Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery workers held a demo today on Sherbrooke. They've been locked out since mid-May.
posted at 23:26

 
The city's banning heavy trucks from a bunch of older overpasses as doubts about their structural soundness continue to multiply. Fagstein has made a Google map showing all the structures considered questionable by the province and the city.
posted at 23:18

 
The Montreal (properly, Pointe Claire) woman marrying Princess Anne's son is a gift to silly-season journalists looking for a story, if nothing else, putting them into an agreeable tizz and making them write things like "his mother turned down royal titles for he and his sister Zara."

But this wedding should also be a warning against giving kids fanciful names like Autumn. You don't want a Princess Autumn or Lady Autumn in the story, do you? Sounds like something out of a badly translated version of The Tale of Genji.
posted at 09:52

 
More stories about the death of rapper Joe B.G. after a fire last week: fire officials say he could not have been saved but admit they could have found his body sooner, their initial announcement having been that everyone was safe from the fire.
posted at 09:40

 
Census figures unsurprisingly show that young single people live downtown and in the Plateau, older folks live in mid-suburbia and young families live in more distant suburbs.
posted at 09:24

 
A brief list of sherbet and ice cream sellers a little less known than the more established ones. I can only speak for Sorbetto and their spectacular non-dairy chocolate sherbet. The blackberry sherbet's also an unusual treat.

Also, a rather impressionistic list of exotic ingredients to be found at ethnic grocery stores all over town.
posted at 09:10

 
The Canadiens signed Michael Ryder for a year; the team now has a full roster for the upcoming season.
posted at 11:10

 
Yesterday afternoon's gay pride parade, the first daytime excursion since 2004, is called a success with 16 floats, 1200 participants and 50,000 spectators.
posted at 11:04

 
Days after last week's east-end duplex fire it was discovered that Quebec rapper Joe B.G. had died there just before a scheduled show at the FrancoFolies and the release of an album. More about him and his projects on his website.

Also, there's a very brief bit here says there's another big fire on Saint-Denis this morning.
posted at 10:49

 
The blue-collar workers in Jean-Drapeau Park have ended their strike but the beach remains closed because of next weekend's impending NASCAR race.
posted at 10:46

 
A few notes and comments on hotel rooftop bars in town.
posted at 10:43

 
The gay pride parade takes place this afternoon, starting at 1 p.m. and running along René-Lévesque in the Village.
posted at 10:51

 
A nice obituary for cycling advocate Claire Morissette.
posted at 03:02

 
A Montreal woman is set to marry the Queen's grandson: I find she has a Facebook page (114 friends) but it's not open to passersby. (Her school history also suggests she's Catholic, which would put her fiancé out of the running for the throne.) I wonder how many friending requests she'll receive now. More detail here.
posted at 03:00

 
Last week the Gazette made Hudson part of the West Island; now CTV is describing Huntingdon as a suburb of Montreal.
posted at 02:53

 
A group of businessmen with Conservative connections wants to restructure rail transport in Montreal to allow for the construction of a huge park and artificial lake in the Turcot Yards. But it would involve moving the major east-west rail cargo link in the country.
posted at 02:52

 
Firemen at Station 40 get temporary digs while an infestation of rats is removed from their 93-year-old station. Meanwhile, the station is taking heat for a delay in scrambling to put out a fire that destroyed four duplexes yesterday morning, but the fire service says it was on the scene within three minutes and 50 seconds.
posted at 16:07

 
Patrice Brisebois may be back with the Canadiens next season, although he wasn't exactly a local favourite when he left to play for the Avalanche. Hockey bloggers are grumbling about Bob Gainey's choices. Meantime, negotiations with Michael Ryder go to arbitration.
posted at 16:01

 
The city will be giving a little more money to the boroughs, while expecting them to cut staff by means of attrition.
posted at 15:53

 
Archaeologists have found relics of an older Montreal neighbourhood in the area to be turned into the new CHUM superhospital, bounded by Saint-Denis, Sanguinet, La Gauchetière and Viger, a block devastated by a huge fire in 1852.
posted at 14:37

 
The Gazette, in the person of the blogosphere's own Fagstein, profiles urbanphoto.net.

Fagstein also twits the newsworthiness of this story about a man who found a date on the Internet, no less.
posted at 14:29

 
An expert on local organized crime gives his views on the leadership of the city Mafia: with Vito Rizzuto behind bars in the U.S., it seems no one has been accepted as the new boss.
posted at 14:23

 
The city is keeping a careful eye on an overpass where Henri-Bourassa goes over Pie-IX. There's been a lot of overpass anxiety since the Johnson Commission reported, but much of it's been off-island.

