This landmark church is going down. It is the Ste-Elisabeth du Portugal at the corner of Courcelle and St James W., a block away from where the infamous Dubois brother crime clan grew up. It opened in 1958and is the third church built on the same site. The original church was built in 1810 with a schoolhouse integrated in it. The Catholic Church sold it three years ago to the FTQ's real estate arm Solim. It will be demolished sometime before the end of April 2008, replaced by housing. Construction is slated to begin May or June. The new construction will fill part of the land, what will be done on the rest of the land remains to be seen. Some of the new units will be social housing, others will be...err.. not social housing. It is unknown how many units will be built. The borough rejected Solim's proposal to build nice condos there, ordering them instead to build homes for randomly chosen welfare opportunists, crackheads and beggars, a concept known as slum, er, "social housing." (Nice objective reporting! - Chimples). Last May 5 and 11 two fires were set to the church which had been boarded up since around 2001. Kids who regularly snuck inside the unmonitored building were suspected, but nobody was arrested.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Bye bye St. Elizabeth Church
This landmark church is going down. It is the Ste-Elisabeth du Portugal at the corner of Courcelle and St James W., a block away from where the infamous Dubois brother crime clan grew up. It opened in 1958and is the third church built on the same site. The original church was built in 1810 with a schoolhouse integrated in it. The Catholic Church sold it three years ago to the FTQ's real estate arm Solim. It will be demolished sometime before the end of April 2008, replaced by housing. Construction is slated to begin May or June. The new construction will fill part of the land, what will be done on the rest of the land remains to be seen. Some of the new units will be social housing, others will be...err.. not social housing. It is unknown how many units will be built. The borough rejected Solim's proposal to build nice condos there, ordering them instead to build homes for randomly chosen welfare opportunists, crackheads and beggars, a concept known as slum, er, "social housing." (Nice objective reporting! - Chimples). Last May 5 and 11 two fires were set to the church which had been boarded up since around 2001. Kids who regularly snuck inside the unmonitored building were suspected, but nobody was arrested.
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9 comments:
Maybe some of the people who will lose their homes on Cazelais St when they are expropriated for the rebuilding of the Turcot Interchange will get an apartment in the new building.
Sorta like Underdale.
What's Underdale?
Can't say it's a great loss architecturally. We have a lot more churches than we need, so if they're going to take some down, let it be the bad ones built since WWII.
overdale...google it.
I remember riding my bike down there one day and the whole street was roped off due to the fire...there were always scabrous looking characters lurking around that place before the fire.
Scabrous... no, not really.
There was the occassional squatter but generally the abandoned church was just that -- an abandoned church. Empty. An eyesore.
Now at least something will be done with it but I'd like to see MORE social housing for young families (This girl's a nut -- Chimples). There's a lot of social housing in this area already for the elderly. The young families need some too, especially with some of them likely to lose their cheap rents on Cazelais when the Turcot gets revamped. But I think I'm repeating myself.
Scabrous.
There's a rundown litter-strewn playground across the street laden with low-class rough-looking pit-bull owning assholes - (in case you think I'm saying that everybody who owns a pit bull is an asshole, well that's because it is what I'm saying). Surely there are some gentle people in that area but there scary douchebags are there as well.
The city should build big houses there so that nice families can move in and pay higher tax rates, thus alleviating the tax burden on the rest of us, rather than raising it, as public housing does.
There's a lot of room for welfare folk and retirees in the countryside where the land is cheap and the air is fresh. There's no reason they have to stay in the city, it's not like they have jobs to go to downtown.
Underdale is the term for the replacement housing to which poorer tenants of the demolished Overdale district accepted relocation. It's still there, a rather drab late-'80s building or two on lower Aqueduc (now Luciano Lalliero).
I always thought that was a cool looking church. Actually Quebec is well know to have very cool avant-garde Modern Churches built by architects from here inspired by international trends. Those architects most of the time worked side-by side with the likes of artist that are renowned for stuff they did at Expo 67 or at PDA (Place des Arts).It's really too bad they couldn't recycle the church into some sort of public, community or cultural building like a theater or a "maison de la culture"... The neighborhood needs it.
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