Park Avenue merchants hurting for business
Businesses in the endless construction zone of Park Avenue are hurting for clients and some have had to shut down. A shopkeeper who just went out of business describes the problem that has also lingered around the Main: after awhile, people change their habits, so there’s no guarantee customers will flock back even when the street work finally ends.
Ian 09:28 on 2012/06/16 Permalink
I’m sure business is just great for Louisbourg, the construction company doing the work, owned by Tony Accurso. This project was supposed to be completed last fall & there’s still 2 phases of theproject left they haven’t even started… I wonder how many brown envelopes it took to get the city to extend the contract a year? I have seen the same stretch of road dug up and repaved 7 times since the project began (specifically between Park & Villeneuve, east side of the street) without additiopnal infrastructure work after the first 4. It’s unclear what the hell they’re up to besides padding their invoices and killing Park. Maybe this is Tremblay’s revenge for the renaming of Park fiasco.
JaneyB 10:32 on 2012/06/16 Permalink
I didn’t realize it was Louisbourg. Interesting. My theory was that someone was just trying to bankrupt at least one business on that stretch. Now I’m curious: was any roadwork there truly necessary at all? I never cared about roadwork until I moved to Montreal; now every pylon screams ‘mafia’. Sickening – and in full view.
Charest and Tremblay don’t realize/care just how much it damages the body politic when ‘ordinary people’ are nailed for the tiniest infraction yet other people can do exactly what they want, often with public money. It’s taken centuries to develop the concept of a ‘neutral state’ that allows some countries to have a public life where people willingly share their resources instead of hoarding them for family protection/bribes. Just incredible.
Ian 14:28 on 2012/06/16 Permalink
They actually did fully replace all the waterworks along the street – giant rusty steel pipes excavated, proper pvc lined concrete conduits to replace them with box joins plus of course all the underground cabling. A lot of that area is solid volcanic basalt too, so there was some serious digging to be done initially. Also, it’s a heavy traffic corridor so only one side of the street at a time could be done. That said, since last fall I haven’t seen a damn thing done that couldn’t have been integrated with any of a series of earlier passes; it’s becoming an obvious joke to anyone that lives in this neighbourhood at the expense of, well, everyone but Louisbourg.