Country-style house on Berri near Boucher, in the Plateau.
As time passes cities’ built environments change with the arrival of new technologies, new uses of space, new means of transportation, and new architectural styles. While the general faces of cities and neighbourhoods evolve, little bits of the past survive and remain as reminders of what things were once like.
Most of central Montreal is densely built, but here and there one can still find hold-outs from a different era in the form of cottages and single family houses smack dab in the middle of highly urban neighbourhoods.
Many of these buildings are remnants of former farming and mining villages that were scattered accross the Island of Montreal back when the the City of Montreal extended just barely past the Old Port. One such village was Coteau-Saint-Louis which was located in the area just north of the modern day Laurier Metro station. The village was founded in the middle of the 1800s and was engulfed by the expanding city around 1900. To this day one can find in this corner of the city little cottages with peaked roofs and porches that would look more at place in a small farming town than in the middle of Montreal.
To me, the new year brings a new job, a new office on St-Hubert up near St-Zotique and, by extension, a whole new neighbourhood to explore. The view from our office window is cleanly cut in half: from the top we can see the bare branches of trees and the mixed use commercial-residential building across the street. The bottom half is metal trellis coated with a thick blur of snow on glass.
Which naturally got me wondering how the Plaza St-Hubert acquired its distinct glass awning? The story seems to date all the way back to 1959, when the Saint Hubert merchants association wanted to convert the commercial street into the world’s biggest shopping centre, spanning 5 blocks. Expropriations were planned to make way for a 750 store shopping centre (currently the plaza has about 390 stores) that would have closed St-Hubert street to traffic and surrounded it with parking lots. The plans boasted “one square foot of parking space for every square foot of selling space.”
This grand destination was dreamed up to shelter local merchants, mostly independent family-run businesses, from increasing pressure from new shopping malls and chain stores. “Our aim is not a competitive scramble for bigger stores, for super or ultra-modern markets,” said Wilfred Sauvé, then president of the St-Hubert merchants’ association.
Finally, in 1984, the city and merchants association finally agreed on a more modest sidewalk covering.
Mark London, then executive director of Heritage Montreal called the canopy a “good piece of high-tech industrial design” but critiqued the uniformity imposed by the glass canopy in a 1985 Gazette article.
Last year there was a rich variety of 300 storefronts and signs set into hundreds of buildings, some brick, some stone, some low, some tall. Now the overall visual effect is of a single uniform, monotonous glass and steel structure 1.2 kilometres long…The buildings themselves are almost impreceptible above the canopies and the structure often lands right on the centre of windows.
The result is to obliterate the diversity of shops and buildings wtih a structure that has the friendliness, interest and warmth of Mirabel Airpot. A year ago St. Hubert St. had so much variety it bordered on the garish. But with this new project, the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of uniformity and control.
Yet when I came to the office was during a snowstorm in December, I distinctly remember stepping under the glass onto a relatively clear sidewalk and thinking: this is architecture that makes sense in Montreal. The Plaza St-Hubert brings together the ideal of Main Street shopping with the harsh realities of our climate; is pedestrian friendly without excluding cars, bikes and buses.
Despite imposing uniformity at a local scale, the glass awning makes the Plaza distinct within Montreal, creating a unique destination and this in turn seems to help foster diversity of small independent businesses. I find that it also creates a sense of cohesiveness which tempts shoppers to walk the entire length of the plaza.
I get the impression that the Plaza is hardly loved and seen from the second story window, the project is harder to swallow. Many of the second story apartments and have lost their balconies and views though the Gazette archive has no mention of complaints from local residents.
Made in Montreal have a cute video entitled “Plaza St. Hubert – petite histoire du kitch à Montréal.” I find it interesting is that the president of the St Hubert merchants’ association interviewed in 2009 actually has similar things to say as his counterpart back in 1959: The Plaza aims to be popular but not too trendy or luxurious. At some point the in-scene is fleeting. And the plaza wants staying power.
(Go to the made in Montreal website for a better quality version of the video)
Perhaps the recent launch of Google Street View for Canadian cities has made my trips to the many 1ière avenues of Montreal somewhat unnecessary. A visit to any of these streets is now as simple as pulling up a map of Montreal and dragging the little yellow person onto whatever street you want to wish to see. However, I am undeterred. Despite my tendency to lapse on visiting and posting these 1ière avenues, my trips will continue. Despite the 360° views every few metres and the ability to toggle between street View, aerial view, and map view, the street view photos are somewhat disconnected, having been taken automatically from the roof of a car without discretion from a photographer (as amateur as I may be, in the case of these photos). Street View takes the photo from the centre of the street, moves on and takes the next photo and so on in perpetuity. I (and other humans), however, can stop and inspect something that catches my attention more closely while ignoring what I deem to be more uninteresting and banal. Street View does not possess this luxury. If anything, at least I take my photos when the city is looking good rather than the right-before and right-after winter photos taken by Google, a time of year that most people can agree is when the city looks its worst.
No matter, my journeys continue. This time through the central neighbourhoods of Rosemont and St-Michel. This 1ière avenue is the only one that existed within the pre-merger borders of Montreal so when someone spoke of (or wrote on an envelope) “1ière avenue, Montreal”, this is the street they meant. Although not the longest numbered street in the city, it is the longest 1ière avenue with a length of 14 blocks. It also starts off one of the longer continuous (more-or-less) series of numbered streets in the city which ends 44e avenue, right before boul de l’Assomption. …continue reading 1ière avenue, part 4: Rosemont/St-Michel
Over the past few months I’ve come to know the Boul. St. Laurent underpass between the Mile End and Little Italy quite well, adjacent to the parc sans nom. Jacob recently asked readers for their dangerous intersection beefs, and here’s my own contribution.
Today I spent 15 minutes watching numerous cyclists, pedestrians, and cars navigate the dangerous corner on the northern side. The lack of an efficient bicycle route across this divide (see map below) causes cyclists to take to the sidewalk when headed south (against car traffic). Pedestrians around the corner cannot see the cyclists, and vice-versa. Worse, cars moving at high rates of speed up St. Laurent cannot see around the corner, even to see those on the crosswalk until the last moment.
I’ve had a few close calls as cars quickly take the turn onto Bellechasse. Today’s evidence, shown below, of a missed turn indicates the speed at which people take the turn without a doubt, if not an evasive maneuver from a pedestrian or cyclist in the crosswalk.
In my experience, both cyclists and pedestrians are courteous to each other as they pass, slowly going and conscious of the blind spot. It’s as if there’s a common understanding that it’s an infrastructural flaw, an area not intended for heavy bicycle and pedestrian use.
However, if it hasn’t happened yet, there’s definitely high potential for some sort of collision.
View Bike route under railway in a larger map This map shows the two bike routes. The red route is how most make the train track crossing, on the sidewalk, and is about 1 km shorter. The blue route shows how to cross if one stuck to the bike paths. Both have as starting points the common north–>south commuting route across the tracks, and end on the Clark bike path. Many people just cross the tracks on foot to avoid the underpasses.
The city should address this issue: create a southbound bike lane that allows for a seamless commute across the train tracks. They tried with the nearby St. Urbain route, but accessing that path seems only for Home Depot shoppers (the blue route in the map). If not, a stop sign or stoplight that slows traffic would be highly appreciated. They’re rushing only to sit in the Little Italy traffic anyways.
