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Old Posted Sep 14, 2023, 10:16 AM
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Montreal hauntology (15 photos)

I don't know that there is any era of our country that has vanished quite so absolutely as this mid-20th iteration of Montreal. As the watermark suggests, these are taken from the city's archives, and from a Flickr gallery you can find here.

A lot of the areas in these photos, which were mostly taken near Bleury Street, have physically vanished. Culturally and spatially, it's all gone, even where you might recognize buildings that are still with us today.

Some of Montreal's new landmarks are being built in this area. Even before that, it saw a lot of very sympathetic infill and public works development in the 2000s, from the construction of Riopelle Square towards Place des Arts.

It is just breathtaking to contemplate how many overlapping realities have inhabited this tiny area of Canada in the short period of a few decades.


































Here, you can see the new city being born.



It's a very good collection of photos and worth a look if you are interested in this sort of thing.
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Old Posted Sep 14, 2023, 10:24 AM
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(I'm not being intentionally elusive in the above, either. Obviously, this period is a political and linguistic hinge, and that is very visible in these photos.

But there are other things at work on other levels. Beyond English/French and Quebec/Canada, you have the end of the industrial era, the breakdown of the Catholic faith and the rise of postwar city planning/architectural modernism. You have the death of the British Empire. You have a massive drop in natality.

On the local level, you have Jean Drapeau and the willed deconstruction of the "dirty old town". This is right before the Metro. It's the twilight of the headquarters.

There were just so many things dying and being born right then and there.)
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Old Posted Sep 14, 2023, 1:08 PM
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Very cool stuff. We love to elevate these types of urban landscapes on this site, but in retrospect it's not hard to see why many people welcomed Modernism and the types of grand plans that got rid of all this.

The 60s was a decade of incredible change in Montreal (at all levels of society) that I doubt we'll see repeated in this country again.
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Old Posted Sep 14, 2023, 1:21 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by niwell View Post
it's not hard to see why many people welcomed Modernism and the types of grand plans that got rid of all this.



A lot of those houses were about 50 years old when those photos were taken, just about parallel to the most unloved tranche of contemporary buildings.

They were pretty mangy in parts. The city in the photos was one of the most corrupt municipalities on the continent, and it had some grievous stats on things like infant mortality and literacy, even relative to its peers. Bleury Street wasn't a very nice neighbourhood either.

Still.

We do elevate those landscapes here, and though it may be a bit tedious given things like the above (as well as sheer repetition), there are reasons for this. You don't need those precise styles of building to achieve that fine a grain, but there does not seem to be a single contemporary developer willing to build at this scale. This despite such areas commanding an incredible premium per square meter in all major Western cities.

But I can bang that drum in the projects thread (I will bang that drum in the projects thread).

I am not sure there is another city in North America more transformed by the already very transformative late 20th century.
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Old Posted Sep 14, 2023, 1:24 PM
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This is a great web app that allows you to toggle between a late 1940s aerial of Montreal and the current Google Maps aerial. You can see the city kind of gasping for air but also letting all the air out at the same time. Both metaphors in play.
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Old Posted Sep 14, 2023, 1:33 PM
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There is still a lot going on in this area. It's funny, because it doesn't even really have a name but this part of downtown is kind of protean and tends to reflect where Montreal is at a given moment.



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Old Posted Sep 14, 2023, 1:39 PM
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There are still a few blocks where you can see ghosts.

Rue Anderson.



de la Gauchetiere

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Old Posted Sep 14, 2023, 4:10 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kool maudit View Post
It is just breathtaking to contemplate how many overlapping realities have inhabited this tiny area of Canada in the short period of a few decades.
Thank you for sharing that!

I love the "before and after" and "then and now" comparisons too. Seeing many of those Montreal pics I immediately think of similar places in Hamilton. Many from before my time were demolished and replaced by parking lots in the name of "urban renewal"... but we've been seeing a lot of positive change more recently.
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