The city’s largest public housing facility was inaugurated Monday on tiny Christin Street downtown. It includes 144 units.
The building will be administered by Accueil Bonneau. The woman who runs the Accueil says the city needs thousands of units like this to house its homeless.
The formal announcement is out, $870 million for the stadium including a permanent roof and a transparent glass replacement for the technical ring.
$1B to throw good money after bad. Do we even have a choice? We can’t demolish it and we can’t keep it as is.
How much would it cost to just encase the whole thing in amber and call it a museum piece?
By the time the roof is installed, that figure will be well over $1 billion, which is getting up into the same stratosphere as the cost, including overruns, of building the entire thing in the first place. And who knows how long this major compromise “solution” is going to last?
The entire project has been an embarrassment from the start. Unfinished in time for its original purpose, with a laid-off architect and a half-completed stump of a tower to remind the world that Quebec and Montreal don’t get things done well or on time. A facility hated by sports teams, concert organizers and spectators of all stripes, with no prospect of becoming home to a major sports franchise. A stadium whose design is a warning, something no one wants to emulate. A heat island, a brutalist eyesore ill-designed for our climate, a wart on the neighbourhood, with nothing to say to it architecturally and very little to offer it socially except a kind of lifeless blight as it sits unused and brightly lit, turning the long stretch of Sherbrooke between Viau and PIe-IX into a couple of bowling lanes. An accident waiting to happen… again and again.
A money sink historically, now and in the future. And it’s only going to get more expensive to maintain as the years wear on. How long before we reach the $3 billion mark for construction and upkeep, with the ticker never stopping? An embarrassment in and of itself.
Speaking of a ticker, someone should have a website that tracks our investment to date, interest included. Maybe that would be the idiot slap the province needs to come to its senses and tear the thing down. Roll out the “can’t take it down because of the metro lines” argument, a convenient excuse that’s unproven and probably baseless.
I’m just going to point out that the repair job of the technical ring will involve slicing out one section at a time, lowering it to the ground, and then hoisting another section into place.
In other words, they have to partially demolish the thing in order to rebuild it.
Cronyism=OIB & Olympic Stadium Repair = Sunk Cost Fallacy
There is NO real reason to do anything with the Olympic stadium other than allow it to decay. How many days was it in use last year as a stadium? How much income did it generate? It’s time for reporters to start to ask questions about the members of the OIB, the real point of spending more money and if and when they think that this will ever be viable. Because almost everywhere else, they have just allowed their Olympic stadiums to decay, because they are useless. Thank of all the housing we could build in that area. 20 story high buildings with plenty of green space with direct metro access.
Ephraim,
Your questions on days used last year and income generated is literally in the article linked.
Michael… I see “could” or “predicts”. That’s not numbers, those are SPIN.
“The government predicts that, with its new roof, the stadium will attract larger events, possibly generating as much as $1.5 billion from tourism and other sources over 10 years.” (This isn’t money in the bank, this is pie in the sky reasoning for spending it. And $1.5B in tourism isn’t DIRECT income, it’s income that tourism will bring in… is this just the stadium or including Bidome, Planitarium, etc. Which will exist without this repair.
And
“It also expects to make $61 million in gross revenue per year from the Olympic Park, while the stadium itself could generate tax revenues of more than $20 million per year.”
So this is $61M from renting parking, renting the cinema, rent for other parts of the park, etc. And again a “could”. I could generate tax revenues of more than $20 million per year… but I won’t. That’s another pie-in-the-sky number. The CBC article says $68M in total… if that is correct, than the stadium brought in $7M in GROSS revenue. No information on NET amounts, of course, because they are deeply in the red.
They are also promising that this roof may last 50 years. They promised the last one would last 25 years and held a “promise” from Birdair that did the repairs, which declared bankruptcy to avoid having to actually do the repairs. The current roof was installed in 1998. And according to the OIB, it rips 50 to 60 times a year. There are well over 7000 tears in the roof…. a roof that was supposed to last 25 years according to the OIB but was su
The stadium has NO tenants, NO one wants to have a concert there (the acoustics are awful). The tower does.
