Montreal City Weblog

Kate 10:37 on 2024-06-19 Permalink Reply  

• Alex L 12:48 on 2024-06-19 Permalink

  I’m curious, why wouldn’t it matter?

• Kate 13:07 on 2024-06-19 Permalink

  Well, it’s an old house, apparently quite decrepit. Nobody is living in it. If it’s demolished and a new house constructed on the lot, presumably people will be able to live there.

  I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s kind of a charming old place, but clearly it’s not regarded as having any historic value or Quebec would’ve protected it, or TMR would. We can’t save every old building. Someone can go in with a camera and document the structure, and then bring in the wrecking balls.

  Basically, someone owns it. Can they be forced to restore it? Can they be forbidden to take it down so they can use the lot for a new house? I don’t know. Clearly no one in authority thinks it matters.

• bob 13:31 on 2024-06-19 Permalink

  It matters because there are only so many old buildings left, and replacing it with a ticky tacky McMansion.

  Maybe Quebec hasn’t protected it because they don’t know it exists, or because it’s in an anglo(ish) neighbourhood. Maybe TMR wants the 2-300% increase in tax revenues from a couple of new ticky tacky McMansions on the lot rather than the current structure. Maybe a couple of $1.5 million houses are perceived as helping to alleviate the housing crisis.

  I tend to think we have enough McMansions and not enough 18th century farm houses. One of those types keeps popping up like mushrooms after rain, the other type keeps disappearing for the sake of profit.

• Alex L 13:42 on 2024-06-19 Permalink

  I must say I’m surprised to hear you say that. There are lots of reasons to preserve cultural heritage, especially old and rare buildings such as this one, I won’t list them here. For me this story is yet another example of a municipality deciding to disregard a lack of maintenance on a building that could have been (and probably still can be) renovated. Even if by doing that (or not doing anything) the municipality contravenes to the example it should set.

  If inventories and assessments by experts had been done, and if the Quebec Governement was an example in safekeeping heritage, be it natural or cultural, maybe I would agree with you. But the reality is the MCCQ, and especially the ministry won’t enforce any of their laws, unless it makes the news. And even then.

• Kate 13:51 on 2024-06-19 Permalink

  OK, I’m kind of playing devil’s advocate here, I admit it. I like old houses and I’d like to see this one saved. But what can be done if it’s private property and not under heritage protection? We accord a huge amount of weight to private ownership in our society. I don’t think it’s likely to be offset by concerns for nebulous historic value in this case.

• thomas 14:06 on 2024-06-19 Permalink

  A big problem with this house is its position on its current property. It looks like the rear and side of the building abuts the property line and is obstructed by walls. This greatly limits it’s desirability.

• Kate 14:58 on 2024-06-19 Permalink

  I bet the property line was created well after the house was.

• Blork 14:59 on 2024-06-19 Permalink

  If I’m reading correctly, the demolition was denied several times for heritage reasons, so now the new owner is canvasing the neighbourhood trying to get community approval for the demo. I don’t think those refusals were for pure heritage reasons (meaning it isn’t officially protected, but might be unofficially protected).

  It does seem like a pretty rare example of a farm house from the 1780s. Although the photos make it look like it’s off in some serene pastoral setting it’s actually right in the middle of TMR ‘burb-ville, a block from Autoroute 15/40.

  And what if they preserve it? Nobody’s going to turn it into a museum. So the owner will have to resell it or rent it out, or leave it vacant. Does it have a future even if they preserve it?

  And now for the comic/cynic part of our programming:

  (1) Of course the government doesn’t see any heritage there. It’s on the corner of “Chemin Sunset” and “Ave. Glengarry” in a largely anglo suburb. Nothing to see here folks. No heritage. Move along.

  (2) The owner wants to replace this single house with two houses (it’s a large lot). Therefore, DENSITY! All must crumble in the name of density! The only thing that matters is density! OMG DENSITY!

  (Density jab is provoked by the occasional comment here and elsewhere from people who really do seem to think that density trumps everything, always and everywhere.)

