The large lot - 40,000 square feet - at the corner once held many buildings but they were razed around 1958 when the south side of Dorchester was demolished to widen the narrow street to become a major boulevard.
For decades the vacant space served as a much-needed parking lot, during an era when parking lots were much appreciated and owners could make a solid profit from the passive venture.
But parking lots became the target of city officials around 2000 when city officials pressured owners to build on the lots by raising taxes and encouraging them to make deals to get something up on their land. Since the lot closed the land exists as a purposeless eyesore.
In the early 1900s the land was busy with structures that sat handily accrss from the old Montreal General Hospital across the street on its east side.
The most prominent of the lost buildings was the Hotel d’Italie, later renamed the Roncari in honour of the family that owned it and fended off various challenges, including Black Hand extortion attempts and an incident in 1930 when 24-year-old Prudencienne Daignault was found strangled to death in a with a towel in a room. Police arrested the German Albert Zimmerman but a court acquitted him after witnesses were grilled.
After the structure was demolished, the intersection also had another vacant lot after authorities demolished the old St. Lawrence farmers market at the northeast corner, leaving two of the four corners long-term vacant wastelands of despair. About 20 years ago the Societe St. Jean Baptiste built a highrise student dorm on that corner, however, leaving the southeast corner alone as a vacant lot.
A branch of the city of Montreal, known as the development society, became owner of the property and sold it for about $6 million in a series of three transactions to the giant FTQ labour funds in 2005. The city stipulated that the new owner must build something there within one year or else resell it to the city for 10 percent less.
A year passed and the city declined to exercise its option to repurchase the land, noting that it would cost them about $800,000 to do so.
Passersby would occasionally notice sporadic signs on the site promising a future development and note the temporary presence of construction equipment but none of the hype ever amounted to anything and years passed without any progress.
The FTQ sold the empty land to Tony Accurso in 2010. Accurso has since become well-known as a developer known for bribing officials, a habit that earned him a couple of fraud convictions.
Accurso used the land as collateral for several major loans and in 2014 he put it on sale for $14 million.
The city of Montreal had reportedly been willing to allow a 39 meter building to be placed on the site - that equates to about 10 floors but later downgraded that to 23 meters, which is about six or seven.
So whoever owned the property, be it the FTQ, Accurso, or someone else who might purchase it, would consider the height limits too restrictive to be profitable.
If city officials greenlighted a taller structure, we might have something there on the land today.
Accurso, it should come as no surprise, no longer owns the land. The city of Montreal sued the embattled developer for $14 million while Laval also sued him for $29 million. Accurso settled with Montreal for $3.8 million earlier in 2022.
The FTQ fund once again owns the property as part of $17 billion in its assets. There’s no major likelihood of them building anything on the land.
The City of Montreal would be wise to exempt the property from the height limitations and allow them to build something much larger than they want, as it would increase their tax base and also provide much-needed homes in the downtown core. .
Some cynically suspect that the city doesn’t want a tall building at the site because it would block the view of the mountain from the mayor’s office.
Thanks for the update.
ReplyDeleteRegarding height restrictions, clearly there are plenty of properties in the city where a smaller or lower-altitude building exists which otherwise could have been built taller or wider, etc., but was not for practical reasons.
Don't our zoning laws already have enough flexibility to permit, say, a much-needed clinic, shelter, or housing project combined with some ground-level commercial establishments as is common in other districts? Would, say, a non-profit institution such as a new Welcome Hall Mission LEGALLY require ten stories or more? Of course not.
I suspect that there's much more than meets the eye regarding the eventual destiny of the southeast corner of R. Levesque and St. Lawrence. Empty land begs to be put to use, particularly nowadays. Back room dealings can only continue for so long before the city can legitimately expropriate the land for fair market value, then build a vital project which would ideally serve the district such as what recently occurred next to Place des Arts.
Otherwise, either hand the corner over to Chinatown or turn it into a green space.
I could see the space transformed into a real park with a fence and surveillance to prevent the ample vagrants from invading. 'd be equally favorable to seeing some sort of very tall residential structure placed there, 20 storeys or whatever. This helps the tax base and provides much needed homes. I don't care if they're luxury units or whatever. The sooner they saturate the luxury unit market the better, let them move onto more budget after. I oppose any sort of government or subsidized housing, as it's a moneypit game of bingo wasting our money that doesn't even benefit many poor people.
DeleteTrue about the homeless and otherwise poor people (many of whom are addicts or schizophrenic and therefore unable to properly care for themselves much less maintain clean, safe dwellings) and who, even if given low-cost, subsidized housing, would inevitably allow their apartments to become slums and drug dens, not to mention targeted by ruthless pushers--a scourge well-documented in many U.S. cities. Such originally well-intentioned housing has often been demolished following public outcries. See:
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes
And this found in Google: "Vagrancy is not expressly penalized under provincial laws. Although the Safe Streets Act of Ontario and British Columbia penalize aggressive panhandling, this requires conduct such as using abusive language or uttering threats during solicitation and does not include an offense for merely being vagrant."
Despite the current tolerance, I seriously suggest that our governments fund and create work camps for the homeless and so-called deadbeats whom, if given the chance, could be trained in basic skills for which they would be paid rather than allowing them to continue living on the streets and/or squatting in abandoned buildings, sometimes being at the wrong place at the wrong time becoming attacked and/or murdered by vigilantes--a sad but frequent occurrence south of the border as well as in Central and South America.
Much has been said about the "horrors of the old institutions" of decades ago where questionable practices were performed on the mentally-challenged. So, how about updating such institutions by utilizing modern techniques? Does not the Douglas Hospital and others like it continue to expand and upgrade?
Your suggestions, while noble, seem to all involve spending money we don't have and will never have and can never get. I went down there to look at the site and a vagrant started screaming at me and storming at me after I shot an image of a building he was standing in front of. I returned fire and yelled back at him and he slouched off. A lot of poorer welfare recipients have moved to rural areas where things are more affordable and I think that's a positive trend.
DeleteYou were lucky that vagrant didn't throw something at you. Just another reason to wear a bicycle helmet wherever you go, perhaps...lol.
DeleteTransferring the "down-and-out" (as such people were called decades ago) to suburban and rural areas, had been seriously proposed back when the downtown Dozois Project was underway, but the tenants of their former, demolished slums refused to consider going so far away from what they had long been used to. Besides, there were very basic services and no large, accessible malls in the suburbs. Public transport was practically non-existent.
A case in point, the former low-rent apartment Cloverdale Park project built
around 1959 by the CMHC was later sold to another concern and then eventually a co-op after much wrangling. Unfortunately, the buildings slowly deteriorated. Low-income, third-world immigrants moved in and drug dealing became rampant. Adding insult to injury, its former A Ma Baie CN commuter station (on the Deux Montagnes line) was closed. Today, the place continues to be run-down with garbage not picked up from unsightly, overfilled dumpsters.
Funding? How about dedicating a special lottery as occurs elsewhere?
I sense that a large number of poorer Montrealers have already moved to towns outside of Montreal.
DeleteI wasn't worried about the vagrant. He backed down like a harmless little puppy when I turned to face him.