I’m not a huge fan of brutalism, but it is iconic. Is it $1B+ iconic? I doubt it. I don’t have architectural plans, but it seems the stadium itself is not above the metro line or station. I’m sure there would be effects, but you could probably demolish nearly everything and then leave a small buffer between the metro and the new construction. You could probably fit tens of thousands of housing units there, immediately adjacent to a metro line, a massive park and most of the Espace Pour Vie things. Even at a smaller scale, this is way better than Royalmount.
Ephraim,
Kate’s 2nd link:
L’amphithéâtre accueille actuellement une trentaine d’événements par année
Les retombées actuelles du Stade sont d’environ 68 millions par an.
Nicholas,
The Olympic stadium is directly above a metro line and there is a station right underneath it. That’s why they can’t do the cheap method which is to detonate it into rubble.
I like the stadium. It’s iconic. It’s all those things. But FFS there’s a point where you just have to stop throwing money at it.
A billion dollars. That’s 4000 housing units if you were to build small and economical apartments for social housing at $250k per unit. (Social housing doesn’t need quartz kitchen counters and fancy “rain” showers in the bathrooms.)
$250k not realistic? OK, $500k, which is surely way more than it costs to build a 700 square foot one-bedroom (or a mix of studios, 1BR, 2BR, on average). You’re still talking about 2000 units.
Alternatively, sell the f*cker to Elon Musk for a dollar and let him figure it out.
That $68M is for the whole park, of which $61M is the rest of the park, so $7M for the stadium per year. That’s 124 years to recoup a roof that will last 50 years.
Even with the pie-in-the-sky numbers suggesting $20M in tax revenues, that’s over 43 years to recoup, and of course that FV cash versus PV cash. In short… it’s just good money after bad with no real promises of income, ever.
The metro line runs adjacent to the stadium – not under. Both stations nearby are also not under the stadium. Care would have to be taken during demolishing the stadium but it is not an impossibility.
This is a really bad idea and a colossal waste of money. I thought that we didn’t have money for teachers and nurses only a few months ago. The sunk-cost fallacy is strong with this decision however there would be bad PR if we decided to demolish it.
How many additional dollars would it take to renovate the inside it to MLB standards if we were successful in getting a baseball team back – not that I’m very interested in that.
The stadium can’t be blown up because it’s made of pre-stressed concrete ie. concrete with massive steel cables running through it that are under lots of tension.
The whole “there’s a metro station underneath” is just something they say to distract of their ridiculous estimates, since there are also many, many sublevels of parking garages under the stadium.
I really, really wonder who the hell likes the stadium that much that they think it’s reasonable to spend billions on it, and why. i just don’t get it.
OTOH that’s only about $230 for every adult and child in the metropolitan region, so why don’t we all cough up so we can fly our flags proudly! Any chance of 100% participation if I started a billion dollar GoFundMe?
Like I mentioned in the other thread Shea stadium was dismantled and not blown up and if you can build the Bell center and skyscrapers on metro stations like downtown then it would probably be possible to do the opposite.
Why can’t another, a new, iconic architectural or even sculptural feature be built for Montreal? Crikey, this isn’t the Eiffel Tower, the Guggenheim Museum or the Sydney Opera House. As a skyline marker it says Montreal, so leave the shell as a sculpture with minimal repairs as needed. Problem is if we bid for some new feature, we could end up with tree stumps or worse. I blame it on the replacement of good art training with marketing degrees. Just think of what social good we could do with this kind of money. For fun, I did a search for iconic urban buildings. Mind blown.
I’d rather have the Guggenheim than the Olympic Stadium, any day. But I will accept just the artwork for the Guggenheim in Bilbao as a proxy, if we have no choice. I miss Maman…
The president of Controlled Demolition — which took out Seattle’s Kingdome for $10 million in 2000 — sees no reason demolition would cost anywhere near the thousands of millions of dollars the OIB is providing as a figure.
The most expensive stadium demolition *in the entire world* was done for $40 million.