• Kate 17:44 on 2024-06-19 Permalink

  Have a look at the house on Google Maps. It’s placed at the far edge of what looks like quite a big lot and, whatever’s said here, more residential units could easily be built there. A clever architect could even make the old house into part of a new structure, although I doubt that will ever happen.

• Nicholas 22:30 on 2024-06-19 Permalink

  This is the kind of building worth protecting. I usually complain when people try to protect anything older than 50 years or whatever. We can’t live in a city of amber, blocking change on half of buildings. But there aren’t many still around from the 18th century. It’s like a handful: imtl lists 25 homes before 1800 (but not this one, maybe because the city says it’s 1910, which seems wrong). It’s not hard to say we want to protect 0.0025% of homes. Even 100x or 1000x that many homes could make sense, adding slightly less old ones and some great architectural and historical ones.

  Tearing down one home to build two, far from anything, is not a great way to do dense development. There are much better places to build more, and build some five storey apartments or whatever, not two detached single family homes. I don’t know many people who want more density who say “let’s build in northern TMR a block from the Met.”

  The big issue, as elided everywhere, is that someone has to take care of this building. The owner doesn’t want to, and you can’t really make someone do it unless you give them some money. The city seems like a natural choice, but it seems not to want to. Maybe there’s an association that does. But if people want to save it, they can buy it. I’m not being flip: if a group wants to save it, I’d throw a few bucks in. (If we, collectively, want to save it, we, the government (local, regional, provincial, federal), should buy it.) But you need someone — personal, associational, governmental — with the funds and resources to care. Hard to do anything without that. I hope someone succeeds.

• dhomas 05:56 on 2024-06-20 Permalink

  Boris Wyka, a real estate agent from Blainville, owns the house since September 2023. The house is listed as being built in 1910 because at some point a fire destroyed the records of many buildings’ construction dates and they were just “reset” to 1910 (this was the explanation given to be when I was looking to buy a house that seemed older than 1910 and I asked city officials). The property actually saw a reduction in tax revenue during the last revision going from a value of 1866200$ down to 1.7M$. TMR probably wants to pump those numbers up by allowing new builds.
  “The city” likely can’t buy it to preserve it since it’s not in the city of Montreal, but in TMR. If TMR cared at all about anything other than tax revenue, I doubt we would have seen the Royalmount project come about.
  In any case, it seems very likely that we will lose this building and one or two rich people will get new homes.

• Chris 10:41 on 2024-06-20 Permalink

  >All must crumble in the name of density!

  If not density, then let’s stop letting in so many immigrants, or let’s destroy more farmland and countryside by sprawling the city out further and further. Pick your poison.

• Blork 11:34 on 2024-06-20 Permalink

  Chris, congratulations for pushing this discussion all the way to the corner where only the extremes are considered. Go team density!

  Kate, it is a large lot, but not huge. You could squeeze one more smallish house onto the lot, but in doing so you’d essentially wall off the “preserved” house on all but one side (and it’s the short side), effectively condemning it. So what’s the point of preserving the old house if you can’t see it, and if you hem it into a small lot that makes it undesirable for anyone to buy it and live in it? It won’t become a museum, and nobody will want to live in it, so by adding the additional density of one house you end up with an abandoned heritage house.

  Before: heritage house on a large lot.

  After: small house on a small lot and abandoned heritage house hidden in a small lot.

  Is that progress? Does that make any difference at all in terms of density?

• Ian 12:07 on 2024-06-20 Permalink

  It’s a shame it’s tucked in by the 40 like that, it wouldn’t be useful in the way the (also) 1787 building on Graham & Glengarry was. It was converted into a fancy little restaurant. It was Villa Armando, but will be opening under new owners soon.

  That said, just because something is old doesn’t make it significant. You can buy obscure books from the mid 1700s for under 200 bucks. The antique roadshow is full of disappointed people that were hoping their stuff was priceless because it belonged to great-great-grandma.

  All in all I wouldn’t particularly want to live in a Soviet apartment block by the highway like Chris desires, and I’m sure the neighbours wouldn’t like it either. It would probably fill up with immigrants anyhow, and we know Chris doesn’t want that.

• Tee Owe 15:47 on 2024-06-20 Permalink

  Thanks Dhomas for the insight to construction date resetting – very interesting