Annus horribilis
How does one even come close to recapping such a hellish and unprecedented annus horribilis? 2019 was the year that saw 500,000 Montrealers hit the streets, shoulder to shoulder, to raise awareness about climate change. 2020 would be the year we barely saw each other.
Looking back on how the year started, it’s almost quaint to see how unaware we were of what was to come. I can now officially confirm that I much prefer reading about history than being a part of it.
Early troubles
What dominated international headlines in January of 2020 were the massive Australian wildfires that would kill people and animals, displace thousands and destroy over 15 million acres of land. It was a harbinger of what climate change will do if not taken seriously.
February saw the Wet’suwet’en crisis unfold across Canada. As rail blockades multiplied against the expansion of the Coastal Gas Link pipeline, national columnists and politicians — from François Legault to Andrew Scheer — discussed the “lawlessness” of the civil disobedience and urged police to “lay down the law.” Reconciliation, once again, proved to be nothing more than words.
February was also the month that saw Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein get his comeuppance. More than 100 women had to come forward before justice could finally tip in survivors’ favour. A few months later, the Quebec music industry would be rocked by its own #MeToo allegations, reminding us that privilege has a way of protecting people for a long time, but karma catches up with us all.
Pandemic March
February would be the last “normal” month we would experience. By early March, what started off as distant stories of a virus spreading in Asia would catapult us all into the unknown. Within weeks, COVID-19 would evolve into a full-on global pandemic, the likes of which none of us had seen in our lifetime.
“Social distancing” would become the buzzword for 2020. Zoom calls, proper mask etiquette, CERB and “flattening the curve” became part of our vernacular and our daily lives, as social media replaced our daily commutes and 5à7s, and some of us wouldn’t see our loved ones for months.
Toilet paper wars
Images of people fighting for toilet paper and bottles of hand sanitizer started making the news. Rapidly updated and often-conflicting government information started making the rounds and sharing online space with conspiracy theorists and anti-maskers.
Then, the stories from hospitals and CHSLDs started making headlines. Our sense of security and order crashed like a badly built Jenga tower. One volunteer nurse blew the whistle, journalists started probing, family members started talking and everything came tumbling down.
Our underfunded healthcare system
Years and years of neglect and refusing to prioritize eldercare came back to haunt us. Story after story of seniors dying in eldercare facilities made frontpage headlines. So many stories… Each story representing a life and the family that loved them and lost them. Each story representative of our collective failure as a society and successive governments’ inability to prioritize healthcare.
Thousands of frontline workers exhausted both physically and mentally. While writing this year-end column, Quebec has registered a grim milestone: more than 7,000 COVIDrelated deaths, far more than any other Canadian province. Globally, close to 1.5 million people have died from coronavirus. The world is collectively in mourning, whether we realize it or not. And that number is only expected to go up before mass vaccinations roll out.
Guardian angels and sacrificed frontline workers
By May, the stories making headlines were frontline healthcare workers and “guardian angels” being left to their own devices and sacrificed by chronic underfunding. Many of these orderlies working the frontlines, risking
(and sometimes losing) their lives were asylum seekers. Many Quebecers demanded the government — in a show of solidarity and appreciation — fast-track their applications. The Legault government would initially reject and then reluctantly (and disappointingly) agree on limited fasttracking for healthcare workers only.
BLM and denial of systemic racism
By June, Quebec’s Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum. Spurred on by George Floyd’s death in the U.S., and continued instances of police brutality right here at home, BIPOC communities increased pressure for muchneeded change. Joyce Echaquan’s tragic death in September rocked Quebec and laid bare the systemic discrimination suffered daily by Indigenous communities. Still… Premier Legault (and by extension his government) continued to deny systemic racism exists, making Quebec seemingly the only place in the world untouched by it.
Summer break
The hot summer months gave us all a bit of breathing room. Able to escape our homes and come together in public parks and terrasses, Montreal felt alive and almost “normal” for a minute. Unable to travel abroad, Quebecers flocked to rural towns and national parks, many of them discovering, for the very first time, the beauty in our own backyards. Summer bliss didn’t last long. By the end of August, Sir John A. Macdonald’s head was bouncing off the pavement at Place du Canada and COVID cases started to climb up again. Healthcare workers warned everyone a second wave was coming.
It did.
While writing this, Montreal’s restaurants, theatres, bars, cafés, museums, live-music venues and all the things that make this city what it is are shut down and gasping for air. I worry about whether we have what it takes — financially, emotionally, physically — to get through the next sixmonth hurdle before vaccines offer us some hope for normalcy. I worry about how long it will take for Montreal to bounce back and I worry about our morale and our sense of solidarity.
The final stretch
2020 has been the year where our collective weaknesses and our failings as a society were laid bare for all to see.
But I also saw some of our finest moments. People found incredibly creative and generous ways to support each other and push through. It’s the good I choose to focus on.
The 7,000 Quebecers who responded to the premier’s call for retired healthcare professionals willing to help. The people who reached out to thousands of housebound seniors.
