City must do more to create green spaces
The bulldozers have finally sunk their metal claws into the dreary pavement of Rue Tara Hall.
While technically a street, the ugly, inhospitable dead-end strip of asphalt in the lower part of the Plateau-Mont-Royal served no real purpose.
Soon, however, it will be Montreal’s newest green space, an oasis with two dozen trees and a handful of benches, once the borough transforms it at a cost of about $273,000.
Rue Tara Hall isn’t going to be a major park or a tourist draw, but it is going to make life more livable for residents of the apartment complexes in the MiltonPark area, a stone’s throw from downtown.
“To me, every shrub, every tree we manage to plant in space that used to be asphalt represents a little victory,” said Alex Norris, the city councillor for the district, who spearheaded the project.
It’s also an example of how beautifying even the tiniest scraps of land in this city is a worthwhile endeavour that doesn’t have to be a complicated undertaking or an expensive exercise.
As big parcels of land for new parks become more scarce or more expensive in Montreal and the city comes under pressure from developers to allow new construction, officials must move to protect the vacant lots that remain or use the disused tracts right under their noses in innovative ways. This applies to the core as well as the suburbs. And it should apply to public space as well as private.
Residents of western downtown were annoyed when the site of an old Franciscan monastery on René-Lévesque Blvd. that burned down was green-lighted for condos rather than the park residents had long been demanding. The only significant green space in the area known as le Quartier de Grands Jardins is Parc Baile, the front lawns of the Canadian Centre for Architecture — which many locals treat as a public space — and the Grey Nuns garden, a lush gem that is part of Concordia University’s downtown campus. Both are privately owned.
The proposed redevelopment of the Montreal Children’s Hospital site near Atwater Ave. will include a breezeway between the towers and some postage stampsize additions to Cabot Square. Leveraging new common space from developers in exchange for building permits is one way for the city to ensure the beautification of the cityscape, but it needs to happen more often.
Parks and public squares are what define neighbourhoods and give them their value. They also help combat the heat island effect of the city and provide outdoor places to congregate for residents who don’t have backyards or balconies.
But all too often it’s an afterthought. This was the case with The Triangle, a new development in northern Côte-des-Neiges where a central park was supposed to be the focal point of the new neighbourhood. However, the park is only a fraction of its intended size because the city never put a reserve on the land and car dealerships moved in. It was only able to encourage one to decamp.
In the central part of Montreal, especially, green space is at premium that often leads to conflicts between the public and private spheres.
The city has had its share of guerrilla parks, where the local residents essentially occupy derelict private lands in hopes of getting someone to act on making it public.
Residents who took over a tiny alley between Parc Ave. and Hutchison St. spruced it up with shrubbery and coined it Parc Oxygène. The setup was tolerated for years. But they lost their battle to have their rights over it recognized a few years back when the owner finally decided to build a new triplex.
The Champ des Possibles on overgrown CP Rail lines in Mile End has fared somewhat better. Its importance as a natural milieu was recognized by the borough in 2013.
Even when the public is invited into the private realm, though, the rug can eventually be pulled away without warning, as we’ve recently seen with the Jardin Domtar. The fate of the awardwinning garden behind the Place des Arts métro is up in the air.
It is owned by Domtar, which is headquartered next door. But it was inaugurated as a site open to the general public in 2002. However, La Presse recently reported that the site may soon be sold to a developer.
A spokesperson for Domtar recently told me the company is “currently in discussions about the future” of the garden, but that the land has not been sold. Yet. The city of Montreal said it is following the file closely, but has not received any applications for a construction permit.
Domtar may certainly have every right to take back the leafy square it has generously allowed citizens to enjoy for 15 years, but selling the site off would feel like a slap in the face. Buying the square at market rates would undoubtedly be costly for the city, but allowing the verdant corner of downtown and its leafy canopy to be swallowed up by another tower just seems wrong.
Montreal certainly has many beautiful public squares, both new and historic, worth boasting about — from the refreshing fountains of Place des festivals to the blue Adirondack chairs on the decks lining McGill College St. that are part of the pleasant if controversial $50-million FleuveMontagne walkway project.
But as more people crowd into an ever-denser Montreal, every patch of green counts.