This long-abandoned building is the first property in the City of Montreal when you're coming in from Montreal West along St. James street West.It was once an old age home but has been defunct for about 15 years.
An application to demolish the building was shot down not long ago but I'll propose something a little further down that might get that decision reconsidered.
The owner of the property is Parmalat, the adjacent dairy company which isn't doing much with the property, which is used as a parking lot and gets very messy.
Parmalat runs the operations formerly known as Sealtest, which was a pleasant place in the west end, as people would line up to buy milkshakes and ice cream from the counter near the famous laughing cows sign. I called about a decade ago to ask if Parlmalat still has the much-loved laughing cow-head sign but the official told me that they were going to be put back up any time now. They never were.
So as you can see in the second image, the property extends all the way downhill to the old equally-abandoned Motel Raphael.
Whatever project was promised to be built there is simply not happening. The City of Montreal should buy up these properties - expropriate if necessary - to build a new road through the property.
Montreal could subsidize this new street by allowing houses, apartments or condo buildings to be put up along the street, bringing in much-needed tax dollars.
The genius of the new road (an extension of Connaught ultimately) is that it would create a new access to between NDG and LaSalle.
Cars could come up and down via Pullman, or highway 20.
The Elmhurst route would alleviate traffic on overcrowded Cavendish, which is always jammed with cars trying to get up towards Sherbrooke.
Montreal West might not like this, but they would have no say in any of it, as they are a separate municipality, by their own choice.
In fact, Montreal could rezone the new street to allow for 40 storey towers.
When Montreal West objects, Montreal could lower that maximum height on condition that Montreal West reverse their wrongheaded decision to cut off access to Devils Hill, which leads to the Ville St. Pierre section of the borough of Lachine.
12 comments:
What you're proposing is straight out of the rose-colored 1960's.
"Whatever project was promised to be built there is simply not happening."
A condo project has been planned and approved, and the demolishion permit will be issued this spring.
"The City of Montreal should buy up these properties - expropriate if necessary - to build a new road through the property."
Expropriate = 1960's mentality. A new road is totally unjustified. A new green space would be much better.
"That would alleviate traffic on overcrowded Cavendish, which is always jammed with cars trying to get up towards Sherbrooke."
No it won't. Unless you're planning to turn the Elmhust and Westminster level crossings into under or overpasses. That would necessitate lots of mess.
"In fact, Montreal could rezone the new street to allow for 40 storey towers."
The tallest reach of a fire engine ladder is 11 storeys. Why anoyone would want to live higher than that is beyond me.
There was a story in The Westend Times or something within the past six months about Parmalat opening a distribution centre there. And yes,the cows were supposed to reappear.
Michael
those are actually good ideas....that whole area is a no man's land that could be put to good use...
lookie luke
why was Montreal West wrongheaded? I bought a lovely house in MTL West and don't want my property value to go down by traffic and what not riff raff circulating up from Ville St. Down and Out. Like TMR which limits access from the Acadie etc. side for a reason. ...
@ Anonymous:
"Like TMR which limits access from the Acadie etc. side for a reason"
What reason is that? So that the poor immigrant Park Ex kids don't cross in on Halloween to TMR where the "good cany" is? If there was ever a case for one island, one city, it's TMR's Berlin Wall along l'Acadie.
Who remembers that for a brief time there used to be direct access from westbound highway 20 onto Brock Avenue and Ronald Drive? Not sure how quickly the local Montreal West chapter of the "NIMBY Club" put an end to that.
See Google Satellite view map here:
http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ll=45.45052,-73.63566&spn=0.002085,0.004823&t=h&z=18
As mentioned in an earlier part of this blog (type Elmhurst in its search bar) the abandoned and shuttered building in question on St. Jacques was originally the location of the Thomas. A. Trenholme home (at that time listed as 7044 Western Avenue), the owner of the Elmhurst Dairy--today Beatrice/Parlamat.
After Trenholme's surviving widow passed away, the house was demolished and the property eventually turned over to the Salvation Army which opened its Eventide Home there around 1948-49. This closed around 1964-65 after which the structure was abandoned and has since remained empty and decaying as the political/zoning squabbling continues.
The two Sealtest cow heads are in fact stored inside.
See them at this site:
http://neath.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/elmhurst-dairy-cow-heads/
Sorry, they aren't smiling, though (can you blame them?), and are therefore not to be confused with the Fromageries Bel brand cheese smiling cow trademark.
Cow pies, anyone?
Ah, yes, those lovely douchy high-density-near-the-city-limits that burbs only want when the inconveniences only affect the other municipality...
Like the high rises on Macdonald north of Isabella, on that strange Côte-Saint-Luc exclaves, or the blocks along the côte St-Luc from about Cavendish, all the way to Westminster...
Naaah, zone it for 30 stories; never mind the pricky Broughton street closure, the inconvenience the 30 stories tower will cause are be greater than those of the street closure.
Anyways, all the PQ needs to to with that is a law that prohibits a municipality from closing a road.
For the record, the boundaries of the so-called Cote St. Luc "enclave" are between the avenues of Aumont-Langhorne-Dufferin-MacDonald.