The whole project is a giant white elephant that isn’t benefiting anyone except the OIB and construction companies.
@James even if you could magically transform the stadium into the world’s most beautiful baseball park, it would still be stuck in the middle of the east end, far from the downtown core. Now, it’s not absolutely essential that a ballpark be located centrally to succeed. Atlanta recently opened a new park in the middle of nowhere and I gather that the owner of the4 NHL and NBA teams in Washington wants to move to a new arena in Virginia (loosely connected to some Virgina Tech campus expansion project). So it can be done – but if you were looking for a non-central location for a new Montreal baseball team, you wouldn’t pick Pie-Ix and Sherbrooke in a million years – it’s a long way from a lot of your fan base (e.g., West Island Anglos).
Moreover, the architecture of the stadium is extremely incongruent to an enjoyable baseball atmosphere – you could spruce it up and try to improve sightline and acoustics, but ultimately the stadium is just way too massive to accommodate a modern MLB crowd (i.e., 30-40K fans, not 50K+). The Big O is incredible when it’s full; anything short of that just feels like being trapped in an abandoned mall in the middle of the night.
All that being said, it will be interesting to see whether the Blue Jays are able to make the similarly massive and dystopian Rogers Centre (aka Skydome) feel more intimate following the current renovations.
Politically, I’m surprised Legault is going along with the OIB. I get that the stadium and its facilities have their uses, but it would be so easy to take a ‘common sense’ approach, veto the plans, order the demolition and then nudge-nudge-wink-wink to the rest of the province about how only the CAQ had the guts to plug Montreal’s biggest money leak. I imagine the OIB has done an impeccable job positioning any prospective demolition as a non-starter (evacuation of surrounding buildings, shutting down at least two Metro stations for years, etc.).
Have to admit I’m a little baffled that all of the major political parties have endorsed the $1B+ plan (including QS). I am not baffled that the minister responsible erroneously referred to Bruce Springsteen – whose fall 2023 show at the Bell Centre has been postponed to this year because the Boss has an ulcer – as justification for the need to fix the Big O’s roof. This is the same logic that left Quebec City with an NHL stadium and no team. Just because you build a stadium doesn’t mean Taylor Swift is coming – when Montreal can support 3+ nights of sold-out shows at Toronto/Vancouver prices, Tay-Tay will book the shows.
Anyway, if you want Beyonce, build a cutting edge performance venue (like the Vegas Sphere), don’t duct tape a roof onto a crappy stadium.
This tweet seems to say it all. The cost to demolish these 8 stadiums was 140M. Which means 2B of demolition costs in Quebec gives you 112 demolitions elsewhere. Something doesn’t add up.
The CAQ just getting as much public money into their developer friends/lobbyist’s greedy hands before they get shown the door. Hopefully this doesn’t get started by the time of the next election and the PQ can just sit on their hands until it has to be demolished.
The thing is, you can keep the cool tower and build around it with the many much more sensible ideas suggested in this thread.
Only if the stadium was built from 100% homegrown Asbestos Concrete™ the 2B demolition cost would be plausible.
(Even though that doesn’t exist we can’t be 100% sure it wasn’t.)
I know you were joking but asbestos really was mixed with concrete and cement for quite some time for a variety of contruction and industrial uses, from the 30s through the 80s.
One could probably build some temporary protective structure around the metro. Do the demolition on a Saturday, early during summer vacation. Shut down the Green Line on that section for the weekend. If something goes really wrong, they’ve got the rest of the summer to fix it.
Or alternatively, dismantle a small section that’s near the metro, and blow up the rest.
Old ideas aren’t working, we need to think “outside the box”.
Think about how the Berlin Wall became highly desirable as slabs of rubble. I read recently that some ultrarich does are trying to create a version of the Olympics where you can dope up as much as you like.. if we can re-contextualize the stadium as a symbol of normative oppression and invite said does to Montreal, they can cart it away to create symbolic plinth wherever that isn’t here and the city gets say, a 10% cut of all initial sales of the raw rubble but at later auction they can resell at whatever prices they want.