Large trucks have been banned from so many overpasses it's a wonder they can go anywhere now. But I don't see anyone concluding that this demonstrates the superiority of the freight train over the 18-wheeler. Not yet.
posted at 14:17

 
The heat's getting to everybody, but especially the hot guys riding the hook and ladder trucks. Ahem.

Montreal firefighters are posting information sheets on the front of their stations to inform the public of the particular shortages of staff and equipment at each station. They're annoyed about short budgets, but aren't allowed to strike.

A major fire broke out today in eastern Montreal; the closest fire station was closed due to an infestation of rats, so firefighters came in from adjoining areas.

Also, the firefighter arrested recently for arson has been freed on bail while awaiting trial.
posted at 18:37

 
A woman whose bags were depth-searched by a Guzzo cinema worker last month wants to sue them for moral suffering and loss of enjoyment of life.
posted at 18:26

 
It's with a distinct sense of déjà voodoo that one reads that the Montreal Grand Prix is attainted with an asterisk of dubiety in the newly published 2008 calendar for the sport.
posted at 18:21

 
The Gazette positively exults over difficulties that have hit the city just as a major conference is about to open for convention planners, a gathering with the potential to bring more conference business here. Or not.
posted at 10:36

 
A bit more detail on yesterday's downtown blackout, which is under investigation.
posted at 10:31

 
The Route Verte bike path through Montreal will soon be completed: it only lacks a 5-km stretch in Pointe Claire. Also interesting to know that the north-south axis along Berri and Brébeuf is the busiest bike path in North America.
posted at 10:25

 
Tourism figures are holding steady despite the rise of the loonie to near par with the American dollar, although some are characterizing the season as a low-key one.
posted at 00:49

 
The third festival in the summer triple-header has opened as the FrancoFolies fest picks up the reins: various suggestions and picks and selections from the weeklies.
posted at 00:46

 
Electricity is back in the downtown area after a fault at the art deco central on Wellington Street.
posted at 15:00

 
The Gazette polled people on the West Island to find a single icon typical of their area, and none drew an overwhelming response. In fact the second most popular choice, Hudson Village, isn't even in the West Island; the newspaper's response that Hudson is included in their West Island coverage seems a bit lame.

The scattered response suggests that there isn't any one symbol typical of the area, and choices like the 211 bus, while based on an incontrovertible fact of suburban life, don't exactly lend themselves to dynamic logo design or whatever else you do with a collective icon. In fact the result is proof that the area is not, notionally, a single place, except as concerns the Gazette's marketing policies.
posted at 12:40

 
Thoughts on how the damaged buildings in this week's Saint-Denis Street fire will be replaced, the street still stinging a little from the 2003 fire which made room for a Couche-Tard on an otherwise architecturally elegant row.
posted at 11:47

 
Blue-collar workers on the Parc Jean-Drapeau islands have gone on strike: the public beach there is now closed, days after the city's other public beach out at Cap St-Jacques was closed too, for unsafe water conditions. (Although now I see a brief piece saying that other beach, in the far western corner of the island, has since been reopened. )

More here on the strike with a list of what is and isn't being affected, at the moment, over on the islands.
posted at 11:26

 
Roy Street east of Saint-Denis is under close watch as its sidewalk – always a bit uneven – seems to be buckling. The proximity of the site to the metro's orange line adds a certain urgency to the situation. The city hadn't planned to work on it till next year.
posted at 11:23

 
A power outage has hit the downtown core this morning (and some of this blog's usual sources are offline).
posted at 11:02

 
Canon Horace Baugh, the Anglican clergyman best known for the annual blessing of the pets, died on the weekend. He was 91. There's also a photo essay.
posted at 15:00

 
Owners of L'Barouf and Le Continental say they will reopen and a sidebar suggests alternative celebrity faves for the bistro's haute-boho scene; another sidebar describes the fire department's demolition squad.
posted at 14:52

 
Ville-Marie has issued 600 cleanliness fines in the downtown area since its new law came into force June 1.
posted at 11:08

 
Lovely piece by Rima Elkouri about the state of the Main and those who have left it.
posted at 10:48

 
Just when the weather turns nice and hot, the city closes Cap St-Jacques beach because of poor water quality.
posted at 10:29