The people who volunteered their time in food banks and shelters. The people on the frontlines: the orderlies, nurses, doctors, teachers, maintenance workers, grocery store cashiers, warehouse and delivery folks, risking their lives daily, who have made it possible for the rest of us to stay home and stay safe.
The people who wore their masks religiously and did everything to keep the numbers low to protect the most vulnerable among us. The people (politicians included) who have been working tirelessly and resiliently around the clock, trying to devise plans and figure out ways to keep us going and keep the city functioning, while dealing with a pandemic they never signed up for.
I see you. And I thank you. You are what makes this city shine. Stay safe. Hang in there. A new year is coming. I hope it’s a supremely boring one. We could use one of those.
It’s one of those vexing, persistent, only-in-Montreal problems — like how to greet American tourists without offending separatists, or how to remove snow without contracting organized crime. We claim we’re historic. We claim we support the arts. We claim to enjoy a night on the town. Yet somehow, for nearly 30 years, a one-of-a-kind theatre has occupied primo real-estate in a pseudo-trendy part of town with inadequate nightlife, and no one has been able to revive the Empress.
A quick search reveals a seemingly endless stream of stories dating back to the late-1990s about how NDG’s Empress Theatre will “finally” find a new vocation. It will be revived, restored, rehabilitated, renovated and/or repurposed, bringing “life back to NDG.” Several articles of the type were written this year alone.
And year after year, nothing happens. Non-profits, charities, cultural organizations, local government — seemingly everyone has taken a turn trying to make something of this building. Sometimes there was more than one group working on a solution, but not working together. Studies were commissioned, architects came up with renderings and illustrations, surveys were completed, the public was consulted.
And zilch. The Empress has stood empty for about a third of its life. The building has been described as derelict and in danger of falling down for over 20 years (spoiler alert: it hasn’t happened yet).
In fact, questions about the structural integrity of the building date back to 1999 when the city first purchased the building with a plan to renovate it. The nature of this concern was based more on politics than engineering, however, with a cabal of West End city councillors (including Michael Applebaum, Jeremy Searle and Marvin Rotrand) leading the laissez-faire charge that the city shouldn’t be involved in the theatre business.
Applebaum, for what it’s worth, had a change of heart about a decade later when he was CDN-NDG’s borough mayor. In 2008, he was pointing to the city’s $1.6-million contribution to a $ 6.5-million project that involved the city, the borough, Black Theatre Workshop, McGill University, the provincial government’s culture ministry and Peter McAuslan, among others. This project — the Empress Cultural Centre — received money to repair the building’s roof, which apparently still leaks. Somehow millions of public dollars have been spent over the years to maintain an abandoned building in a state of disrepair.
When just about the entire planet was glued to their screens waiting for results to come in from this year’s American presidential election, the borough of Côte-des-Neiges / Notre-Dame-de-Grâce held the first in yet another round of public consultations on the future of the old Empress Theatre.
Though participants had plenty of ideas about what could be done on the site of the antique movie palace, what wasn’t clear was whether any effort was being made to preserve the nearly hundred-year-old theatre. Answers to the question ranged from “we’ll see” to “we’re not sure” to “let’s see what people say,” but for the most part elected officials seemed resigned to the idea that the building is a total loss and not worth preserving.
Qualified though these individuals may be in running the borough’s affairs, none are preservationists, historians, architects or engineers.
City councillor Peter McQueen, who was needlessly evasive when questioned about the Empress and its future, indicated that the building had lost whatever was worth preserving when it was converted into the twin-screen Cinema V in the 1970s.
Héritage Montréal, by contrast, indicated that there were not only preservable fragments of the building’s historic interior, but a façade worth preserving as well. Moreover, preservation is not limited to form, but extended to function as well, and in this respect the Empress is still what it’s always been: a neighbourhood theatre. Héritage Montréal’s experts were invited to tour the Empress but
also encouraged to confirm the borough’s position that the building wasn’t salvageable. This they declined, indicating they’d need to conduct a thorough examination before rendering judgment. They weren’t invited back.
City councillor Christian Arseneault said that borough mayor Sue Montgomery “tried to fast-track a demolition in order to show that something (original emphasis) was being done, but was unsuccessful” and that “the inaction of administrations past has effectively ruled out preservation funding.” Arseneault continued stating “…we conducted a structural audit of the building last year and, frankly, it’s a miracle the place hasn’t collapsed yet. It’s not just the façade that is falling apart; the building itself is unsound.”
This assessment wasn’t entirely confirmed by borough planning consultant Nicolas Lavoie, who contradicted Arseneault’s assertion that the borough had sought to demolish the building but agreed that the building was in poor shape. Whatever shape it’s in, the borough gave the SHDM (the city’s public housing authority) a quarter of a million dollars to conduct an engineering and architectural study. This is apparently a different study from the “structural audit” Arseneault referred to, which isn’t a public document. According to Lavoie, the studies aren’t public because it’s a “delicate situation” and the borough wants to avoid any “misinterpretations.”
