Walking around downtown yesterday with a camera, it came into focus for me that one thing this city needs is a train station. The view above is the “front” of Central Station, and the view below is the “back.” I use quotes because the building is a faceless block with no human entrance at street level. On the “front” it has a gaping maw of a garage entrance where taxis enter and leave. The presence of a Tim Horton’s and a McDonald’s are indicated by signs tacked on one corner, and that is all.
Anyone who has experienced the grandeur of Toronto’s Union Station or New York’s Grand Central has to look at this featureless nonentity of a box with shame. I know people who have lived here for decades and don’t know where the train station is, because there is no character to this thing at all.
I’m not saying we need to reconstruct something imitative of the boom days of the early 20th century, but there should be a modern structure with a distinctive presence and it should, above all, have a well-marked entrance on the front where people can walk in from the street.
The inside of Central Station is not terrible (although those featureless frosted windows are bad) and it would be nice if we could keep the anthem friezes at either end of the hall, but it’s not much compared to the soaring spaces inside the New York or Toronto stations.
Ironically, of course, we had a grand train station and you can even see a glimpse of it in the distance in the photo at top, but Windsor Station is no longer in use and the existence of the Bell Centre means it can never be revived for the purpose. Even Jean-Talon station at Parc metro, whose main hall stood empty for many years, then became an Indigo bookshop then an SAQ and is now part of a Loblaws, is an infinitely more effective and dignified building.
It’s hard for me to believe that today’s Central Station was meant to be left in the state it’s in. It looks to me like a stub, a mere placeholder. But this city can think on a bigger scale and one of the things it deserves is a train station that isn’t a cringing little box.
Martin Girard 16:25 on 2010/05/15 Permalink
I really like the interior of our station, much more than Toronto’s, which is grim and decrepit (and once you have passed the grand hall, Toronto’s station become even worse – and there is no place to eat, contrary to the vast choices of Mtl’s station). But it’s impossible not to agree with you about the exterior.
Émile Thomas 17:38 on 2010/05/15 Permalink
Once, I almost missed my train because I refused to take the rat tunnels that lead to the station from métro Bonaventure. I tried instead to enter the station from outside. It is impossible. There are virtually no pedestrian entrances at street level. I learned my lesson and now take the underground like a good little Montrealer.
brett 22:02 on 2010/05/15 Permalink
Both Toronto and Vancouver have great looking buildings, but the exteriors are disgusting. The park in front of Vancouver’s station is full of sketchy homeless people/drug addicts who don’t hesitate to bug you for money. Toronto’s Union station has a similar stellar welcoming committee at its exit, complete with an overwhelming stench of urine. The inside of Union station is a vast, empty, echoing hall. The only reason that Vancouver’s Pacific central station has any life at all is due to the bus station sharing the exact same building.
Boston, on the other hand, has an amazing train station. Great exterior, and the interior is buzzing with activity. It reminded me the most of Hamilton’s train station, which is mostly taken over by GO Transit.
What’s the problem with Montreal’s station? Besides the exterior, it’s the crappy service offered by VIA rail that precludes any possible improvement to Canadian train stations. The commuter rail service offered by the AMT is the big reason there’s any life at all in the building. VIA offers a crappy service that’s very expensive; what’s the point of improving a building whose purpose is to serve that corporation. Those people who’ve lived here for decades have no knowledge about the train station not because of its exterior, but because of its lack of usefulness to them. Want proof? Ask them where the bus station is. They’ll know.
blork 09:02 on 2010/05/16 Permalink
I fully agree that the building is terribly bland and nondescript from the outside. However, it is most definitely possible to walk into the station from street level. However, you’d never know if you didn’t already know, because the pedestrian entrances are equally nondescript.
One way is to go into the “gaping maw” that taxis and other cars use. On the east side, near the Tim Horton’s, there’s a pedestrian walkway that goes all the way from the sidewalk to the interior rotating door that brings you right into the station.
The main pedestrian entrance is west of the “gaping maw.” In your top photo you can just barely see it in front of the schoolbus on the left. It is poorly marked, but there it is. It’s an entrance into the adjoining office building, but there’s a ground-level tunnel that runs about 50 metres and then opens into the west end of the station.
That said, I also agree with Brett in that CN/VIA Rail should be ashamed of themselves for letting rail travel in Canada become so lame.
