Robert Moses With a Pen
Michael McKenna
Certain
cities attain their prominence mainly in the subconscious mind. Not New York or London,
those places are real. Documented. Towns like that guide you through the idea of
themselves with a parade of known icons. Having entered the vernacular, even their
greatest and most secret tricks can do little but burnish the myth.
In other cities, however, you are left more to your own
devices. There are a lot of squares where there are almost monuments. A lot of
streetcorners where there are almost gates. Berlin is like this. So, I am told, is New
Orleans. Multilayered cities that can’t be grouped under any single image, no matter
how huge or general. No Statue of Liberty or Christ the Redeemer to put on all the
postcards. Just rows of painted houses, anonymous traffic circles.
Montreal is like this though we try like hell to deny it.
All over the island we’ve built cathedrals, stadiums, oratories, clock towers and any
number of skyscrapers but they just end up staring across town at each other. We have an
iffy record with immense public works here. The metro system is great, but Olympic Stadium
is falling apart. And we’re still paying for it.
Like many imaginary cities, our weakness is insecurity.
This is how such places build things. It’s how Bilbao got the Guggenheim and Memphis
their pyramid-shaped Sports Arena. Some mayor, some investor comes along with a bagful of
someone else’s cash promising a "world-class" spectacle, something that
will "put us on the map" once and for all. And we buy in every time, eager for
acceptance by the world of Maps and Class, embarrassed by our ephemeral claims. We always
think we can have it both ways.
And nine times out of ten we end up with bizarre
structures poking out of suburban parking lots. For every Guggenheim there are nine Grollo
Towers, SkyDomes, and Detroit PeopleMovers. Former Montreal autocrat Jean Drapeau even
wanted to dismantle the Eiffel Tower and rebuild it you-know-where.
The whole process bankrupted us in the end, and nobody is
proposing a World’s Most anything in Montreal these days, but that doesn’t mean
the idea of the big-cash-grab, one-stop-fix is behind us.
Like a lot of things in tough times, it has just been
appropriated by the public sector.
"Montreal" does not just consist of the City of
Montreal. The steep mansion-bedecked streets of Westmount, the tree-lined alleys of
Montreal West, the packed tenements of Verdun and Ville-Émard, these cities crowd around
us, housing our workers, our players and lovers, stretching towards the horizons
bequeathing the gift of immensity.
All of these self-governing municipalities are victors,
having resisted the turn-of-the-century greed that allowed the metropolis to swallow
little St-Henri and Hochelaga. Even suburban cities such as Longeuil and St-Lambert all
have their own Main Street, their own banks, post offices and churches, their own fierce
local pride. Loomed over by the skyscrapers of Montreal, they go about their daily
business with grace and autonomy, cleaning parks and collecting trash with an efficiency
impossible in their million-strong neighbour, unencumbered by the years of bankruptcy and
bloat that have dotted the big town with potholes and broken signs.
One day, the Quebec government decided this can no longer
be.
As of January 1 of next year, the 27 municipalities that
make up the Montreal Urban Community will become 3. The island itself will be swallowed by
Montreal. Laval, product of an earlier such move, will sit complacent in the sprawl and
mismanagement that this has allowed. The entire South Shore will lose her centuries-old
towns, uniting them all under the never-before-seen moniker of "LeMoyne."
All this in spite of the fact that similar expansions in
Halifax and Toronto have ended in nothing but shortfalls and tax hikes. All this in spite
of the fact that, when polled, 97% of suburbanites wanted to keep their towns. All this
despite the fact that the most successful urban areas in North America today are precisely
those that consist of a great plurality of townships and municipalities, such as Boston
and Atlanta.
The government is claiming that this will increase
efficiency, trim fat, allow us to step up to the plate slim, muscled and ready for the big
leagues. They ask us how can 3 organisations be less clumsy, less redundant than 27. They
ask us to ignore the failures in Ontario and Nova Scotia. They ask us to ignore their
contempt for our will and sentiment.
They ask us to oversimplify, to swallow their simplistic
logic, to let them tell us that 2 groups of 20 are vastly more tangled and difficult to
run than one group of 40.
They ask us to give up our homes. They ask us to change
our answer when people ask us where we are from.
Montreal beneath her swagger and sashay is an insecure
old town who has been sold so many bills of goods her pockets are stuffed with useless
papers that won’t pay the bills. She asks us to forgive her constantly, asks us to
allow her charms and wiles to cover up her clumsy government, her unresponsive council,
her dirty streets. And we do. 1.1 million of us do.
But 2.4 million of us don’t. They have every bit as
much of a right to choose tidy Westmount, peaceful St-Lambert, leafy Montreal West, just
as I choose sexy old Montreal.
The Government cannot afford to test us on this one. Our
premier has no public mandate. Their plan has no support. The metropolis is recovering
from a 20 year slump and is looking better than ever; even Montrealers aren’t getting
greedy. We are thinking, "don’t rock the boat". We came out 60,000 strong
to protest this amalgamation in the streets and we will come out equally strong in the
courts. The elected government of a democratic has no right to go forward with this move
when it has such a minuscule following. They have no right to force their outdated
urbanism on a city so perfectly poised to boom. Above all, they have no right to treat us
like pins on a map.
Michael McKenna is a writer living in
Montreal.