Then and Now #2: Gas Station
This image was created by Guillaume St-Jean, an urban planning student at the Université du Québec à Montréal who has been doing an admirable job of exploring Montreal’s history on Flickr. In the top photo, which was taken in 1929, you see the old Molson house at the corner of St. Laurent and Sherbrooke. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century when Sherbrooke Street marked the edge of the city. By the early twentieth century, though, St. Laurent had become a full-fledged commercial street. Sometime in the 1910s or 20s, when car ownership was still rare enough that it carried with it an air of privilege and distinction, the house was converted into a rather striking gas station.
Alas, as tends to happen all too frequently in Montreal, the house burned down in 1937—but the site retained its vocation as a gas station. The bottom photo reveals its current incarnation: a bland, unremarkable chunk of suburbia marooned at one of Montreal’s most prominent corners. To its credit, the retail portion of the gas station, which contains a depanneur and a Tim Horton’s, faces the corner of Milton and St. Laurent with a streetside entrance and a café terrace. But that doesn’t make up for its profound waste of space in such a bustling neighbourhood. Personally, I’ve always thought that the gas station site, which forms a neat square between Sherbrooke, Milton, Clark and St. Laurent, would make for a beautiful and well-located plaza.
Tags: Montreal, Then and Now
Matt Muma says:
Need…Shatin…tower block…now…I peronsally think a 30 story pastel colored square with a nice, raucious podium host to two cha tanteeensss,one watsons, a crabby-old-men-like-it-here style tea joint, one mcdonals, a k-place, furnature knick knacks joint, and a mulletted and white rimmed glassed (let’s not forget the bleached ends) dude selling dvds and god-knows-what (actually god does, this is the new, savvy China) would do a lot for the site…don’t you?
April 10th, 2007 at 7:50 am
Donal Hanley says:
This does raise an interesting point on the role of gas stations in cities generally. We have discussed urban parking here too. In Dublin, high land prices are driving a lot of gas stations (or petrol stations as we call them there) out of the city centre. So, not only is it hard to find parking, it is hard to refuel your car. That is all well and good only if there is a show stoppingly good public transport system such that there is no valid reason to want to drive ‘into town’.
April 10th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
Guillaume has added some interesting details about the house in the 1929 photograph.
April 12th, 2007 at 11:54 pm