When is a Lake Not a Lake?
Anjou sur le Lac
Montrealers are accustomed to thinking of their city as an island, with a big river out front and a small river out back, as simple as that. But on old maps you will find other watercourses marked on the island, long since drained or driven underground to make human settlement more convenient.
Here’s one case in which a small urban watercourse has been revived as a landscaping feature — and not the only one in the metropolitan area.
One winter night as I was accompanying a friend on an aimless drive, we passed a sign saying Anjou sur le Lac. I blinked. “That makes no sense — Anjou’s not even on the back river, much less a lake.” Curious, we drove around and could see a bit of a frozen snow-covered pond, but that was the extent of our investigations. I assumed that sur le lac was merely a marketing ploy meant to evoke the wealth of Laval sur le Lac or the ease of summer resort towns.
I was mistaken, at least partly. On the map there’s definitely a sort of tiny lake in this part of Ville d’Anjou. The satellite view of the area shows that it appears to wind its way north as a watercourse through the grounds of CEGEP Marie-Victorin and the Parc Ruisseau de Montigny (possibly its original name) but then vanishes, probably underground, before reaching the Rivière des Prairies.
Anjou sur le Lac is a recent development with rows of new single-family houses — their still raw brick architecture focused around the all-important garage — some sixplex condo buildings, and two anonymous eight-storey buildings that could be apartments, homes for the elderly (as suggested by one web search) or even offices. All are clustered around something resembling a lake.
Map fragment from Google Maps
A lake? Oddly enough, in several places you can see water bubbling vigorously up from below, accompanied by a droning noise like a swimming pool pump. It seems that the designers of the subdivision chose, instead of draining a wetland (which may originally only have been a “lake” for a few weeks during spring thaw), to stabilize it as a lagoon with hidden plumbing and landscaping tricks.
I’ve got mixed feelings about this editing of nature. A similar decision was made on Nuns’ Island where a wetland is now known as the Lac des Battures and serves a similar purpose: to give character and preserve a touch of nature in an area under new and intense development. After all, a lake or pond is so much prettier than a swamp, never mind that the changed ecology may support entirely different species.
All along the eastern edge of this Anjou lake is a walking path that cuts through a narrow verge of relatively unspoiled terrain. It’s quite striking, even moving, how nature will flourish even in the narrowest of spaces: there are reeds and bulrushes, butterflies and wildflowers, although the only birds I noticed were a few gulls practising dips over the water. It wouldn’t surprise me if mosquitoes and shadflies had been edited out of the ecosystem, which would discourage other birds from colonizing the area.
Follow the path north beyond the bridge and you pass through an as-yet-unpaved section of the subdivision, roughly cleared, and eventually you step over a clear boundary fence and find yourself standing in a vast parking lot between a Réno-Depôt and a bowling alley. The brief quasi-natural idyll is suddenly over.
Bridge in Anjou sur le Lac
Anjou sur le Lac is a part of town that’s thoroughly suburban in flavour but reachable by bus, although no bus route enters it. The corner of rue Bombardier and boulevard Les Galeries d’Anjou functions as something of a gateway to the development, although not a guarded one. There is not so much as a dépanneur inside the subdivision, although there’s a grocery store and a couple of other small businesses in a small strip mall on the far side of that intersection.
I see there’s a fête de quartier coming up, but I’d be more interested in coming back in a hundred years’ time to see what has happened to the lake and the people living around it.
Tags: Exploring the City, Montreal, Urban Design
Montreal Apartments
Fagstein says:
I think it’s telling that houses around a semi-artificial lake have swimming pools in their backyards.
August 8th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
Next time I go to Calgary I should write something about all of its artificial lakes. There are actually dozens of them… and they’re quite impressive.
August 8th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Kate McDonnell says:
Nobody was playing in the water, or doing anything near it, hence the pools. I don’t know whether it’s forbidden – there were no signs – but there are no boats and, I think, no fish, and probably no paddling either.
August 9th, 2007 at 4:03 am
BruB says:
Semi artificial living space around semi artificial lake. Looks like Laval to me :)
August 9th, 2007 at 7:08 am
Under Montreal » Blog Archive » Montreal’s Lost Rivers – What Maps Can (and Can’t) Tell Us says:
[...] marshland there. One of these areas contains the recently developed complex of subdivisions named Anjou Sur La Lac- of course, the “lac” that exist today are entirely artificial [...]
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:34 pm