 
If having four or five kinds of salt in your kitchen is becoming routine, you can now get artisanally made butter at Jean-Talon market; a Pakistani halal resto from Park Ex opens a Toronto branch (and not the other way around as you might expect); where to get trendy cupcakes around town
posted at 10:11

 
Christopher DeWolf does a guest piece on a Toronto blog about how Just for Laughs uses the city space.
posted at 17:08

 
The gay pride parade is taking place this Sunday along René-Lévesque in the Village as part of the Célébrations LGBTA. They're expecting 66 contingents in the parade and 16 floats.
posted at 16:41

 
Background on the new photo exhibit illustrating urban contrasts, along McGill College Avenue till mid-October; it's odd that the writer refers several times to "contemporary" photos – from the 1970s.
posted at 13:22

 
A design blog has a nice piece about Montreal's Olympic logo, with scans of a design magazine of the era and a link to a federal government page on the same topic.
posted at 12:46

 
Review essay on the Bruce Nauman show at the Musée d'art contemporaine.
posted at 11:28

 
More details on the fire on Saint-Denis last night including some video of the fire and the site as it is now with parts of the buildings torn down. Not buildings of tremendous heritage value, but a loss of familiar establishments. Saint-Denis Street may be closed at Rachel most of Tuesday.
posted at 11:19

 
Kent Nagano supports the idea of a new hall for the MSO.
posted at 11:02

 
More and more STM drivers are receiving complaints for chatting on the phone while driving.
posted at 10:21

 
Longtime Plateau establishments L'Barouf and the bistro Continentale were a total write-off in a major fire Monday evening. Fifty people are said to have lost their homes. Flickr photographer wjpbennett has a whole series on the fire), via Fagstein.
posted at 02:57

 

While Notre-Dame-des-Neiges struggles with labour issues, its smaller but prettier neighbour quietly finishes a project to restore its grounds and monuments. No photos in the article so I've added one of mine.
posted at 12:26

 
Ville-Marie is repurposing its old parking meters to collect change for the homeless.

A nice idea, or an outré plan to banish the jab of guilt the well-heeled feel when they make eye contact with the less fortunate? On the one hand I can see the point of collecting money in this way to support an organization that helps the homeless. On the other, there's a certain depersonalization that happens when you drop fifty cents into a parking meter rather than into the hand of someone who has asked you for help.

There's this chronic bureaucratic idea that you can and should force the homeless to queue in an orderly way for your bounty, and not introduce an element of waywardness into your urban scene. I am not convinced.
posted at 11:40

 
The city is resisting the gift of a bust of Charles de Gaulle, which although supported by a group of French expats here, has been regarded as unwelcome by two successive mayors. De Gaulle's only connection with this city is still regarded as something of a political hot potato 40 years later.
posted at 11:19

 
A single mother with a young son had a terrifying awakening one night as two drunken strangers were given entry to her apartment by police who hadn't verified that it actually was their address. City has to pay, but not (by some standards) very much.
posted at 14:37

 
A building made completely of recycled elements, with used socks for insulation and a mission to deliver environmental education, is being built at the Old Port, part of the Sedna project.
posted at 14:10

 
Moving the Planetarium out by the Biodome is something this blog last saw mentioned a few years ago, but now it's being cast in terms of the existing facility being too small, too old and so on, rather than of how badly developers want that land so they can build more sweet, profitable condo buildings.
posted at 14:02

 
The city wants to start archaeological work on sites on the island but outside of Old Montreal, mostly old fort and village sites that existed as separate entities from Montreal back in the day.

Four hundred years always seems to me a very thin premise for archaeology when sites are measured in thousands and tens of thousands of years in places where durable history is longer. But I suppose it's better to study this stuff while we still can.
posted at 13:09

 
A journalist tries to pin down the city's zeitgeist in the last of the Gazette's alphabet series.
posted at 13:03

 
After recent volleys of complaints it isn't surprising the city's putting two additional work gangs onto the job of finishing the renovations of Boulevard Saint-Laurent.
posted at 11:50

 
More giggles about Maxim magazine's choice of Montreal as a bachelor destination – largely based on the NASCAR race taking place here on August 4.
posted at 02:52

 
The venerable Spectrum closes forever on August 5 (or, according to this piece, August 4) after the end of the FrancoFolies. The first show there as the Spectrum was in 1982 and it had originally been the Alouette cinema, but I'm almost certain there was also an intervening period when it was a live venue called the Club Montréal or something equally generic-sounding.
posted at 02:50

