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.
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.