I’m only kind of kidding … if we can Tom Sawyer our way out of this albatross around our necks we could have all the clowns, forever.
A new project is being planned for McGill College and Ste‑Catherine, to replace Place Montreal Trust. But the new building would further block the view of Mount Royal.
As long as it’s still visible through the giant mystical cock ring I think we’ll just have to make do with clowns.
I was there yesterday and wondering how it could possibly block the view of the mountain. It wouldn’t project out over McGill College.
This appears to be a classic case of the headline being largely disconnected from the story, and written in such a way as to attract attention. In other words: clickbait.
As DeWolf says, it won’t block any views of the mountain. The only thing it will block is the view of the Bell Media tower (the tall building just up the street from PMT) and to some extent the Manulife tower next to it. Too bad for tenants of the Bell building; I used to work on the 21st floor there, and my office was one of the ones within the blue glassy bulge of the south facade, and the views from there were fantastic. That’s where I captured the images in my “View Project” where I shot the same view of the Sun Life building every day over the course of a month, to record the changes in light during different times of day and different weather. (I regret that I was using a turn-of-the century digital camera and shitty processing software; maybe I should revisit those tiny and shitty JPEGs and see if I can improve them…) https://www.blork.org/blog/viewproject/
Anyway, yeah, no blockage of the mountain from that particular building, although the headline (and the story, although barely) does raise the question of the conflicting values of views and building scale vs. densification. Not really mentioned, but there is also the idea of compression and claustrophobia that can happen when there are too many tall buildings too tightly packed together. The article talks about the (forever wished for) transformation of McGill-College into some kind of open-air pedestrian utopia, but that new building might take away from that if it imposes too much on the space.
How on earth do people look at that ring and the first thing that comes to their mind is sexual in nature?
How on earth do people look at that ring and the first thing that comes to their mind is srtistic in nature?
😛
Les Amis de la Montaigne really seems out of touch here. We’re not talking about putting up a skyscraper on Parc Avenue – expanding an existing tall building in the middle of downtown to create more housing in the middle of a major housing crisis is extremely sensible.
Incidentally, someone I used to know was connected to some of the Amis at one time. He had suggested that they engage with downtown building owners to get them to donate their vertical building rights (i.e., their ability to make their buildings taller) to the Amis – the building owners would get a big tax credit and the Amis would, eventually, have a veto over any building expansion (at least upwards). I have no idea whether this idea would have been legal or feasible – establishing the value of the donations would be complicated but, IMO, not impossible. I suppose the Amis didn’t think it practical or necessary; they do have an inordinate amount of traction when it comes to establishing the terms of discussion around anything remotely connected to the mountain.
Not to throw shade or anything; the little I know of the org (various kids’ programs, etc.) is all solid and well-intentioned. I wonder, though, whether their viewpoint is representative of Montrealers as a whole. I think, generally speaking, we defer too much to the status quo ante when it comes to a lot of urbanism in Montreal in a way that is ultimately only beneficial to bureaucrats and contractors. In the case of the Big O, our devotion to the status quo – what @Ephraim rightly called “sunk cost fallacy” in another thread – is understandable. But the devotion that CCUs and borough permit-approvers hold to recreating 1920s Montreal is really hard to square with in the context of a housing shortage, inflation, and advances in building material technology.
Really the only thing that bums me out about this Mtl Trust project is the prospect of more years of work interfering with Ste Catherine. They’ll probably only get started once the city’s project is done.
Amis de montagne seem like a bunch of juvenile kids throwing their opinion into adult affairs.
We need more housing built. End of story. How much light we get while walking on ste catherine and looking at the mountain is the least of our concerns right now.
Les Amis is doing good work and holding the line against development on the mountain.
Michael, reading words like that from someone like you has made me go give a donation to Les Amis.
For what it’s worth, I have a friend who also calls it the cock ring.
My first thought looking at it was one large olympic ring.
People calling it a cock ring is more to do with their own personal habits.
Alternate theory: They have a sense of humour.