 
A journo's strange conversation with homeboy William Shatner before his Just for Laughs gala this weekend.
posted at 02:43

 
A look at one small piece of the major sewer infrastructure job needing to be done in a city where some areas have brick sewers dating back more than a hundred years.
posted at 21:42

 
I'm a little appalled to read that residents within the perimeter of the comedy festival have to identify themselves with special badges so as to be allowed to do normal things like walk on their own street with their groceries, their bicycle or their dog. The rest of us must submit to being searched in order to walk on ordinary city streets. Law professors handwave this, but I'm sure it could be legally challenged if enough people protested. The scary part is that most people don't.
posted at 21:37

 
Fairly gloomy look at the Arcade Fire's summer tour from the Times (UK); Boston profile of local rapper Rugged Intellect; perky west coast glimpse of synth funksters Chromeo.
posted at 17:59

 
The YWCA has closed its gym after more than 100 years, citing dwindling membership and heavy competition from commercial gyms nearby.
posted at 15:57

 
As the city population growth speeds up (is this categorically good news?), crime statistics are at their lowest in 25 years except for a few kinds of violent crime, mostly pinned on gangs.
posted at 14:27

 
Something of a sad paean to Goose Village and its scattered denizens.
posted at 14:18

 
A Concordia student has won a Google prize for creating a detailed three-dimensional model of his school's Loyola campus, for use in Google Earth.
posted at 01:23

 

St. Michael's, the church at the corner of St-Urbain and St-Viateur, is open for visitors 9:30 a.m. till 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, till the end of August. It's pretty nice inside with decorations by Guido Nincheri, possibly more famous for the Mussolini fresco in the Madonna della Difesa in Little Italy.

People often take St. Michael's to be a mosque or a synagogue or something Eastern Orthodox. Actually it's a Roman Catholic church and always has been.
posted at 01:16

 
A conciliator has been named to try to settle the cemetery lockout, but the union still wants Cardinal Turcotte to step in, even though he declined to do so last week.
posted at 16:03

 
Bob Gainey signs another six new players to the Canadiens. The team we see this fall will be a whole new ball game. So to speak.
posted at 16:02

 
A Montreal firefighter has been charged with arson in a major fire that destroyed a Canadian Tire in Pointe-aux-Trembles.
posted at 15:55

 
People 65 years and over make up 13.6 percent of the city population according to numbers from the 2006 census, a small notch up on the 12.9 percent figure from five years earlier. The median age is also edging upwards. I don't know what the optimum distribution of age groups is considered to be.
posted at 15:41

 
Detailed formal obituary of the NHL's John Ferguson, and more memoirs as sportswriters bid a sad farewell to the kind of larger-than-life character hockey's running short of.
posted at 15:32

 
What life is like living in one of those old houses nearly under the Jacques-Cartier bridge.
posted at 15:27

 
Fascinating shots of the old sewers in an unspecified location in town, via Fagstein.
posted at 15:01

 
The CSST has forbidden Montreal firefighters to try to deal with fires in the agglo's tiniest community, Île-Dorval, until something's done about its access and skimpy services. The island has 58 buildings with 171 residents in summer, but only two year-round, and residents are satisfied with the fire arrangements they have now.
posted at 14:58

 
Can you spend $500 on a single drink in Montreal? Yes, and this article tells you where. They promise further extremes in an ongoing series.
posted at 14:34

 
The Church of Scientology is moving from their longtime haunt on Papineau to the La Patrie building on Ste-Catherine between Saint-Laurent and Saint-Denis. It's also getting bigger and better digs in Quebec City.
posted at 13:38

 
The metro system is in an unending and expensive battle against the "scratchiti" that defaces almost every window in the system. And whereas painted graffiti can have artistic merit, I've never yet seen a scratch that was anything but ugly.
posted at 13:42

 
The CIA paid for brainwashing experiments in Montreal during the Cold War – that's not news, but now a McGill researcher is going to trace the whole history of the disgraceful practice. This isn't ancient history either: a Montreal woman finally received a government settlement only a few weeks ago for the torments she underwent at the Allan Memorial during the era.
posted at 13:37

 
Yves Beauchemin has produced a revised and corrected edition of his Montreal classic Le Matou; an Italian architect takes the helm of the CCA and is tactful about Montreal's architectural shortcomings; the Cinémathèque québécoise is doing an exhibit and projecting a series of very short films that were originally made for Expo 67.
posted at 13:32

