Maybe, if you've got enough years under your belt, you'll remember this long-vanished streetscape, captured here by news photographer J.P. Laliberte in the spring of 1959. If you don't know it, you're looking towards the southwest corner of Jeanne Mance St. at Pine Ave. It's all gone now, demolished to make way for the Pine-Park interchange -- itself now bulldozed out of existence. A total of 25 vintage row homes in the Jeanne Mance-Pine-Park area were wrecked to make way for the interchange, a $4.5-million series of concrete over- and underpasses that finally came down last year. Nowadays, this sort of expropriation-and-demolition project is always lamented as a kind of loss. But back then, it was progress -- plain and simple. In fact, project engineers wanted to take down even more buildings -- including those still standing on the west side of Park, south of Pine. But the city refused, not in order to preserve the heritage block, but to limit sums paid out for expropriations. 
So by mid-July, '59, these resplendent buildings were nothing but splinters and brick -- just in time for construction to start on the futuristic interchange (see diagram), which many Montrealers would eventually come to see as an eysore -- a case of Stalinesque overkill. But for all its homeliness, the interchange did have charm. Self-proclaimed "urban artists" certainly enjoyed making it even uglier. Others (present company not excluded) just loved to zoom through the northbound Pine-Park underpass at unlikely speeds, like wannabe Ayrton Sennas trying to make last call.
Footnote: These plans credit Lalonde & Valois Consulting Engineers, forerunners of the often troubled company called Lavalin, which was acquired after its collapse in 1991 by SNC (an engineering rival that was initially founded by Montreal engineering consultant Arthur Surveyer in 1911).
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