90s that agreed to let me out of my lease if I paid for the classified “for rent” ad in the Gazette.
It’s true though, before online listings were a thing all the stuff that became OKCupid, GlassDoor, LinkedIn, eBay, Craigslist, Marketplace and all that was just ads in the paper.
You want a job? A date? An apartment? A couch? A car? Just open the paper, circle the ads that look promising, and start dialing your phone.
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Kate
CBC looks at the notable incidents in Quebec in 2023.
TVA on crimes and court cases of the year.
La Presse has photos of daily life topped with a Martin Tremblay shot that feels like an Edward Hopper painting.
Stéphane Laporte gives us the Palmarès de 2023.
CTV also has a notable stories piece but is already dreading 2024.
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Kate
La Presse’s city reporter Émilie Côté, sparked by the recent news of the Imperial’s closure, looks into what’s up with the Empress in NDG. The answer is: not much. At most, the façade may eventually be saved.
Côté writes: “Et pourquoi la thématique égyptienne (qui pourrait être considérée aujourd’hui comme de l’appropriation culturelle)… ?”
Is it possible to inflict cultural appropriation on a civilization that’s long dead and gone?
qatzelok
Revivals are not a form of necrophilia.
They are symptoms of the bankruptcy of a society’s language of symbols and of its sense of direction.
Kate
Made any new year’s resolutions, qatzelok?
Chris
>Is it possible to inflict cultural appropriation on a civilization that’s long dead and gone?
Of course not, because cultural appropriation is an idiotic concept, period.
But if I wanted to be devil’s advocate: the civilization is *not* long dead and gone, it’s evolved into current Egyptian culture. Is the pre-European-contact Mohawk culture dead and gone, or has it just evolved into what we have today? Dare you culturally appropriate from ancient Mohawk culture?
EmilyG
Cultural appropriation is not an idiotic concept, it’s a form of harm towards marginalized cultures. It’s a real thing that groups of people experience. A lot of white people just don’t get it.
I don’t know if this particular example is cultural appropriation or not. I admit that I don’t know enough about this particular example to say. I don’t mind admitting when I don’t know enough about something rather than shooting my mouth off at something I don’t know much about. Like what a lot of white people do about the topic of cultural appropriation in general.jeather
Was it, when it was popular as an architectural and design style, appropriation? Probably, from what I understand of the history of the fad. Is a building built then still appropriative 100 years later? Not, I think, based on most definitions of it, though I am willing to hear otherwise.
Kate
> it’s evolved into current Egyptian culture
Chris, I would depose that the arrival of the Roman empire and Christianity, and later and most obviously Islam, caused a profound disconnect between classical ancient Egypt and the present-day culture of that nation.
Is it cultural appropriation to borrow ancient Greek, Roman or Egyptian forms? Should we not be putting columns or domes on buildings? Is it the same thing as somebody wearing an eagle feather headdress at a Halloween party?
qatzelok
@Kate: “Made any new year’s resolutions, qatzelok?”
Consume less sugar and hyper-processed foods of all kinds. You?
Anton
Wait, do I note a note of irony?
Chris
EmilyG, odd (and telling) that you seem to think only white people find cultural appropriation idiotic. This story from a few years ago comes to mind. Worth a read.
Is it ‘cultural appropriation’ when Chinese adapt Halloween? Or was the appropriation when the Americans perverted a Christian feast? Or was it when the Christians twisted a pagan harvest festival? Are we to get our knickers in a knot on every iteration?
Cultures don’t exist in a vacuum, they interact, spread, change. We are all human, and we borrow from each other.
Tim S.
“Or was it when the Christians twisted a pagan harvest festival?” Interesting example, considering that in this case appropriation was a deliberate and extremely successful effort to eliminate the pagan religions and replace them with Christianity.
Personally, I think it’s a kind of case by case thing, and in many cases there is an element of fruitful exchange, but you shouldn’t ignore how the power dynamics between cultures means appropriation sometimes causes real harm. There’s a reason why Ukrainians and Russians are arguing over the origins of borscht.
(Actually, you could argue that the adoption of the term “Russia” by the princes of Moscow was an act of appropriation that has led to millions of deaths over the centuries, but that’s an argument for a different corner of the internet).
EmilyG
Not all mixing or interchange of cultures is “appropriation.” Appropriation is when something is used incorrectly.
It’s a complex topic, and a much-debated one.Ian
I like to make Indian food and do seek out “authentic” recipes but as a non-Indian I wouldn’t open an Indian restaurant
…. but that Indian restaurants sell Tilkka Masala which was invented in Scotland doesn’t bother me.
