Gargoyles, Horny PhDs & Spoiled Newspapers: an Afternoon at McGill

Ce mois de mars. Incroyable par sa fraicheur, déroutant par sa chaleur inopinée. Frébilité perceptible. Émotions intenses.

Je parcours le campus de l’Université McGill, en plein coeur du centre des affaires de Montréal, à la recherche d’une place apaisante où lire ce journal pris à la course aux portes du métro. J’adore ces petits endroits, le jardin généreux,  où il est possible de se promener sans empressement, avec pour seul objectif la détente et l’évasion.

McGill est un Éden, downtown Montreal, comprimé entre les tours cristallines des avenues et les broussailles en pente du Mont-Royal. Architecture variée. Élégance victorienne. Châtelets aux tourelles inusitées. La visite de l’université me donne toujours un petit frisson nostalgique, le regard en balade sur cette grisaille burinée d’abondantes formes fantaisistes.

Jeunes en rut. Ethnies au garde-à-vous. Le printemps s’annonce précoce, les regards sont alertes. Je me retire de la foule compacte et repère une place mi-ombre, d’où il est facilement possible de jouir de la scène agitée tout en respectant mon rôle de spectateur.

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Student Business, Campus Life

It was a quiet, rainy day at McGill when Devin Alfaro, just out of his last exam of the semester, walked into the Caférama on the first floor of the university’s William Shatner student centre.

Two weeks earlier, in early April, the café was at the centre of a battle over campus business. Caférama will not renew its lease this summer, so the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), which manages the space, was faced with a decision: rent it to students, who would operate a non-profit café, or rent it to another private vendor. Although leasing the space to a student-run business would fulfill SSMU’s obligation to prioritize student needs, a privately-operated tenant would provide a reliable cash flow to the student union.

“It was a marathon meeting,” recalled Alfaro, a third-year undergraduate and arts representative on SSMU council. “It started in the early evening and lasted until three in the morning, and the vote was close.”

Ultimately, SSMU voted 13-12 to lease the café space to an outside business. Alfaro was one of the council members who voted against the student proposals, not because he was opposed to the idea of student business on campus, but because the three student proposals that had been submitted were simply unfeasible.

The strongest bid came from Midnight Kitchen, a volunteer-run collective that provides free vegan lunches to students. Along with serving lunch, it would have used the café space to sell coffee and pastries, but this proved too modest for SSMU, which was looking for a full-service café.

Food services and other businesses at Canadian universities are becoming increasingly centralized. Every year, new undergraduate students are being met with restaurants, cafeterias and bookstores run by corporate franchisees, and many complain of high prices and a lack of choice in product offering. This is especially true at McGill, Montreal’s oldest university, which has systematically closed many of its student-operated businesses over the past several years.

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Ideas for An Awkward Space

On a crisp evening early last week, I joined about two dozen other people in a crowded studio on the fourth floor of McGill’s Macdonald-Harrington Building. We were there to see what ideas for reshaping the Pine/Park interchange four teams of McGill urban planning students, led by former Vancouve planning director Larry Beasley.

I won’t go into details, since I arrived halfway through the presentations, but, among the plans was a “recreational archipelago” that scattered various points of interest around the Pine/Park site. Another proposal focused quite intensely on the actual intersection of Pine and Park itself, surrounding it with various uses — a bus station on the northwest corner and a public market across the street, for instance — meant to encourage activity and create a bustling urban corner. Other students planned a linear promenade that extended up Park Avenue to Duluth St.

The most interesting plan involved a fine balance between built and open space. The small street running parallel to Pine between Hutchison and Park would be pedestrianized, creating a larger public square at Pine/Park’s southwest corner. Midrise housing would be built along Park from Pine to Duluth, with a laneway running alongside the Hôtel-Dieu’s stone wall. The green space where the volleyball courts currently stand would be preserved. The end result would be a well-defined, functional urban setting that would balance greenery with residential, community and commercial development.

Problem is, that kind of plan has virtually no chance of being realized. In fact, none of the student plans pay attention to the political realities of the Pine/Park intersection. The entire chunk of land north of Pine is already accounted for — it is in the process of being landscaped as I write this — which leaves only the two small, awkwardly-shaped parcels of land south of the avenue to work with. Community groups in Milton Park and the McGill Ghetto, the neighbourhood just south of the intersection, have already made it clear that they will only accept a public use for the land, with a preference for green space.

Raphaël Fischler, the urban planning professor who organized the charrette, noted at one point in the evening that there was a tension between the local and the city-wide vision of Pine and Park. That’s true, and it risks jeopardizing the success of the new intersection. The clear challenge here is to build a site of activity and engagement in what is now an extremely passive space. By ignoring the politics of the situation, the McGill students were able to offer fresh ideas, and hopefully they’ll be able to push the interchange discussion in a more creative direction.

“It Was Too Funky to Last”

McGill architecture students Jessica Dan (left) and Aurore Paluel-Marmont work at the Architecture Café, which is slated to be replaced by a corporate licensee. Photo by John Kenney

Like all good secrets, the Architecture Café is a bit hard to find, tucked as it is in the basement of McGill University’s School of Architecture.

Most students, unless they have a class in the lecture hall next door, are unlikely to come across it by chance. Yet this non-profit student-run café has long been one of the most popular spaces on campus, filled throughout the day with students and faculty from across the university.

At lunchtime, a line usually bends out the door and down a hallway as customers file in for sandwiches, pastries, zaatar and bargain-priced coffee.

Many see the café, started in 1993, as an alternative to the other cafeterias at McGill, which are run by such corporate licensees as Chartwells, a subsidiary of Compass Group Canada.

As students head back to classes, they might find that the last student-operated café at Montreal’s oldest university is packing up for good: McGill’s administration has ordered it closed.

According to Morton Mendelson, deputy provost of student life and learning, the move reflects the administration’s efforts to centralize food service on campus as a means to ensure health safety.

But since news of the café’s fate broke in early August, students have rallied behind a drive to keep it alive. A Facebook group called Save the Architecture Café, founded by the café’s student operators, drew more than 1,500 current and former McGill students as members within a week.

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Eating the Campus

Santropol’s old rooftop container garden. Photo by Jack Sanford

Is it possible to eat a university? A group of environmental activists, volunteers and McGill University researchers want you to think so. Last week, they launched the Edible Campus, a container garden located at the school’s campus in downtown Montreal.

Operated by Alternatives, a social and environmental advocacy group based in the McGill Ghetto, the garden will supply up to one-third of the food needed to feed Santropol Roulant’s meals-on-wheels program. At the same time, it will provide an opportunity for researchers from McGill’s Edible Landscapes Project to study the effectiveness of container gardening as a tool for urban food production.

“Gardens are not just a leisure activity,” said Dr. Vikram Bhatt, a professor in the school of architecture and the director of the Minimum Cost Housing Group, which runs Edible Landscapes. “They play a profound role in the lives of the elderly, immigrants and people who are just lonely.”

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