I still don’t understand what so many of you have against these houses, for my part, I love them !
EDIT : except the Lola Rosa one, of course 
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IMO they are now incongruous with the rest of the area, and serve no purpose that couldn’t be better served by food trucks and stalls during festivals. There are a thousand other bad coffee places within spitting distance, as well as kebabs, poutines and ice creams. They have as much “heritage value” as the former fake façade of 245 RB — certainly, if there was indeed any patrimonial value, the city wouldn’t have allowed all these shitty commerces to take over the block. I’d have preferred a nice transition from Maestria’s esplanade down to Place des Festivals, but whatever; now the bougie new owners of million dollar condos can sit in the lobby and look at the dumpsters and grease traps behind these crappy establishments.
Well that’s the price to live in town and not into Simcity… in a perfect world all those lots would have been sell at the time of the spectrum project and that full block would have become a lot, but it’s their rights to not sell and the city cannot do anything about it.
They are not the most attractive, but at least they give a glimpse of what the sector looked before, since all the blocks have been tore down (PDA, Complexe Desjardins, Place des Festivals, a good chunk of the UQAM, etc). Eventually they would become more upscale and would probably be renovated or restored.
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Hey productive contributors. Let’s back-track a bit if possible. Do you remember when these ‘ugly’ low-rise ‘houses’ / street-level boutiques on Ste-Catherine between Bleury and Jeanne-Mance, were the only structures standing for so many years after the destruction of Le Spectrum. Thank god for these… Otherwise it would have been a really desolate no man’s land for a long time. What makes Montréal interesting is in fact that, somehow, the forces at play sometimes end up NOT eradicating all vestiges of the past. Do you see what’s happened to Vancouver and Toronto… They are basically destroying all the past to erect similar glass-wall buildings that all look the same. Yes the esplanade may have been nicer without these low-rise rundown structures, but these quirky merchant buildings will make the Maestria area uniquely Montréalais in the end. It’s a good thing because it’s kinda odd and not typical of many other cities.
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Like I keep telling my mom, just because a movie is “old” or “black-and-white” doesn’t automatically make it a “classic.”
If a building offers no historical, architectural or cultural significance, we should still keep it because “it’s been there a while”? Sorry, I’d rather a sterile, modern neighbourhood than one dotted with insignificant, ugly vestiges of a forgettable era. Can’t build your baseball stadium because there’s a rusting 80 year old silo there!
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You keep saying we or the city should have done something as if we owned them… There’s just no legal nor logical justification for the city to do anything. The buildings are privately owned and structurally sound, so the owner decides. As someone else said, this isn’t SimCity.
Imagine if the city tells the developer “listen, I am not letting your project go ahead unless you buy those buildings on another lot that are ruining the aesthetic and demolish them.” That will never happen. Or if they approach the owners of the houses and say “sorry, but we think your property is insignificant and ruining the view of the bougie new owners of million-dollar condos, so you’re going to have to sell to them.” The city can’t expropriate for the benefit of private developers.
You should look into the case of Café Cléopâtre. You or I or maybe even the city might not see the value of these buildings, but the owners sure as hell do if they continue to refuse offers to sell. In the end, what the owner wants is all that really matters.
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I don’t think you understood my posts.
“We” keep crying about some mythical “heritage” value in ugly buildings that have none, just because they predate PVM. Somehow “we” have become over-protective of older constructions even if they don’t have any aesthetic, historical or cultural value.
certainly, if there was indeed any patrimonial value, the city wouldn’t have allowed all these shitty commerces to take over the block
I never said the “city” should have stepped in at Maestria and expropriated anything. I just said it would have looked better without those shitty shophouses at the base.
I mean you don’t specifically say to expropriate the buildings, but it’s evident when you read between the lines that it is what you are suggesting. You said “lapse in allowing this to go ahead with those nondescript shophouses…” It is the city that allows, or refuses, projects. The opposite of what you deem a lapse of judgment by the city would be to refuse Maestria until the buildings are demolished.
Clearly, the owners have no intention of selling nor demolishing, so what do you suggest should have been the proper course of action if not expropriation?
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Keeping that low-scale row of older buildings is the best thing that could’ve happened for the Place des festivals. The scale of it itself is heritage. The ensemble is heritage. Some of them are not heritage per se, but standing altogether they are, on an urban evolution point of view. Heritage shouldn’t be understood one building at a time, or one detail at a time. Just like cinema history shouldn’t be understood one movie at a time. It’s much more complicated than that. So yes, even a bad black&white movie can be part of a heritage sequence that makes it worth watching and studying, and preserving.
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Agreed. To me it gives a glimpse of what was there before the entire area changed for Place-des-Arts, Complexe Desjardins, etc. It’s actually pretty cool, but I guess that’s a very subjective topic.
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Aujourd’hui, j’étais sur Sainte-Catherine au coin de Bleury et le 1er plancher au coin me semblait… pas au niveau! J’ai regardé longtemps en me disant que ça devait être une illusion d’optique mais je le trouvais toujours penché - il semble suivre un peu la pente de la rue. À part une salle de cinéma ou de spectacle, je ne me souviens pas d’avoir vu un plancher qui n’était pas au niveau. Personne d’autre à remarqué cela?
