PVM created lasting legacy

Re: “The behaviours that Henry Aubin denounced are still happening” (Montreal Gazette, Feb. 27)

Henry Aubin’s journalistic skills, his vigilant commentary in the face of the disastrous loss of Montreal’s built heritage and his thoughtful perspectives on urban development are worthy of continued praise, most recently in a new documentary film. Balance and proportion between respect for heritage and an acknowledgment that cities change to survive and flourish are hallmarks of his writing.

But the Montreal Gazette story should not have included mention of the 1962 Place Ville Marie project in the context of the remote, unthinking and mysteriously financed office construction that Aubin is criticizing. Place Ville Marie was part of a bold redevelopment of what is now Montreal’s downtown commercial core. It comprised the in-fill of the huge and scarring pit of CN rail yards with an innovative underground city and became the foot of the wide esplanade of McGill College Ave.

PVM is regarded as one of the catalyzing forces for a Montreal renaissance in the early ’60s. It created a lasting legacy of renewal and redevelopment: quite the opposite of the faceless and anonymous capitalism Aubin rightly points out as a source of banal architecture in the following decades.

Bruce McNiven, Montreal