The oldest building in Chinatown – nearly 200 years old – has been fenced off because the masonry has been crumbling. Two years ago the building was one of the Chinatown lots bought up by one of the Shillers.
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Kate
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Kate
Starting this fall, the city plans to adjust traffic directions in Centre‑Sud to create a traffic enclave, with the intention of slowing down street traffic – but it’s bound to annoy some drivers.
Blork
I’m still stumbling over the expression “traffic enclave.” I’m picturing a leafy suburb full of streets that are always clogged with traffic because there are no entrances or exits. Just a never-ending existential traffic jam.
Nicholas
In some places they call this “unravelling”. They did this specific thing on Gilford, with diverters at Lanaudiere and Chambord in front of a OMHM residence (though that’s been changed after the school street on Lanaudiere that blocks traffic to the south of St Joseph; now there’s just a diverter at Garnier, but you can see the old setup on Google Streetview). People walking and biking can go through, but through traffic in cars cannot, either on the main street or the cross streets; you just get a set of alternating U shapes, sending you right back where you came from. This completely eliminates through traffic, which would be the vast majority of traffic here. I hope it works as well here as it did on Gilford.
DeWolf
This is exactly what Montreal has been missing. You can’t have traffic-calmed neighbourhoods until you physically prevent through traffic.
There have been very tentative attempts at doing this elsewhere in the city, but nothing comprehensive and systematic until Gilford (as Nicholas notes) and now de Rouen.
Incidentally many other cities have implemented this to great effect. Vancouver is an obvious example: there have been modal filters and deviations in the West End since the early 1990s at least.
Orr
What I understand this news story’s “diverters” to be already exist on Clark street between Rachel and des Pins since a few years.
CE
The area east of Laurier metro until Papineau between Laurier and Mont-Royal has slowly turned into this type of set-up. To get anywhere in the area by car, it can often require a very carful and difficult route. There is a Communauto station near St. Stanislas De Kostka church which can be absolutely maddening to get to if you don’t follow a specific route. As someone who rarely drives, I think it’s fantastic as few people use my neighbourhood as a throughway (my block has a car drive by maybe once every 5 minutes).
Kate
Blork, I used the term “traffic enclave” so blame me – it didn’t come from anywhere else.
DeWolf
@Orr the diversions on Clark have made a big difference but the way they’re set up, traffic from St-Urbain often spills onto Clark via St-Cuthbert, which makes no sense to me because those drivers just get jammed up when they try to cross Pine. For the system to really work, Clark needs another diverter at Pine, or maybe it could change direction to become one-way northbound from Sherbrooke to Pine.
Nicholas
Orr, DeWolf, the Clark example is a good one, but the setup for the southern one is wrong. The way it works people going south on St Urbain can use Saint Cuthbert as a cut-through. Change Saint Cuthbert there to one-way west from Sewell to Saint Cuthbert and the only way to get in that segment is from Pine via Sewell, and the only way out is then back down to Pine via Clark or St Urbain. You don’t want people using it to getting around a jam; you need to send them back the same way they came. The U off of the Main from Bagg to Clark to Saint Cuthbert is a perfect example: you can’t use it as a cut-through, as it only brings you back to St Laurent backwards.
There are some other examples of diverters and U, partial and complete, of varying success: around Laurier metro (the two loops that use Bibaud, around Rivard, Berri and Resther), Pontiac to Gilford to Resther, Mentana to Napoleon to St Andre. There are examples where the street grid is just a loop, like the top of Grey to Vendome, or, you know, any of thousands of suburban streets across the region. And then you have whole neighbourhoods that make it hard to cut through, like Circle Road, which is partially one way and has some timed restrictions on entering via other streets, but people ignore those turn restrictions, and those are the kinds of people who will then speed down your street.
But the cleanest examples are ones where the car street grid is fully disrupted, so no one will ever use it as a cut through. That makes biking and even walking trips faster than driving, depending on the distance. Adding all day bus lanes, and even better making some streets one way for cars but two ways for buses, can do the same for transit. You can also have movable bollards that buses and first responders can pass but others can’t, allowing even more direct transit routes. Montreal has been very slow on circulation plans, so this is very welcome, especially for a city where people will react with incredible hostility to banning cars from a street entirely. Here everyone has access, just not easily enough to use it as a cut through.
Joey
@Nicholas I suspect that the city refuses to adjust Clark as you suggest because they rely on it every time St Urbain gets jammed up due to construction (i.e., most of the time).
CE
I was thinking about this conversation yesterday while walking around and I think one of the best pieces of infrastructure in the city that has this effect of diverting through traffic is right here on Gilford.
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Kate
Saint-Eusèbe-de-Verceil church, on Fullum in eastern Ville‑Marie, is closed as a church and decrepit as a building, but is accumulating fines because people keep sneaking in for urbex.
