What will city name after Leonard Cohen?
City Hall is dragging its feet in honouring Montreal’s most world-famous figure — and “everybody knows” who I mean.
What can we name after our master of song, our poet of the Plateau, our bard on a wire — Leonard Cohen?
Ex-mayor Denis Coderre pledged to name “a park, a street, a place” or something “creative” after Cohen, as soon as the oneyear delay required after his death was up.
But Cohen died in November 2016, so what’s our new City Hall waiting for, The End of Time?
The just-ended Leonard Cohen show at our Musée d’art contemporain was the latest in a massive outpouring for Cohen that started in Montreal, and then took Manhattan and the world.
Lately, you hear Cohen’s music everywhere — on major U.S. network TV shows like Billions and The Americans, in famous video games like Assassin’s Creed, while Hallelujah is becoming a global anthem.
This Leonard-mania moment is the perfect time to name something after the man who left his gravel-voiced mark on the Main and Montreal. But what should it be?
If we name a street there are many possibilities: his home was on tiny Vallières St. in the Plateau, but do we want a pint-sized block for a musical giant?
Others suggest Parc du Portugal just across the street, where the week-long Cohen vigil took place. But why cause problems for the Portuguese community? We’ve lived through our fill of divisive street fights, from Dorchester-vs.-René-Lévesque Blvd. to Parc Ave., to University St, er … Robert-Bourassa Blvd. But Cohen was a man of peace. We could look at his songs for inspiration. Marianne is an obvious choice, as we already have a street named Marie-Anne in Cohen’s hood. We’d just have to change the spelling and then say “Hello, Marianne” and “So Long, Marie-Anne.”
Then again, we could follow Suzanne “down to a place by the river.” But which one? Most major streets and squares there have historic names, so which could we possibly change: Place d’Armes, Notre Dame or Hôtel de Ville?
Hmmm. Maybe we could rename the river itself and change the St. Lawrence to the St. Leonard River? It has a nice ring.
On second thought, the name St. Lawrence goes right back to Cartier’s second voyage to Montreal in 1535, and is the continent’s sixth-oldest surviving European place name.
So sorry Leonard, it’s even more sacred to us than “Suzanne.”
Perhaps Cohen’s Jewish heritage could entice Côte-St-Luc to step up, as they have with streets named for Einstein, Freud, Chagall and Irving Layton. But Leonard would require a bigger boulevard.
How about changing Côte- StLuc Blvd. to Côte- St-Cohen? That street is ostensibly named after St. Luke, the evangelist. But how many Catholic street saints does our supposedly secular city need? Maybe it’s time for a Jewish saint?
If this idea disturbs Luclovers we could always name it Cohen- St-Luc Blvd., which has a nice ecumenical and bicultural flavour.
In truth, Cohen has always been a unifying cultural force between Montreal anglos and francos — our city’s East End and West End both see him as a native son.
The elegant way to express that would have been naming the road over Mount Royal after him, and changing Remembrance Rd. to Remember Leonard Way. But nowadays the mountain road is dividing Montrealers more than uniting them, so let’s leave Leonard out of the fight.
Others say let’s forget street battles altogether and honour him with something else: a building, or statue, or bike path, or bench — anything but a Richlerstyle gazebo.
How about the Royal Victoria Cohen Wing of the new MUHC superhospital? Few anglos remember what all those bureaucratic initials stand for anyway — and can barely pronounce them.
So maybe we should rename the whole Glen site The Leonard Cohen Superhospital.
The most talked-about idea is renaming the Quartier des Spectacles, our Jazzfest Ground Zero, whose name has no emotional meaning to anyone. There’s talk of changing it to Place Leonard Cohen, or Le Quartier des Spectacles Cohen.
I prefer the simpler Quartier de Cohen — though Hallelujah Place might draw pilgrims of wildly different kinds from around the world.
Ultimately, Cohen’s reputation towers over Montreal like a Tower of Song. So maybe we should just rename the Olympic Stadium — and change the Big O to the Big L.
Too grandiose? OK, I vote for something much smaller. Cohen’s signature line is “There’s a crack in everything,” from a song he obviously meant as an “Anthem” to Montreal’s crumbling pavement.
If we really want to remember the poet-laureate of Montreal, and keep his name in our hearts daily, let’s change the spelling of our omnipresent orange cones — to Cohens.
That way his name will be on the tip of our tongues till, well … the end of time.