SAVIOURS OF OUR CITY
WHAT IF THERE WERE NO OLD MONTREAL? No Old Port, no Place Jacques Cartier, no “place by the river” where Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne takes you down?
Just a crumbling elevated expressway and the constant whine of traffic.
That’s what Montreal would be like today if not for Blanche Lemco van Ginkel and her late husband, Daniel van Ginkel.
During the late 1950s and early ’60s, the pioneering architects saved the historic district from destruction. Daniel died in 2009 at age 89.
Old Montreal is just one of the things for which Montrealers can thank the van Ginkels. In fact, many of our best-loved landmarks bear their imprint.
Because of them, the southern part of Mount Royal Park is not littered by highrise apartment towers.
The métro illustrates the planning genius of Daniel van Ginkel.
And it is largely because of the designing couple that Expo 67 showcased cutting-edge architecture and embodied Canada’s cultural effervescence in its centennial year.
So how come few Montrealers have ever heard of them?
The answer lies in the city’s habit of forgetting its past, and in the modest personalities of the couple who did so much to preserve it. A half-century later, the story of how Montreal almost lost its historic core seems incredible.
“Without their intervention in Le Vieux Port, I don’t know what Montreal would be today,” says Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Heritage Montreal, and a longtime friend.
“It is such a significant, fantastic place,” Lambert says. “The quality of a place like this goes from the 17th century to the 19th century. It embodies the whole history of the development of Montreal and really Quebec in many ways.”
Lambert is among those calling for greater recognition for the van Ginkels’ unsung achievements in Montreal.
“It’s so big a contribution, people can’t imagine it,” says Dinu Bumbaru, policy director of Heritage Montreal.
It is hard for present-day Montrealers to conceive of a city where “the relationship with the river and the founding neighbourhood would be lost,” says Bumbaru, who described what Old Montreal would look like today if not for the van Ginkels’ intervention as “the Metropolitain on de la Commune.”
But awareness of the van Ginkels’ legacy is growing. The current issue of ARQ/ Architecture Québec magazine is entirely devoted to their visionary work.
In New York, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art is displaying one of Blanche’s early commissions, a rooftop kindergarten in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseille, France.
And as a provincial commission probes corruption in the construction industry, the story of two planners guided by vision, not vested interests, offers inspiration for those who care about the Montreal of tomorrow.
When the van Ginkels arrived in Montreal in 1957, the historic district did not even have a name.
“When we stopped the expressway and talked about saving Old Montreal, first of all, nobody called it Old Montreal. It was just the shabby older section of the city,” recalls Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, in an interview in the sun-filled house in central Toronto, converted into three flats, she shares with her adult children.
“We called it le Vieux Montréal. We identified it that way and I think we were the first people to identify it that way,” she says.
Petite and still lovely at 88, van Ginkel has bright blue eyes that frequently crinkle with mirth as she looks back on a career where convictions were more important than contracts and principles infused urban planning – a profession the van Ginkels founded in Quebec.
“I consider myself Montréalaise,” says van Ginkel, who still misses her hometown after 35 years in Toronto, where she was dean of architecture and a professor at the University of Toronto from 1977-92.
Born in London, England, Blanche Lemco moved to Montreal at age 14. In 1940, she won a scholarship to McGill’s architecture school, a male preserve that had admitted its first woman only the year before.
Breaking down gender barriers was just the start for the brilliant, young architect. In 1948, she landed a dreamcome-true summer job in the Paris atelier of Modernist icon Le Corbusier. There, Lemco designed what probably remains her most famous commission, the rooftop kindergarten and gymnasium for his Unité d’habitation in Marseille, a postwar housing project also known as the Cité radieuse, or radiant city.
Armed with a master’s degree from Harvard, where she studied under Modernist giant Walter Gropius, Lemco became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 1951-57, where many of her students were Korean War veterans her age or older. “They’d never had a woman teaching before or somebody with a funny accent. And when I wrote on the blackboard, I spelled wrong,” reminisces van Ginkel, whose accent still bears traces of her English upbringing.
