Some streets boom, downtown not so much
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.
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.