 
The union of cemetery workers at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges has asked for a conciliator to intervene in the ongoing lockout, while an unknown benefactor tidied up the overgrown gravesite of Maurice Richard over the weekend.
posted at 12:58

 
The part of the FIFA U-20 soccer tournament played here ended yesterday with a defeat of Nigeria by Chile: organizers are pleased with high ticket sales and local enthusiasm.
posted at 12:44

 
City infrastructure czar Sammy Forcillo asks Main shopkeepers to hold their patience with the obstructive and seemingly endless road repairs while encouraging everyone else to patronize the Main's flagging businesses. Meanwhile, the Journal de Montréal enlists some disgruntled tourists in Schwartz's lineup to say negative things about the state of the street, and its shopkeepers talk about a class action suit.
posted at 12:20

 
Chris DeWolf talks about this city's complex about newsstands and other street vendors in an article nicely illustrated with a photo by yours truly.
posted at 12:08

 
More memories and obituaries are piling up for John Ferguson, as well as thoughts from his fellow players of the era.
posted at 12:04

 
The city quite correctly refuses to step in in the matter of the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges lockout; Maurice Richard's son, also quite rightly, says he doesn't see why the locked-out workers should make exceptions for celebrity gravesites.
posted at 11:52

 

Shopkeepers along the part of the Main that's been undergoing deep reconstruction have finally thrown down a gauntlet to the city, after a year of low sales and overall loss of customer goodwill.

Is the city willingly allowing some of the Main's older and more marginal businesses to die off so that the new version of the street will be glitzier and harder-edged (and inevitably studded with more corporate franchises) than it's ever been? It sometimes seems that way.

One local blogger mourns the loss of some of the more basic establishments – Warshaw's, the Boulangerie – in favour of ephemeral trendiness, and Josh Freed pens an even more confused screed than usual involving a mishap on the Main due to skimpy signage, although most of us take the presence of large earth-moving machinery to be a warning in itself.

(Incidentally, is anyone going to tell the Gazette that the term blogroll means a list of links to other sites, other people's blogs that you like, and not a list of pseudo-blogs maintained by your own journos on your own site?)
posted at 11:09

 
Red Fisher does a very personal obituary for Canadiens scrapper John Ferguson, who died today.
posted at 23:42

 
A general Google search for Montreal stories has sifted out this Suburban story about the suburbs forcing Montreal to renege on a ten-year contract it made back in February to bring its recycling business to a firm that employs the intellectually handicapped. A further story from the same paper describes Pointe Claire as ordering Montreal to get on with finding someone else to do the job.
posted at 23:03

 
A piece about the Emile Berliner museum in Saint-Henri is heavy on the family history behind the sound inventor's family business.
posted at 22:44

 
The considerable French expat community are celebrating Bastille Day today at Viger Square. Now if we could only mobilize some of that Bastille-whacking spirit to demolish the square's concrete accretions, it would be magnifique.
posted at 17:36

 

A guaranteed tug at the collective heartstrings: the Rocket's tomb is becoming overgrown as the lockout at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges drags on into its third month. But then so are the tombs of many others (including my own family grave, but I'm not complaining: the workers' demands don't sound unreasonable to me).

This photo of the Maurice Richard tomb was taken last summer, not shown as it is now. The handprint is accompanied by a sentiment that may appeal to the strikers: "never give up."

The big cemetery's deepfreeze now contains 355 coffins out of a possible total of 700.

In a related story, Quebec cemeteries have been being pillaged for a long time. Le Devoir looks at the Écomusée de l'au-delà, which works to preserve at least the graves of prominent citizens and those with markers of artistic merit. There's also a piece on the mausoleum growth industry and a brief history of the development of local burial practices.
posted at 16:42

 
This is the weekend of the Sainte-Catherine street fair from Saint-Marc all the way to Jeanne-Mance, the biggest street fair in Canada. Alas, the weather's looking a little iffy.
posted at 14:52

 
A review of what's still widely considered the city's top restaurant, Toqué! ([sic] on the exclamation mark, although the Gazette's wonky handling of accented characters online results in it rendering even more weirdly as ToquE!)
posted at 13:44

 
It's major business news, but the angle for Montreal is that in the Rio Tinto purchase of Alcan, the company will still keep major Alcan offices in the city.
posted at 15:47

 
The Gazette alphabet series continues with a piece on the questions asked to several information booth workers downtown. I've skipped blogging some of the more urban-generic alphabet entries, but they're all listed here.
posted at 14:42

 
Sherbrooke Street between Saint-Denis and de Lorimier is closed as an emergency excavation repairs an old sewer line that collapsed under the street.
posted at 11:13

 
Another item on the Mile End Cultural Centre (Main Hall/Green Room venue) and its potential closure or at least squelching by the city. Don't Ottawa our Montreal indeed.
posted at 11:11

 
Interesting look at how cities roughly comparable in size to Montreal have similar issues with multiple layers of bureaucracy, regardless of their location in the world.
posted at 11:01

 

Somehow I've missed noticing Images Montreal, a site that amasses architectural photos of the city. But it's curious that they nominate as the city's number one building this post office on Saint-Jacques that was demolished in 1959.

