Peter F. Trent: Why is Montreal planting a forest of highrises?

Article content material

One does get the impression that Montreal metropolis corridor, particularly the Ville-Marie borough, has given builders the keys to the town.

Article content material

After Griffintown, an object lesson in dangerous city planning, got here one other tabula rasa undertaking, this time within the southwest nook of the historic Peter-McGill district (certainly one of three Ville-Marie wards). I’m referring to the redevelopment of the previous Montreal Youngsters’s Hospital, baptized Le Sq. Youngsters’s, which has emerged as a jumbled assortment of wind-buffeted glass crates of as much as 37 storeys that won’t a group make.

Article content material

Montreal desires to draw households to downtown. As an alternative, 25- to 34-year-olds with kids represent the biggest demographic decamping from the island of Montreal. The phrase kids in Sq. Youngsters’s misleads. In frequent with the whole lot Montreal appears to do, there’s nothing to draw kids right here.

Article content material

Article content material

The place’s the varsity, area, pool and correct park that collectively function the armature for any decently rooted group? Similar to in Griffintown, they don’t exist. Montreal crops a forest of residential highrises, however by no means budgets for elevated service demand, not to mention these specific to kids.

Within the Sq. Youngsters’s undertaking Montreal will present a group centre and library — services that ought to have been constructed a long time in the past for the Peter-McGill district. However, because of the Montreal Gazette’s indefatigable sleuth, Linda Gyulai, we now study of Montreal’s opaque and strange usufruct association to pay for it, a scheme that might price taxpayers a cool $150 million over 40 years. Listed. Not solely is it costly, this deal doesn’t mirror inventive city planning.

Article content material

Proper subsequent to Sq. Youngsters’s and its deliberate library is — mirabile dictu? — an current library. Oh, we’re advised, the venerable Atwater Library is in Westmount — as if it have been positioned in Westphalia.

Many Montrealers store and research in Westmount and plenty of Westmounters do the reverse — so the place’s the issue? And Westmount already has its personal public library. And, as for the group centre itself, there’s the underused YWCA and various struggling church buildings within the neighbourhood that might have supplied the house required.

On this historic district, the Metropolis of Montreal ought to be main by instance in restoring, reusing or repurposing heritage buildings. David Culver, then the CEO of Alcan Aluminium, confirmed the way in which in 1983 by doing exactly that. He constructed Maison Alcan on Sherbrooke St. within the west a part of the Peter-McGill district. Culver’s imaginative and prescient was to attach the Atholstan Home, the previous Berkeley Resort, the Salvation Military’s Citadel and different such heritage buildings and tying the entire historic assortment along with a modest trendy constructing.

Article content material

A elementary query stays: Do younger households need to reside in highrises in any respect? Within the Nineteen Sixties, Westmount, historically a household group, caught the highrise fever. It adopted the “valley idea”; constructing heights on Westmount’s flanks have been dramatically upzoned to match these prevailing next-door in Montreal. Château Maisonneuve in western Westmount rose in 1965.  On the jap flank, Expo 67 introduced the resolutely family-free 33-storey Plaza Tower that, with others, proceed the concrete canyon of highrises that line de Maisonneuve Blvd. from Man St. to Atwater Ave.

Of their mid-century modernish manner, at present’s builders ape that Nineteen Sixties mania for top, whereas nonetheless constructing solely for singles and {couples}. But conventional Montreal and Westmount lower-rise residential varieties produced dense human-scale growth that continues to draw younger households.

Article content material

Maybe, come the day Peter-McGill residents lastly get their group centre within the Sq. Youngsters’s, they’ll ponder one other developer’s unfettered handiwork by trying southeast throughout René-Lévesque Blvd. towards the freeway on-ramp. They’ll see, silhouetted in opposition to the sky, a pair of 20-storey egg-crated highrises just lately and indecently shoehorned between two forlorn heritage homes.

Peter F. Trent, a former inventor and businessman, served 5 phrases as mayor of Westmount and led the Montreal demerger motion. His Merger Delusion was a finalist for the very best Canadian political guide of 2012.