Angle

An Echo of the Hagia Sophia

Over the years I’ve heard people surmise it to be a temple, a mosque, an Orthodox church, even a synagogue. Familiar sight though it is in central Montreal, the first thing the huge domed building at Saint-Urbain and Saint-Viateur brings to mind is not the Roman Catholic church.

At the turn of the last century there was something of a migration of Irish-Canadian working people from their overcrowded Point St. Charles and Griffintown haunts north into Mile End. In 1902, the Catholic archbishop of Montreal, Mgr. Paul Bruchési, gave his approval for a new parish to be created. The first mass was said upstairs of a fire hall at Laurier and Saint-Denis that no longer exists. Their first small church building was on rue Boucher near there; it no longer exists either.

By 1914 the growing parish decided it needed something bigger and grander. In July of that year excavations began. Work stopped briefly when war broke out that autumn, but resumed in April 1915, and the church was ready to use by that December. The price tag was $232,000 and the church could hold 1400 people.

This information comes from a booklet published in 1927 when the parish was already 25 years old. The text describes, and images show, that the dome and the cap on the tower were both decorated with patterns, and the massive façade with the words Deo dicatum in honorem St. Michaeli and a smaller motto on a banner over the doors. Those flourishes are gone, but carved shamrocks are still part of the façade, a nod to the time when the parish was pretty well a monoculture, with priests called McGinnis, Fahey, McCrory, Walsh, O’Brien, Cooney and O’Conor and church wardens Keegan, Gorman, Dillon, McGee and Flood.

Also, unusually, there’s no mention of bells, and no evidence that the tower ever contained any: unlike most church towers it’s closed all the way to the top.

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Doorbells

Next door

The Evening City

Resto Hong Kong, 7:00pm

On the Old Port, 9:22pm

Café Cleopatra, 10:43pm

Sherbrooke Near Decarie

Big Changes on the Upper Main

Bingo Villeray, demolished this week

Major demolitions on the Main. Older buildings flattened and replaced by megastores, old folks’ homes, condos.

Not the plot of a dystopian movie: it’s begun this summer on Boulevard Saint-Laurent above Jean-Talon, but the long shabby decline of that part of the street means it’s not at all necessarily a change for the worse.

Saint-Laurent north of Jean-Talon is not a strolling street. If you exit de Castelnau metro and walk north, on your left is the massive institutional pile of the Centre 7400 (left, photo taken during last year’s World Cup; built in 1921 and still property of the Clercs de St-Viateur religious order, mooted to become a satellite campus for Université Laval), then the long green stretch of Jarry Park. North of the park there’s a secondary school and some institutional buildings, headquarters of unions and professional guilds, and then eventually Crémazie and the highway. Teenagers throng around the secondary school when school’s in, but, besides them, very little foot traffic passes along the boulevard.

On your right, for many blocks, is a jumble of dodgy buildings, much of it characterless small-industry boxes and the sort of bleak apartment buildings you hope you’ll never have to live in. The Main has its livelier and its more subdued zones, but between Jean-Talon and Crémazie far more of it is moribund than any soi-disant main street has any right to be.

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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.

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Rue Saint Félix

Suburban Metroland

Platform at Montmorency station

The strongest impression left by the new Metro stations in Laval is the determined attempt to get things right. There are elevators and they’re industrially solid ones. Walkways to the far platform are glassed in with thick panes so that nothing (and nobody) can be thrown over onto the tracks. The lighting is full-spectrum and there’s a generosity to the layouts and a solidity to the finish that surpasses most of the later metro stations: think of some of the Blue Line stations where the attempt to make a virtue of skimpy layouts and the bare brutality of concrete resulted in a kind of Soviet grimness.

Efforts have been made to make the finish of these new stations both aesthetically pleasing and virtually indestructible, a tricky brief at any time. There’s a signature mood of thick glass and brushed steel inside and solid stone paving outside that carries through all three stations. And the landscaping of two of the three is more than just an afterthought. Using these stations is a pleasure. Time alone can fully test the success of a project like this – full accessibility for the handicapped was simply not on the cultural radar in the 1960s, for example – but these stations are clearly built to last.

Platform at de la Concorde station

The metro system’s universal use of Univers 57 in white on black bands along the platform has been maintained, an excellent initial choice which I’m glad has never been changed to anything more obviously trendy.

All three stations are intermodal, Montmorency and Cartier being bus termini for Laval bus routes and de la Concorde doubling as an AMT train station on the Blainville line.

This extension to the Orange Line was first opened to the public on April 28.

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Dates

Dates on Montreal buildings from Villeray to Mile End, except for “1953″ which is on a building on Mayor Street in the fur district.

Urban Blight: It’s a Gas!

Corner Saint-Laurent and Sherbrooke

A few years ago there was an outcry when McDonald’s proposed to open a branch on Park Avenue at Mont-Royal. Neighbourhood people were up in arms because its arrival threatened to create a huge eyesore at the edge of the mountain park. McDonald’s opened anyway, keeping its external signs relatively low-key: it’s still there and nobody thinks twice about it.

Not long after, just opposite, a huge garish gas station with an A&W and a dépanneur sprang up. I heard no protest, saw no one speak out against it, but there it sits, testament to the pre-eminence of the car in our lives.

Corner Park and Mont-Royal

Over the last decade, Montreal has seen an ugly invasion of highway-style service stations into its neighbourhoods. Few of its streets have been deemed off-limits for these excrescences and nothing seems to bar them from any neighbourhood save for Old Montreal. No doubt we can expect to see more of them.

It’s understood that the needs of the car are paramount, so there is no will at City Hall or in the boroughs to speak out against the construction of these visual horrors. Somehow these buildings are surrounded with a “this must be tolerated” field. Even at the corner of Sherbrooke and Saint-Laurent, right in your face in what’s currently regarded as the trendiest strip in town, is a massive gas station with a Tim Horton’s attached. I hope it gives international travellers a good laugh at our expense: Saint-Laurent Boulevard was declared a national treasure not so long ago, but even that was not enough to keep the highway from depositing one of its bastard children on its doorstep.

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Cornices of Montreal

Various neighbourhoods, all residential buildings. A sequel to this earlier Mile End collection.

Cornices of Mile End