Without getting into the delicate topic of the surfacing quality of Montreal’s automobile infrastructure or the budget management of previous municipal administrations, I will comment on one thing. There is much to say about how little gets done in the current and most recent decades as a result of political obstruction and wasted time, resources and energy on inquiries, investigations and incompetent practitioners that create public opinion stalemates. Movers and shakers are becoming rare, and those that do emerge from the woodwork are often percussively sent back by the hammer of cynicism borne of hyper-partisanship. There are no good guys and bad guys, only toucans squawking artless rhetoric at each other across a channel they refuse to cross.
We were born too late to experience a time of grand urban projects (debt notwithstanding), the kind that alter both the arrangement and areal image of a city, the kind that dramatically change our entrenched circulation patterns on a yearly basis and act as a constant reminder that our supposed self-evident practices should continuously be judged for relevance and renewal. The building of the Decarie Expressway is an interesting study. To be filled in on the circumstances surrounding that five kilometre stretch of Autoroute 15 that provides an approximate barrier between NDG and Westmount and, a little further north, between Hampstead and Cote-des-Neiges, follow this link.
For a more detailed story complemented by historical photos, visit Decarie’s entry on the Montreal Roads website.
My paternal grandparents immigrated to Canada from Italy in 1956 and settled in NDG. They lived in two houses before buying their permanent home in the 60s on Walkley Ave. The first house was on the West side of Addington between Upper Lachine Road and St. Jacques. I have yet to ask them if they were ever able to take a picture of the house, because a few years after moving out, it was one of those demolished to make way for the construction of Decarie.
Not only were those Addington homes pivotal parts of personal stories, they were part of a street that bowed down before the progression of Montreal’s once steady urban development. They were the tradeoff of that southbound rightward veer to spare a historic church before the highway leaps off the Turcot hill toward the sky, a sentiment aptly captured in the Wikipedia article. A church…or three blocks of duplexes. Despite those homes being little memorialized, the collective motivation to solve an obvious traffic problem, to alleviate mornings and afternoons of clogged neighbourhood one-way, one lane streets, to implant an artificial lifesaving artery, to ignore unreasonable dissent, defines true leadership and the use of power for the good of the city.
When I was informed of the location of my grandparents’ connection to this momentous chapter in the city’s history, I made a point of visiting the exact site to approximate where the house once sat. The picture below is not obvious, but looks south from the Upper Lachine viaduct, in line with where the row of once-existing houses began. The block is now an open-face sandwich, with the street itself an alienated service-road fragment and the enduring homes unprotected by the shady canape of a typical NDG avenue.
I’ve also included two maps taken from City of Montreal websites, the first depicts Montreal in 1939. I’ve annotated with a red rectangle where Addington street stood among other neighbourhood street in the west side combtooth. The white, open area to the south is where the Turcot Interchange was built in the 1960s. The second map is of the current day agglomeration Cote-des-Neiges and Notre-Dame-de-Grace. A similar annotation marks the temporal ellipsis. (To zoom in, click on the image and it will open on a separate page. It is sufficiently detailed.)
Finding traces of these geographical adjustments is fascinating, especially when the places that we know and remember are so tightly woven into the fabric of our personal and collective histories. So I nearly obsess over looking at pictures of how it is and how it used to look before time’s decay and projects that bring renewal. To this end, and for those interested in urban geography and history, the Spacing blog is a vehicle of endless learning and engaging opinion about our ever-evolving neighbourhoods.
