As this article demonstrates, in 1913 Montreal real estate developers were hatching a plan to turn the area near the Aqueduct into a highly desirable place to live. It was close to much of the action - including the jobs on the highly-polluted and industrial Lachine Canal. According to this artist rendition, pedestrians would be encouraged to walk alongside the water, peer over railings or even walk down stairs so you wiggle your toes in the watery St. Lawrence drink.
The pretty road would be named Aqueduct Boulevard - which of course is now known as de la Verendre, which is as hard to spell as it is long to say. As the patched-together picture on the left displays (between Church and Woodland) what was eventually built allows no access to the water along the north side of the canal. The West Island appears to have been called Highlands. What's now known as Ville Emard was known as Rockfield. And the area between Lasalle and Verdun was known as the Bronx. Some residents of that area still call it that, and one or two stores still bear that monicker.
One hint that the area might slowly fulfill its potential as a pleasant waterside area can be found in the big series of condos finally completed near Church and St. Patrick.
2 minor corrections - one in the way you spell la Verendrye and the other is Rockfield: it is(was) part of Ville St Pierre. The church on St Jacques just east of Lafleur hotdog still bears this name.
ReplyDeleteThis picture illustrates a section of a parkway corridor planned to encircle the downtown and separate the first ring of suburban neighbourhoods from the city. In 1909 the Province of Quebec Architects Association proposed implementing a ring of tree-lined park avenues with divided modes of transportation (walking/carriages/omnibus/streetcar etc). The PQAA was vehemently opposed to the introduction of vehicular traffic to the urban core, preferring a series of parkways the doubled as a public transit superhighway. But it had social functions as well. Such a well defined network of public transit systems could be easily policed and its regular traffic could provide a safe route to anywhere in the city and help was always certain to be nearby. This is in drastic contrast to the public conception of urban parks in an earlier era - that they were the natural refuge of the vagrant. Indeed, that's why Mount Royal Park is at the center of a massive residential zone - it was safe - a vagrant couldn't walk long through Outremont without being turned back by police. The Late Victorian/Edwardian era in Montreal was dominated by public hygiene crusades and nascent urban conservationist trends - and so the park took on a new role. Its purpose was to provide all citizens with a link to a spot of fresh air. Unfortunately only small segments of the heavily forested parkway system ever got built - Irving Layton described Park Avenue as the 'vaulted ceiling in an arboreal cathedral' and I know exactly what he means - the visual of a tree canopy, of old trees three or four floors high (think Jeanne Mance north of Rachel - like columns! Like a frame!). It was remarkably avante-garde and I know we'd do well to thoroughly re-investigate it - an eco-social public-transit ring road.
ReplyDeleteI guess public transit has always been pie-in-the-sky stuff in North America. Still is, it seems, and will always be, unless doomsayers like this are right and I wouldn't bet on it.
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