Kate 09:35 on 2010/05/16 Permalink
blork: I know you can enter on foot via the garage entrance, also via the doorway and tunnel on the west end, but how depressing and furtive those seem as entrances to what should be a major public building.
I can’t find much about the history of this structure, but I have to admit I made an error. I didn’t take a photo of the actual, real station, which is hidden BEHIND this structure and squeezed between it and the hotel – basically floating in the middle of a parking lot in an indeterminate space. There’s a picture of it here on imtl.org and you can see a bit of it in the second photo above. It is not beautiful and looks like a railway depot belonging to a much smaller town somewhere, but it’s slightly better than the box. However, since it isn’t on a street, you can’t see it on Google Streetview, and you really cannot enter it on foot – you either have to sneak in through the taxi garage, or come in through the tunnels. I wonder what kind of mad chain of decisions led to the arrangement.
But since the street sign for Central Station is on that box on La Gauchetière, it has to be considered part of the station, so I wasn’t completely misled about it.
Neath 12:17 on 2010/05/16 Permalink
It is one of the most unfathomable things to witness how little of Montreal’s railroad history actually still exists. We have buildings like Viger and Windsor that are masterpieces, but the city would prefer to hand them over to developers. This was once one of the greatest railroad cities on the planet, and certainly kicked ass over anything in Canada, yet you would barely know it based on what you can see. The CN station looks like it resents being a railroad station.
greynotgrey 16:54 on 2010/05/16 Permalink
Just a note regarding “Hamilton’s Station” – that is in fac the old TH&B station that closed down , Hamilton’s “real” station (originally grand trunk but bought by cnr) was a classical hall-style station down on Bay that has been closed since ’89. The TH&B was actually only nominally open by ’81 when the line closed down and the station locked its doors, only reopening in ’96. The entire station wasn’t just taken over by GO but fully rebuilt, retrofitted, and renovated after standing empty for decades.
Rich 18:44 on 2010/05/16 Permalink
You have to know the history of the site to understand how Central Station came out like it is. A predecessor of CN owned the mega-block from Place Bonaventure up to PVM since they bored the tunnel though the mountain in the 1910s. They planned to develop the huge ditch into prime real-estate at least since the 1930s. Making the station small and placing it in the middle of the block left the more valuable street-fronting parts of the lot available for future development. For years the station straddled the ditch and was connected to the surrounding streets with escalators, stairwells and vehicle ramps. The modern day entrances came about as the surrounding buildings went up in the 1950s and 1960s.
Check this site out for plenty of old photos: http://www.imagescn.technomuses.ca/
Certainly the architecture of the original brick building doesn’t live up to the importance of the site but that’s understandable considering that it was built in the middle of World War II when resources of all kinds were tight. The only reason it did get built at that time was because the need to move men around was pressing and the existing Tunnel Terminal (around where the CN headquarters building is now) was overloaded.
As for that “gaping maw” of a parking structure, I have to agree. That thing is an architectural abomination and an embarrassment to our city.
Jean-Claude Marsan dedicated an entire chapter of his book “Montreal in Evolution” to the development of the CN land around Central Station. In the original french it’s called “Montréal en évolution”. It’s a fascinating read.
Yeah, maybe not every aspect of the plan worked out perfectly in the end, but you have to admire the thinking that went on in the head office of CN back then. Those men were decades ahead of their time, and the end result was the core of our modern city.
DC 13:33 on 2010/05/17 Permalink
A big part of the sorry state of Montreal terminals is the differences in where Canadian railroads chose (unwisely) to spend their money. When railroads in the US were building big electrified commuter networks, profitable suburban developments, and grand downtown terminals and business districts, Canadian railroads were competing to build ruinously expensive cross-country links through rural areas. It didn’t work out so well.
Look at Canadian Northern’s attempt to build TMR: when the tunnel was more expensive than anticipated and the profits from suburban land speculation didn’t materialize, the company was already hanging by a thread and had to be reorganized as CN at great expense to the federal government. (Hey, why does this story sound strangely contemporary all of a sudden?)
Rich 11:57 on 2010/05/19 Permalink
Here’s a well-researched web page on the architecture of Central Station. It’s by Brian Merrett who is (I think) the son of the architect.
http://www.archiguides.com/jcmerrett/central/