As far as decorative motifs, art deco was heavily influenced but the popularity at the time of Egyptology- but specifically ancient Egypt. You could make a better case for appropriation with Picasso and African art or Van Gogh and Japanese prints, but even then is an artistic influence appropriation in the same way as some 19 year old white girl from New Jersey at Coachella wearing a costume store war bonnet? Not really.
We don’t need to get into the “desert of the real” to see that cultural appropriation is not the same as drawing influences from other cultures.
Taylor
I think it’s important to consider the context: this was largely celebratory, reflecting (then) new interest in Ancient Egypt as a consequence of the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb.
But there’s also the contextual aspect of ‘atmospheric’ theatre design from the era, in which theatres were richly decorated along a consistent theme (inside and out) as a kind of escapism – creating an immersive environment that largely served as kind of entertainment in its own right, something to overwhlem the senses before the entertainment began
They may not have got all the details right (Ancient Egypt didn’t have theatres as we understand them), and AFAIK no egyptologists were consulted (i.e. the ‘hieroglyphs’ don’t mean anything), but with intent being 9/10s of the law, it’s hard to see this as demeaning a culture.
To @EmilyG’s point, if simply using cultural elements inappropriately is appropriation, we could argue things like the Moorish Science Temple movement, an early Black pride/ Black power movement from the US in the early 20th century, might be considered ‘cltural appropriation’ (they moxed a varity of symbols, beliefs, costumes etc), even though these organizations were in fact seeking to return African culture to African Americans, freeing them from oppressive white culture (such as Christianity, which was used as a tool of enslavement).
If someone were to build an “Ancient Egyptian themed” condo or casino today, we might expect them to consult an Egyptologist for accuracy and authenticity, but we wouldn’t necessarily expect them to call up the embassy and ask for permission.
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Kate
The Montreal Pool Room has served steamés for a century although they haven’t had pool tables for decades. The new owner wants to start franchising. I’m not sure this is the way to keep the place alive, but then, I don’t run a fast food joint.
This piece says the Pool Room is the second oldest restaurant in town (1912), and Wilensky’s is the fourth (1928). What do we think are #1 and #3? Some links suggest the Auberge St‑Gabriel is the oldest, although I don’t know anything about its continuity.
Nicholas
Schwartz’s opened in 1928, and has been at that location the whole time. Since Wilensky’s is 1932, that must make it #3. Looking it up, they’re probably using this list. It does surprise me there’s nothing else older.
carswell
The “this list” link’s not working, Nicholas.
Nicholas
Sorry, let’s try again. It’s from Tourism Montreal, so probably treated as official.
carswell
Thanks. Surprised Snowdon Deli (1946) receives not a mention.
Jake
Auberge St‑Gabriel certainly trades on the notion that it’s the oldest restaurant in the city, but that claim seems pretty spurious, at least if we’re talking about continuity. Histories of the restaurant claim it was the first place to get a liquor license after the British conquest, but they also say it was converted back into a private home in the 1800s. It’s not clear when exactly it reopened to the public, but the current incarnation appears to date from 1987.
Kate
I vaguely remembered that, Jake, thank you.
Snowdon Deli does seem to deserve to belong on the list. (I’ve never been to the Deli, although I lived very close to it for some years, as a kid.)
Ian
Best in town and not just a restaurant but also an actual deli. I find them way superior to Schwartz’s but then again Schwartz’s doesn’t even use a real smoker anymore, let alone all the sides and a full coldcut counter.
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Kate
La Presse has a brief video about the climatic extremes we experienced in 2023, Le Devoir is going about it a little differently, with lists of objects from the year: 1, 2, 3, while the Gazette looks back at notable people who died in 2023.
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Kate
André-Philippe Côté’s cartoon this weekend is a nod to Le Soleil’s final paper edition after 127 years of publication in Quebec City.
I’m seeing on X that Ottawa’s Le Droit is also ceasing print editions after Saturday’s.
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Kate
La Presse’s Daniel Renaud looks back on the city’s 33 homicides, classifying them by type, means and so on.
Renaud says, echoing Paul Cherry’s report in the Gazette, that the killing of Claudia Iacono in May is believed by police to have been an error, and that the assassins were sent for someone else. A few months back, Renaud suggested that the target had really been Iacono’s husband, Anthony Gallo.
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Kate
Looking at my 2023 incident map, I see only 2 items on the cycling fatality layer this year, and one of them was a skateboarding accident.