Also reported later by CTV, which partly blames social media.
Ephraim
We won’t get real reform until we force it. We can’t just declare a building a heritage building unless someone (ie the city) is willing to spend the money for it’s upkeep. We need in place a law which allows owners to donate a building and it’s land to the city for the value on the role foncière. In case of a church, at a minimum, for the value of the land. And then, as city property, the city has to decide if it’s going to actually spend the money for the upkeep or let someone redevelop. Or redevelop with conditions. But letting buildings decay to the point of their being dangerous and collapse, isn’t a real solution.
Kate
I’ve commented on Saint-Eusèbe before. It must be nearly ten years ago I walked around it and took some photos – it wasn’t fenced off as firmly then, but I didn’t risk going inside. It’s a big building and there’s a presbytery next door which could have been converted into a dozen dwellings if it had been worked on before falling into ruin. But both buildings will absolutely have to be taken down.
The problem for the city is finding ways to build residential units effectively. They’ve bought up buildings and spaces and nothing progresses – there needs to be synchronized efforts between all three levels of government to push this forward, as apparently there was after World War II when returning soldiers needed places to live and start families. Only not little single-family bungalows like last time.
Of course, Quebec won’t want Canada stepping in, this time, so it will all get hung up on the jurisdictional mess while people cannot find places to live.
Ephraim
@Kate – Which is why I have suggested partnering with a REIT, which has an infrastructure to do exactly this. Yes, they are for profit, but they have everything to do repairs, manage payments, etc. Take for example CAPREIT (Ticker is CAR.UN). Most famous building they operate in Montreal is likely the Olympic Village. https://www.capreit.ca/neighbourhood/montreal/
Basically, all the expertise and it has to answer to shareholders. You can see who owns the biggest blocks. But basically their owners are mostly interested in their yield. Which at the moment is about 3.65% and being a unit trust has a lower tax rate than dividends in Quebec. When they need to raise money, they can put out more units (not stock). And it increase the amount of availability they have. And if government wants to subsidize housing, they can pay part of the rent with the reassurance that the upkeep is done.
We have clearly shown that the SHDM can’t manage buildings. They don’t invest enough in maintenance.
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Kate
The CSSDM’s abandonment of plans to renovate FACE have sapped hopes for other heritage school buildings around town. But architects say you can’t impose standards of modern construction on these older buildings without paying exorbitant bills.
Meantime, Le Devoir looks at the consequences of Quebec calling a halt to a hundred school construction sites around the province.
Ephraim 11:18 on 2025-05-21 Permalink
City/Province needs to change how they charge and having a rising scale. The longer you take, the more you pay for permits. Like the CSM building at the corner of St-Denis and Avenue des Pins. It’s been under repair for so long. It’s now covered in a shell, been that way since 2021. In 2011, it had scaffolding up on the side for 2 years.
Every month you delay the repair, the more it costs. The longer you wait, the more it costs, with a discount during the winter, of course. So 1 month costs X and wait 3 months and the permit is 3X. Put an incentive to get it fixed… and quick.
Taylor C. Noakes 16:57 on 2025-05-21 Permalink
Montreal: come for the history, stay for the piles of rubble where history used to be
Nicholas 16:57 on 2025-05-21 Permalink
That’s not a bad idea, Ephraim, but for CSM specifically, the owner, since 2013, is the Quebec government.
Ephraim 05:46 on 2025-05-22 Permalink
@Nicholas – Good way to transfer provincial money to the city government. It’s really bad facility management to allow a building to decay… and being the province isn’t really a good excuse.
Ian 20:30 on 2025-05-22 Permalink
It’s an interesting building fore sure and I hope they preserve it, if nothing else for the sheer historicity of being the Wing’s soy sauce factory. Back in the 70s no matter where you went in Canada, the little soy sauce packets that came with takeout were Wing’s. Also plum sauce and hot mustard. I have lived in PEI and BC. ON & QC, and these little packets were ubiquitous. In every little town the very first restaurant that would open after the diner/ family restaurant was a Chinese place. Later it was pizza. Powassan to Kelowna to Summerside those Chinese restaurants used Wing’s.
CE 07:15 on 2025-05-23 Permalink
It was also designed by James O’Donnell, architect of Notre-Dame Basilica. Other than the church, it’s the only building he built in Montreal and if I’m not mistaken, his last before his death.
Kevin 10:44 on 2025-05-23 Permalink
My only disagreement is that nobody knows what will be found when a decades-old wall is opened up.
Nobody knows what cobbled-together atrocity has been hidden by previous repairs. Nobody knows if the only thing holding up a ceiling is the plumbing and layers of paint.
If you’ve never done renovations it’s easy to get hopeful when you see a lowball offer that assumes a best-case scenario, when the decision-maker really needs to pay attention to the person with the expertise who can calculate the real cost of a complete teardown, salvage, and rebuild.