This section of land was for some reason left intact to remain part of CSL following the incorporation of the Town of Hampstead back in 1914, whose territory now completely surrounds it. It wouldn't surprise me if residents across the street aren't even aware of this fact.
The aforementioned high rise buildings within this sector are, needless to say, a profitable source of tax revenue for CSL.
And let us not forget the other oddball CSL property which exists north of Hampstead between Decarie-Vezina, the CPR railway tracks to roughly just east of CSL's Aldred Crescent.
This area incorporates the Decarie Square shopping centre as well as the streets David-Lewis, Tommy Douglas, and Abraham de Sola, within which are many town-houses and some high rises adjacent to the shopping centre itself--the latter seemingly doomed never to rise above its rather dismal, low-consumer-traffic status despite its convenient location (are the rents too high or what?).
During the merger fiasco, this "Decarie Square enclave" briefly came under the jurisdiction of Montreal, but was later transferred back again to CSL following the de-mergers.
Notice that "annexation" has become a dirty word rarely used anymore by politicians or the media who prefer "merger" instead since it sounds more "benign and voluntary", perhaps even remembering how Germany "annexed" Austria back in 1938.
Let me guess: the next term to be abolished will surely be "expropriation".
Maybe the politicians should promote a contest to dream up a softer, less "violent-sounding" word. ;-)
Regarding the fence along that section of l'Acadie Blvd. and the Town of Mount Royal...
It is all too easy to initiate controversy with regards to fences and boundaries no matter where they are placed--a point of contention going back thousands of years.
According to TMR officials at the time, the fence along their l'Acadie Blvd border was installed in the fall of 1960 to prevent children from running into where heavy and often high-speed traffic existed--and still exists today, but even more so.
I haven't checked, but it is even quite possible that a child was indeed injured or even killed on that very wide and busy road before the fence was erected. If so, you can rest assured that a public outcry would have resulted, including a demand to...you guessed it...put up a fence!
Standing anywhere along the east side of l'Acadie today, it is easy to imagine someone--before any fence yet existed--taking a chance to dash between traffic across to the TMR side. Logically then, a fence, would more than likely make them think twice--the centrally-located concrete median notwithstanding. (Note that there is a safety fence on a section of the median along Cote Vertu near where students used to risk their lives dashing across to catch their bus--and may still do even today).
I very much doubt that TMR--in 1960--had any sinister, ulterior motives regarding the fence's installation, especially considering the relatively benign political climate of the day, before all of the confrontational nonsense developed later on.
Indeed, TMR may very well have been legally within its rights to OMIT gateways entirely in the fence, but chose instead to place them there--albeit only at strategic intervals--and human nature being what it is, the very existence of the fence itself would logically have increased the temptation for some to enter TMR from adjacent Park Extension just for the sake of doing so. Had the fence NOT been there, the opposite would have been true.
At noon on February 9, 1961, around 300 students from the U of M demonstrated with placards at the fence, it being what they perceived "as a tangible sign against [Canadian!] national unity" and managing to bend over a 40-foot section of it before police arrived.
This incident, however, was only part of a larger demonstration--really more of a prank than anything else--whereby students stole a cannon from Outremont as well as pulling down a Union Jack flag from TMR's City Hall. (See Gazette, Feb. 10, 1961, page 17).
Later, in the February 23 edition of the Town of Mount Royal Weekly Post (page 3), a letter of apology from the U of M's Student's Association president Jean Rochon was published, not only recognizing the town's stated purpose of the fence, but even going out of his way to regret any perceived insult to the Union Jack--and by implication the Queen--and that the misbehaviour was the result of only a few overzealous individuals.
How times have changed!!!
TMR public security often cruises along Selwood ave. along the Berlin Wall to patrol it. Anyone spotted by the public security entering the town via one of the portals along the Berlin Wall will be questioned.
And yes, each Halloween, they close and lock the gates.
I'm sure they meant well 50+ years ago, but now they're just being wannabe gated community, class-A douchebags violating the Quebec Citites & Towns Act.
RE the waving-cat toy you show here: I have one, but I'm cheap, so I couldn't stand the idea of it running on a battery all day. I put the cat away, because if it doesn't wave, it's just a piece of tacky plastic. See how being cheap is a vicious cycle?
Not to belabour the point, nor to defend TMR (since I don't live there myself, anyway), but I suspect that some TMR residents close to the fence may have complained about vandalism or graffiti around Halloween when such incidents tend to increase citywide.
I suspect that if TMR removed the fence and left only the hedges to "protect" the neighbourhood, there would STILL be complaints about it being a "Berlin Hedge"!
Remember, too, that many TMR residents surely cross over to shop in Park Ex.
Personally, I enjoy cycling through Park Ex and usually end up taking my chances to cross l'Acadie from Ogilvy Avenue (where, by the way, there is amazingly no traffic light(!) and then through the gate and onto Brookfield where I can then cruise along the quiet streets feeling more safe and relaxed after having moved extra-cautiously through the heavy Park Ex traffic.
See Ogilvy and l'Acadie:
https://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ll=45.524901,-73.62771&spn=0.000015,0.009645&t=m&z=17&layer=c&cbll=45.525011,-73.627648&panoid=oEtYZZCd4mH8lgCTFcPJgQ&cbp=12,227.27,,0,14.22
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