Les Amis are doing good work but they’re completely off the mark here. The idea that we shouldn’t be densifying our already-dense downtown with more housing because it’s near the mountain is ludicrous. If they’re opposed to skyscrapers near Mount Royal, well, sorry, that ship has sailed. This building isn’t even nearly as tall as the buildings around it.
And, once again, it doesn’t block the view of Mount Royal in any way.
The designer, Claude Cormier, was also an out gay man and an artist. I’m sure he was well aware of all the ring’s allusions, including sexual and cultural ones, as well as of its shape, a bit of round — albeit a big one — in a sea of right angles. And, yes, he also had a sense of humour.
Though in favour of the height limit on buildings around most of the mountain, I’ve never understood why it’s set at 745 feet/233 metres, the height of the mountain. Buildings that tall effectively block the view from the summit and would fence it in and those even smaller block the view of the mountain from the street even blocks away. A better solution might be to have a lower limit in unbuilt-up areas that would block the view from the mountain to the river and beyond and in established low-height residential neighbourhoods like the ghetto, Plateau, Mile-End and Outremont. At the same time, pockets of downtown or elsewhere, of which the mountain affords limited views, could be allowed to go higher.
That’s an entirely reasonable approach. We should be taking cues from Vancouver and preserving specific view corridors, not setting a blanket height limit that doesn’t make any sense.
Bringing the conversation back to the project at hand, I have no problem with the volume, but I do think it’s the shame that Ivanhoé Cambridge seems intent on completely remaking the façade of Place Montreal Trust. It’s a very nice post-modern structure made with high-quality materials. Add a new building on top, sure, but why mess with the original structure designed by a Canadian architect who did a lot of good work?
PS: Kink-shaming in 2024, wouldn’t believe it unless I saw it with my own eyes.
A bit of round in a sea of right angles = a lifesaver.
Also, let’s not forget that Cormier designed the pink (later rainbow) balls over Ste-Catherine in the gay village. Pink balls. Nothing sexual about that except that they’re what 90% of the area’s bar clientele and many of its residents were there for.
The only view it appears to block is the view on the pink granite postmodern monstrosity that is the Bell Media Tower. No complaints there. The new proposed building isn’t exciting, but at least it doesn’t have a gaudy 80s colour scheme.
Also worth noting that the image being shared isn’t an architectural rendering, it’s a volumetric study. There’s nothing that has actually been designed for this spot (and no actual proposal). Ivanhoé Cambridge is just getting the necessary zoning permissions for an eventual project.
Frankly they should have just had a rendering of a white box, because then we wouldn’t be getting comments about how awful/bland/ugly the nonexistent proposed building is.
I guess I’m a nerd because I immediately thought of a Stargate
It truly is the Stargate of cock rings and the cock ring of Stargates.
I have a piece of Place Montréal Trust’s pink granite in my kitchen.
There used to be a prison for women near Bordeaux jail, but it was closed in 2016. Now there are plans to build a new Tanguay prison on the same big lot, which people living nearby say they weren’t consulted about, and are not happy with.
Nicholas 15:55 on 2024-02-05 Permalink
Great. Though I love how this building is 15 storeys, and some of the ones next to it are also 15 (another is 10), and yet 150 metres away from this is the old Voyageur terminal that the city has zoned for 5 storeys, and various people complain that anything taller is out of context with the neighbourhood.
DeWolf 19:11 on 2024-02-05 Permalink
As usual the CTV article is wrong. This may be the largest building specifically dedicated to formerly homeless people, but it’s certainly not the largest public housing block in Montreal. There are many even bigger ones just blocks away.
Also, Nicholas, the city recently announced that the bus station development will be the same height as Place Dupuis, which is 30 storeys:
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/grand-montreal/2024-01-12/quartier-latin/700-logements-avec-vue-sur-un-poste-electrique-sur-berri.php
Nicholas 10:49 on 2024-02-06 Permalink
That’s great, DeWolf! Also the CTV article was also wrong in that it had a 3 year old uncredited Google Street view screenshot of rubble, not the new building, but my correction had too many links so was marked as spam.