The anti-Communist McCarthy era prompted her to leave the United States. “I could have stayed forever if I wanted to, but I just couldn’t stand it. I was afraid of the atmosphere,” she says.
In 1953, Lemco had met Dutch architect and planner Daniel (Sandy) van Ginkel at the International Congress of Modern Architecture in Aix-en-Provence, France. Three years later, they wed and headed to Montreal.
Arriving via the Victoria Bridge and turning east, the van Ginkels discovered the historic district near the harbour, still a working port at the time. “Sandy was shocked because he happened to have been, a few years before that, the architect in the planning department of Amsterdam who was responsible for the old city,” van Ginkel says.
The couple, who set up a private architectural practice in Westmount, soon learned a threat loomed over the old district.
“There was a little diagram in one of the newspapers which indicated that there was a proposal to construct an elevated expressway along the river,” van Ginkel says.
What the diagram did not show was the need for access ramps, which the van Ginkels knew would wipe out much of Old Montreal, just as the expressway itself would destroy the historic waterfront, including priceless treasures like Bonsecours Market and NotreDame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel.
“Both of us felt we had to do something,” she says. “And having seen this thing in the newspaper, you knew you had to do something damn fast!” But fighting highway development was no easy task during the late 1950s. Concern for heritage buildings was “nonexistent. Absolutely nonexistent,” van Ginkel says.
“Everybody was saying: ‘ You can’t do anything about it, you have to have an East-West Expressway.’ Because at that time, there was absolutely no historic anything going on. Everything was, ‘You have to improve the highway system,’ and ‘Everything new is the best thing,’ ” she says.
It might seem surprising that the saviours of Old Montreal were modern architects, usually associated with soaring skyscrapers, windswept plazas and slum-clearance programs.
“We were modern architects, so we thought everything new was the best thing, too,” van Ginkel says. “But everything old was worth looking at.”
Familiar with the historic centres of European cities, the van Ginkels were sensitive to the value of a district that Montreal’s civic leaders cheerfully proposed to sacrifice in the name of progress.
“They came with fresh eyes to Montreal,” Lambert says of the van Ginkels.
“It’s like, people in their homes might not notice the walls might be a bit dirty, or they don’t notice the paintings on the wall anymore. There was no recognition (in Montreal) of the quality of this (district), nor of its history,” she adds.
The solution came from an unexpected quarter: the Port of Montreal, which at that time was still locatedinwhatwenowcalltheOldPort.
The van Ginkels secured a commission from the Port Council, an association of maritime businesses, to evaluate the impact of the projected expressway.
In a 1960 report, the van Ginkels warned the expressway would sever the port from the city, hindering its efficiency. The relationship between the port and the historic neighbourhood is an “intangible” that produces mutual benefits, the report argued. “The ‘old city’ (bounded by McGill, Craig, Berri and the harbour front) can be an asset to the harbour, to the downtown area, and to the Montreal metropolis as a whole,” it urged.
“We therefore recommend that the area be rehabilitated according to a comprehensive and detailed plan administered by a competent and powerful authority, set up expressly and solely for this purpose,” it concluded.
The van Ginkels’ report might have been quietly shelved had a copy not been leaked to the press. “We arrived at the meeting and there was a big hoo-haw. In those days, we had three editions of the newspaper, and the mid-day edition already reported on our report on the front page,” van Ginkel recalls.
“Everybody accused us of leaking it, but it wasn’t true at all. I really think (otherwise) it would have been squashed by some of the members of the committee.”
The van Ginkels followed up with further studies for city planning director Claude Robillard, who hired them in 1960 to help him overhaul the planning department. Delving into dusty archives, they charted the evolution of Old Montreal from the 1600s and created large display panels to raise public consciousness.
In a 1963 report, the van Ginkels argued that Old Montreal’s streetscapes were even more precious than its historic monuments. The “preservation of the aesthetic of the old streets is even more important than the retention of individual buildings,” they wrote.
The old city should include a mix of housing and businesses, they recommended. “In many of the old European cities, it is this mingling of work and living places which imparts their interesting character,” they noted.