Indeed, it is peculiar that a building of such evident importance to the people of NDG would be left in such an apparently precarious physical state while the report detailing the precariousness would be withheld from the public eye. Keep in mind, just four years ago the Empress Theatre Foundation was moving ahead on a project to rehabilitate the building as a multi-screen cinema. Did the old girl suddenly decide to fall apart after all these years?
Curiously, in the entire time the city or the borough has owned the building outright, no one has ever applied to either the federal government’s Historic Sites and Monuments Board or the Quebec heritage ministry for an official recognition of the building’s historic status. Nicolas Lavoie reiterated several times that everyone at the borough considers the Empress a heritage site, but admitted no one had ever tried to make it official.
Such a designation would permit the borough to apply for federal and/or provincial government funding to execute necessary repairs, and in some cases even more substantial renovations. It might also limit what could be done with the building — i.e. historic site status would mean it would have to function as a theatre, one the reasons the status likely wasn’t pursued 20 years ago. It wouldn’t be a tough argument to make: the Empress is nearly 100 years old and remains, dilapidated though it may be, the unique extant example of Egyptian Revival theatre architecture in Canada.|
And just for good measure, yes, Oscar Peterson apparently practised on the Empress’s organ during off hours when he was a teenager.
The biggest problem facing the Empress — and the primary reason why the borough seems insistent on wiping the slate clean and starting fresh — is also what hampered restoration and revival efforts of the past.
Everyone wants this building to be something it isn’t, and for it to make up for an ever-increasing deficit of public community space.
So rather than restoring a theatre to function as a theatre, public consultations consistently reveal that the public wants multi-functional rooms, dance studios, performance space, a cabaret, a cafe and a full-service rooftop restaurant. They’d also like the project to be finished yesterday, don’t want to pay higher taxes, need extra parking on weekends and would prefer the whole renovation process be carbon neutral.
It goes without saying, the greenest building is almost always the one that’s already built.
Given the myriad non-theatre related functions the public would like to see at the site, the form of the building is now considered “too constraining”, according to Lavoie, who also reiterated the prominent belief, drawn from public consultations, that streaming services and the internet have made cinemas obsolete.
There’s a great irony here, because people were saying the exact same thing about the VCR in the mid-late 1980s, right around the time Famous Players bought the Empress and converted it from a repertory theatre back into a firstrun cinema.
It’s the difference between drinking at home and drinking at a bar.
Sure, the former is usually cheaper and likely safer, too. It’s also boring. There are plenty of people who have jumped the gun already and pronounced bars, cafés and restaurants ‘obsolete’ because of the pandemic. Trust me when I say once it becomes safe to go out again, Montrealers will be going out with a vengeance. A theatre — be it a space for cinema, comedy, music, slam poetry or amateur beatboxing competitions — will likely attract a crowd, and those people will probably want food and drink both before and after a show.
When people talk of reviving the Empress, it’s not just that they wish to see the lights on in a charming old building, it’s that they want the opportunity to go have a night out on the town in their own backyard.
Perhaps public consultations in NDG reveal a bit too much about the people who live there: the Deeg got old. A lifelong resident who split recently for the greener pastures of the Mile End-adjacent Outremont lamented the loss of his old neighbourhood: “NDG ages you.” It’s not that the Empress is a loss, but maybe that NDG is too old and too stuffy to have a good time. Being “Westmount-adjacent” was bound to bite the borough in the ass eventually, and here it is. If the Empress were anywhere else, it would be a performance venue, and doubtless a successful one as well.
The Montgomery administration’s aim to build social housing on part or all of the site — in addition to community space, commercial space and whatever other proposals come forward in public consultation
— is admirable but not what the borough needs. NDG is almost exclusively residential, and extant housing could be purchased by the city and subsidized for those who need it most, integrating social housing into the urban fabric rather than isolating it on an island in the most prominent location in the whole neighbourhood. As it stands, the mayor is setting the stage for a potentially ugly confrontation between the borough and local Not-InMy-Backyard types. Besides, there are other locations — former churches, empty lots etc — that could just as easily be used for public housing. Political expediency — in this case the fact that Mayor Montgomery is on the outs with the rest of Projet Montréal — seems to be dictating the fate of the Empress. It would seem what local small businesses need may have taken a backseat to showing everyone who’s in charge.
Subsidized housing and ill-defined commitments to ‘community space” isn’t going to get people out onto Sherbrooke Street West, and it’s indirect small-business stimulus that’s going to need to be prioritized in the post-pandemic recovery. Montreal neighbourhoods are distinguished by their cachet, but for NDG like too much of the West End, there’s no “there” there.
It would be a sad fate — though entirely characteristic of Montreal — for the Empress to be razed in the name of political expediency, only to be left an empty lot for several more years before eventually being turned into condos, supported by a new borough mayor hell-bent on “finally” rejuvenating NDG.