I’d be happy to know there was only one cycling fatality in 2023, but I see there was only one on the 2022 map, and four in 2021. Am I missing some news source?
Nicholas
The official city data map on this has one cyclist death in 2022 (in St Leonard) and five in 2021 (2x Plateau, Villeray, Lachine, Senneville). Just select the filters for fatality, cyclist and your year. You can click on the points to see what month and year it happened to fill in your map if you wish, but it seems you’re catching most of them. There’s no data for 2023 yet; nine pedestrian deaths would be the lowest in a decade, but not unthinkable. More data and details here. I have come here sometimes to check the YTD numbers, it’s the most up-to-date source I know, so thanks for keeping track of these faster than Montreal is publicly!
Overall, since deaths are now so few, one could look at deaths+serious injuries. Using that metric, we had 30s and 40s in 2014-2017, and then 20s in 2018-2022, except for 2019 which had 11, with no deaths at all. (I don’t think this is mostly PM/Plante’s doing as that’s too quick a change, but there definitely was a change there.) There is a strong trend in reduction of pedestrian deaths+serious injuries, with an alarming increase in 2022 bringing it back to pre-pandemic levels, stopping that trend. Deaths themselves, which are larger for pedestrians but still small compared to the d+si, are up slightly since 2018 and over the last decade, following the trend we’ve seen across Canada and the US, the cause of which is still unknown, but phones and larger vehicles are the biggest suspected causes.
Ian
Considering how many vehicular killings in Montreal are “working” trucks, I’d like to see data before jumping to conclusions based on suspicions.
Kate
Thank you for the links and statistics, Nicholas.
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Kate
Toula Drimonis looks back at 2023’s dramas in Montreal.
TVA says Quebec had a bloody year with 107 homicides. Shooting deaths are down throughout the province as well as in Montreal, but there’s a theme of people using vehicles to deliberately kill. But as usual, most killings are either domestic attacks or gang assassinations.
Paul Cherry at the Gazette summarizes the 33 homicides in Montreal (so far) this year, down from 41 in 2022. The 33 deaths includes the seven who died in the fire on Place d’Youville in March.
Allison Hanes says it was an awful year for anglos. Here’s a sample of how this idea has been received on X.
Nicholas
Murders province-wide are at or near a record for two straight years, but down 20% in Montreal. If you discount those deaths by fire (which is not completely fair), that would bring down Montreal to 26% of provincial murders, compared to about 24% of the population. I’m sure of these trends continue we’ll soon be seeing articles in the Journal decrying the dangerous suburbs and rural areas compared to the beacon of safety that is the Island.
Kevin
Not sure when, but I had already blocked that person on Twitter for being offensive.
Ian
Murders overall are down all across Canada but you know what’s not?
Police shootings.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/expert-says-number-of-police-shootings-in-canada-spectacularly-unrelenting-1.7071775
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Kate
Weekend notes from CultMTL. Most of the usual sources haven’t done the exercise this week.
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Kate
Cops caught a pair of guys as they were trying to set a storefront on fire on Notre‑Dame West, early Friday.
Cops also stopped a guy trying to switch seats with a passenger while the car was in motion, and found he was packing an illegal loaded gun and was wanted for breaching conditions.
With dim crooks like these, no wonder cops get arrogant.
Ephraim
Or you could point out that the only criminals they catch are not as intelligent as they are… And why there is so much unresolved crime…
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Kate
One man was stabbed in a bar brawl in St‑Michel early Friday morning.
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Kate
Global tells how two locations of Juliette & Chocolat have reopened.
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Kate
Montréal en fêtes, the group that organized a waterfront party in the Old Port from 2013 to 2022, has decided to permanently pack it in.
EmilyG
I remember going to New Year’s Eve activities in the Old Port in 2004/2005. There was music and fireworks. I guess some group or other organized it before Montréal en fêtes did.
I wonder if there will be any sort of activities in the Old Port this year for New Year’s eve.Kate
There isn’t even going to be a New Year show on CBC and definitely no fireworks in the Old Port.
CE
Yesterday I met a group of tourists visiting from Toronto who came specifically for the NYE event in the Old Port. They were asking me what to do instead and I was at a complete loss. I guess I should have invited them to my friends’ house party.
Kate
I guess it’s no use telling them to watch Infoman and Bye-Bye…
Ian 03:04 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
It’s funny, I still go to the malls downtown & chinatown (both the old one on St Larry and the new stretch on Ste Kitty around St Mathieu) but the idea of casually strolling along Ste Kitty is not on my radar. It’s been more or less under construction for so many years I immediately think of it as an unwelcoming street level space for pedestrians and really the whole idea of wandering in a shopping district seems very 20th century unless you are picking stuff up on your lunchbreak or whatever.
