The Champlain Bridge is big mess this weekend as multiple lanes are closed for repairs. But at least the bridge has a website – as does the Mercier, which has its own problems. The Jacques-Cartier is only closing for fireworks this evening.
Updates from August, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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West Island folks are trying to save the Anse à l’Orme nature reserve, which Quebec wants to sell. Unless I’m mistaken, this land is included on the city’s list of large parks, which does seem to suggest a certain commitment on the city’s part. It also does have a river running through it, making it a valuable and scarce inland wetland area. Photo of the river by Ben Soo, taken in early spring.-
ExMontrealer
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B2b
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TV Hebdo, which is one of those perennial Quebec things utterly familiar even to an anglo who doesn’t watch TV, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
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Henry Aubin asks how Montreal can be declared the second happiest place on earth at the same time as its decrepitude leads to a declaration of crisis in the Globe & Mail. Aubin is chronically something of a doom-sayer, but he does have an answer, and it questions the tendency of the Tremblay administration’s to refashion the city into a sort of cirque-du-soleil tourism mecca while ignoring the needs of permanent residents.
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walkerp
I think we can safely file that Globe & Mail article under sour grapes. Certainly we have some serious infrastructure problems and endemic corruption and bureaucracy in the city administration. But to call that a city-wide crisis is just typical journalist hyperbole. The economy here is strong and growing, we have the only managed real estate growth in a major Canadian city and are making a sophisticated and deep transition to a true skill-based service economy. To make a comparison of Montreal today to New York in the ’70s pretty much undermines the entire rest of that article, which is too bad because there is actually some good reporting in there buried under the schadenfreude.
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This week will see the mayor’s choice of a new police chief among five men who have to each do a presentation, which sounds like grade school show-and-tell.
Tip to Maire Tremblay: if anyone uses Comic Sans, disqualify him.
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Intentions remain vague, but the Canadiens won’t be holding an outdoor game at the Olympic Stadium – if they did play outdoors here, it would be at Molson Stadium. If they did. The NHL has only done a couple of outdoor games since it experimented with the idea in 2003; hopes for an outdoor game for the Canadiens’ centennial year never worked out.
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Anyone who’s walked through Westmount Park would remember the huge old weeping willow that leaned out over the pool. Age finally did for the 150-year-old tree this week. Here’s a 2008 photo by Alanah Heffez.
In other tree news, Bronwyn Chester writes about the fate of the city’s elms – there are drawings and more detail on her own blog.
So sad that’s the island’s natural and cultural heritage is not valued by politicians : so much destructions this year, with Ben’s, the Spectrum, now this …