“The street is an essential part of the total fabric of the city,” Blanche wrote later. “When changes are made, they should be made with due respect for the totality so that the end product is whole cloth, not a patchwork.”
Successful cities are scaled for pedestrians, she maintained. “The current tendency to design for technology instead of with it – for instance, to design roads for cars instead of for people using cars – is to create built-in obsolescence, build- ing only for today. Urban design based on the sense of community and on its functions is essential to city building for tomorrow,” she wrote in 1961.
Thanks to the van Ginkels’ pioneering efforts, saving Old Montreal became a cause célèbre. In 1964, Quebec declared it a historic district.
The van Ginkels also fended off a proposed “apartment city” on Cedar Ave. In 1960, the city expropriated the site for the proposed Cedar Towers development and incorporated it into Mount Royal Park.
But a new problem reared its head when the engineering firm that designed the East-West Expressway, Lalonde & Valois (the forerunner of SNC-Lavalin) threatened to sue, claiming that as architects, the van Ginkels had no right to meddle with road planning. They struck back by founding Quebec’s professional corporation of urban planners with colleagues in 1963.
Today, the Ville Marie Expressway mainly follows a route the van Ginkels proposed as an alternative to the East-West Expressway. In 1962, the Soviet Union backed out of the 1967 World Exhibition, leaving the field open to Canada, which two years earlier had lost its bid to hold the ’67 event in Montreal. In November, Mayor Jean Drapeau flew to Paris with a proposal by Blanche and Daniel van Ginkel in his pocket – and Expo 67 was on.
“When the matter of an exhibition was broached, everybody assumed that it was going to be somewhere on the outskirts of the city, because the nearest international show of that kind (the 1964 World Exhibition) in New York, was on Flushing Meadows,” van Ginkel remembers.
“We weren’t going to have any of that.”
For the van Ginkels, the fair was a golden opportunity to create an urban showcase. They proposed a waterfront site stretching from Point St. Charles to the future site of Radio Canada, adjoining a restored Old Montreal. They presented a scale model of their proposal, “Man in the City,” to Drapeau shortly before his departure and he successfully pitched the concept to the Bureau International des Expositions.
Drapeau had initially resisted the van Ginkels’ suggestion of an urban site, arguing that visitors’ first view of the city would be of the industrial area near the Old Port.
“I said: ‘ Oh, but Monsieur le maire, you know Le Corbusier says that the grain elevators are so beautiful!’ And that was the end of that! It was sort of a magic word!” van Ginkel recalls.
The exhibition was later shifted to île-Notre-Dame.
For Daniel van Ginkel, who was named chief planner for Expo 67, the fair was a lesson in city planning.
“Expo was in miniature an example of the city,” Blanche says.
“There were different modes of transportation, which connected in a way that you wanted the city to work.”
Daniel van Ginkel recruited Canada’s best young architects, including his former student Moshe Safdie, whose Habitat 67 development is a lasting legacy of van Ginkel’s desire to spotlight new housing forms.
In December 1963, Daniel van Ginkel resigned after Expo commissioners rejected his budget. Suddenly, the van Ginkels were persona non grata in Montreal. “From being the pet planners, we were now the maudit planners,” Blanche says.
During the 1970s, the van Ginkels went on to design a traffic plan for midtown Manhattan, including a shuttle bus called the Ginkelvan. They did studies for the Toronto and Montreal airports, and mapped the First Nations communities of the Mackenzie River Valley, slated for a pipeline.
But their greatest achievement lives on in the city Blanche Lemco van Ginkel still thinks of as home.
Asked about the couple’s lasting imprint on Montreal, her response is characteristically humble.
“I never thought of it that way,” she says.
“It’s true, Montreal wouldn’t be what it is today without us. It’s absolutely true,” she says. “But I never thought of it that way. Really! Maybe I should.”
But while van Ginkel is proud of having saved the old quarter, she regrets that it has lost the authenticity it had when sailors and stevedores, printers and furriers strolled its 300-year-old streets.
“Because it just became a tourist trap,” she says. “And we envisaged it as just a good, working part of the city. You know, charming and nice, but sort of more normal.”