It kind of feels like all the city’s efforts to make downtown “vibrant” killed off what was organically happening, whether it was covid or the unwelcoming vibe of the seemingly endless construction barricades, or whatever. Mont Royal and Wellington naturally benefitted form the pedestrian traffic given the demographic, street structure, and business types.
That said I have noticed that a lot of the businesses along Mont Royal that used to sell thigns have closed in favour of coffee shops, bistros, and bars… they need to be careful not ot turn into another St Viateur where all the useful local businesses are quietly edged out by rising rents in favour of the attracted flaneurs.
Kate 12:53 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
For years my mother went to Ste-Catherine Street weekly, with her sister and their friends, on Tuesdays (after attending a noontime mass at St Patrick’s). She was of the generation that loved the big department stores. I don’t think she bought much stuff, it was more a question of chatting while looking over the goods on display.
I might find myself on Ste-Catherine three or four times a year now. Sometimes it’s for the Apple store, which stands one address away from the location that used to draw me to the street weekly for my own pilgrimage: Classic Books, which had its paperback store next to where the Apple store is now, and where I spent a shocking amount of money back in the day.
I guess for me it’s now a street filled with ghosts.
Ian 17:52 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
This being 2024, the city has to be willing to try new things.
As always in Montreal, we ask “is this a problem that can be solved with clowns” but now, as the city evolves, we should more correctly ask “is this a problem that we can solve with clowns … or hookers?”
I also miss Classic Books as well as all the used bookstores that used to be downtown. That said the food scene has gotten pretty good around St Mathieu. Swapping out the porn stores for noodle shops turns out to have been just the ticket. Plus Korean fried chicken (thoght the hot star closeed down there are others), izakayas all over, Kazu’s magical ramen, Sammi dumplings, PM’s amazing hotpots & tofu dishes, and even a decent Asian grocery in the faubourg.
carswell 21:09 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe that old haunt was Classics Books.
My first year in Montreal, I and several other expat students were invited to an American Thanksgiving dinner. One of the hosts asked me to provide the starter, the cream of mushroom soup from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The only problem was none of us owned the book, the McLennan Library’s sole copy was AWOL and the worldwide Web wouldn’t be invented for a decade or two. So a plan was hatched. Host and I were to secretly rendezvous at Classics, where I would stand in one aisle, the book in hand, softly reading the recipe while host, dressed in a trench coat, fedora and sunglasses (she was a drama major), stood in the adjacent aisle (the inter-aisle shelves were low), scribbling the dictation in a tiny notebook.
CE 22:11 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
How was the soup?
DeWolf 22:45 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
Ste-Catherine is an eternal kind of street, it will always exist and always evolve. If it dies, Montreal is dead.
But it’s certainly in a weird place right now. You have the effervescent Asian food scene around Concordia, a kind of zombie-ish corporate presence in the old shopping district, a bit of buzz around the Quartier des spectacles, and a very confusing situation east of St-Laurent where it seems somehow both lively and tottering on the precipice of destitution. And then it just falls off a cliff around Papineau.
Kate 10:14 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
carswell, the name of the shop was Classic Books, but as a blogger observes here, it was commonly referred to as Classics.
A bit like how Milano in Little Italy is often referred to as Milano’s, etc.
carswell 10:23 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
Excellent, CE. I continue to make the soup occasionally to this day, following the recipe in my splattered and worn copy of the book, bought at Classics a few years later, after I’d graduated and had some disposable income.
The food situation in North America has changed so drastically since 1961, when Vol. 1 was published, that I’m surprised the books have never been updated. A few years ago, Paula Wolfert felt compelled to produce a revised edition of her classic The Cooking of Southwest France, originally published in 1983, more than two decades after MTAOFC, due to ingredients like moulard duck breasts, fresh chestnuts and fresh foie gras becoming available in the intervening years.
Anyway, while there are lots more cultivated and commercialized wild mushrooms around than in the ’60s, when plain old button mushrooms were all you could find, Child’s soup remains one of the best things you can do with them.
carswell 10:30 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
Thanks for the correction, Kate. Those bookmarks, which I remember, confirm the name but I’m also pretty sure they had bags with Classics printed on them. Wondering whether I could possibly track down and ask a couple of the clerks I knew who worked there.
Ian 11:19 on 2024-01-03 Permalink
I do have a couple of the old bookmarks they used to give out.