REQUIEM FOR A HOSPITAL
When the wrecking ball destroys a part of the city’s history, a mourning of sorts takes hold. What have we lost? What will we gain in its place? It took more than a year to knock down the site of the former Montreal Children’s Hospital. All that time, photographer Dave Sidaway kept watch over the destruction. A photo essay in
A neighbourhood doesn’t recover quickly when a beloved landmark disappears. These days, it’s disorienting to walk past the corner of Atwater Ave. and René Lévesque Blvd. That red-brick institution Montrealers fondly remember as their Montreal Children’s Hospital, the place that cured and tended to so many children, is gone.
I don’t have words — I have pictures to tell the story.
As if erased from the view, a gaping hole now looms in the landscape where lower Westmount meets Montreal’s western downtown city limits. All that remains of the hospital’s former site is the columned three-storey nurse’s centre, a building constructed in 1919 that was deemed of heritage value. The rest? Over a period of 16 months, pieces of the site were demolished to make way for a multi-tower condominium development. For photographer Dave Sidaway, a 30-year veteran of the Montreal Gazette who lives a block away from the site, “it was a bit of an obsession” to capture the “progression” of that destruction image by image. “How can you record the history that’s going to be relegated to the Wikipedias of the world?” he says. “I don’t have words — I have pictures to tell the story.” It was a “self-assignment” of sorts, driven by curiosity and a sense of purpose. “Isn’t this our job? To show the history of the city in one way or another?” He often left behind his heavy professional camera gear, choosing instead to snap images with a lightweight, inconspicuous camera — the Fuji X-Pro2 — so passersby wouldn’t take note of him standing there. It also helped him squeeze into tiny spots and reach through fencing for a view the developers had cordoned off from sight. “That’s the reason why you photograph this stuff. Because if not, you forget what was there,” he says. “It’s a chunk of history that’s gone. It’s over.” Thankfully, the hospital continues its important work at the MUHC’s Glen site, where it was relocated in 2015. And there’s another consolation. When it comes to a place that once housed and tended to sick children, well, the memories run deep. And those are indestructible.