The site has a fascinating list of vanished buildings, although some are listed as demolished when fire was actually the main cause of their loss, as with the Windsor Hotel and the Unitarian church on Sherbrooke, and also the spectacular Villa Maria mother house which only stood for a few years before being destroyed by fire. It would also be nice to have more details: more precise locations, for example, and the dates and reasons for their destruction.

Looking at these images makes me realize how cities remake themselves constantly. So much planning and effort went into all these buildings, people lived or worked, studied or prayed in them, they were familiar landmarks to many more, and now they are gone, replaced with something else that will be replaced in its turn.
posted at 00:08

 
The city has given the nod to the project to enlarge Molson Stadium, and millions of public dollars are being poured into it.

They say games are sold out. Funny how I've never in my life met anyone who follows or cares about the CFL.
posted at 23:50

 
Mayoral sidekick Frank Zampino says the complaints of festival czars against the city are unfair and that it's really the provincial and federal governments that are being stingy. Gilbert Rozon of Juste pour rire appears to agree, now turning his criticism to Quebec after stirring things up with the city earlier this week.

But some think that layers of inefficient bureaucracies and obfuscation plague the management of the city of Montreal, and one expert explicitly blames Quebec and its fear of a too-powerful metropolis.
posted at 11:09

 
The price of gasoline has surged to around $1.15 a litre just as many people start their summer vacations.
posted at 10:59

 
Good story about journalist Claude Poirier, whose intervention helped bring Roger Grenier in to police custody after a violent kidnapping incident last week.
posted at 23:48

 
A ruling by the Régie du logement says the tenant of a Montreal apartment cannot be barred from smoking at home since it wasn't agreed on in the lease.
posted at 23:34

 
Workers at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges held a demo at the Jacques-Cartier bridge this morning, asking for negotiations to be speeded up to settle their standoff with management. Meanwhile, the lockout continues as the grass grows between the graves.
posted at 11:23

 
The partenariat public-privé deals for the new superhospitals have taken a first step, putting out tenders for the private construction and maintenance of what are supposed, in theory, to be publicly accessible hospitals.
posted at 11:19

 
The recently closed Montreal Biennale failed to draw much of a crowd and the next one is intended to be much shorter.
posted at 10:48

 
Boroughs of the city differ on the question of building mini city halls or renting space for their offices. The building pictured, used for the Ahuntsic-Cartierville municipal offices, is rather short on grandeur. On the other hand, this is a city full of disused and under-used church and school buildings, so maybe some repurposing is in order instead of million-dollar budgets for new ones.

In any case, I predict that the borough system, always kind of creaky, may not last, so any new mini city halls would have to be repurposed soon anyway.
posted at 10:42

 
The mayor says he feels disappointed and betrayed by the recent flurry of public complaints against his administration made by top organizers of major festivals.

Thing is, the city does tend to be stingy, and in a short-sighted way. Here's an example: last night I walked up to the lookout to take some fog photos, including the one shown below. It was around 8:30 when I got there. Still light out, at the peak of summer. Lots of people were there, many of them chatting in languages I don't know, so at least some were probably tourists. After all, the lookout view is promoted as a must-see item on even a short list of the city's charms.

And the chalet was locked up tight. No bathrooms, in other words. Oh sure, it would cost something to have a small staff manning the place till later, but if they were thinking creatively they could also keep a snack and souvenirs concession open too, and make back some of the money that way, even without becoming grossly commercialized. And as I walked away around 9, I passed a large tour group of students approaching the lookout. Too bad if any of them needed to pee.
posted at 10:33

 

View from the lookout this evening as fog shrouded the city.
posted at 22:58

 
A new plan for the old Turcot Yards, as hinted recently, would include a new man-made lake, parkland, luxury residences at the western end, and – almost inevitably – a tram line connecting Dorval to downtown.
posted at 11:10