Chamber gets creative to boost appeal of downtown to workers
Some $3.1 million of public money is being invested in a clutch of creative projects designed to brighten downtown Montreal and lure back office workers.
Eight projects will be carried out following a call for submissions that yielded 73 entries, the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal said Friday.
Experts from the arts and tourism fields selected the winning bids as part of the Chamber of Commerce's “J'aime travailler au centre-ville” campaign.
They include a hologram garden, an extended arts festival, a hockey-themed mural on the Bell Centre's facade and a multimedia installation by Montreal's Moment Factory. The first projects will begin to take shape this fall, with most of the setups planned for 2022.
The $3.1-million budget is part of a $23.5-million contribution from Quebec for Montreal's central business district, announced in March.
“We want to breathe new life into downtown,” Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said Friday at a news conference. “The goal is to increase its attractiveness as a place of work and a place for doing business.”
The pandemic has deprived downtown Montreal of much of its office worker population for the past 18 months. Many companies' plans to bring employees back this fall have been put on hold as the fourth wave sweeps across Quebec, and Chamber of Commerce head Michel Leblanc acknowledges the group's campaign can only do so much if infections keep climbing.
With COVID-19 and the multiple lockdowns it provoked, “the heart of Montreal stopped beating,” added Fitzgibbon. “Downtown Montreal is a true economic engine for all of Quebec, and our government recognizes that.”
Downtown office vacancies rose to 13.2 per cent in the third quarter, real estate firm CBRE said Thursday. That's the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2004.
This isn't the first time Montreal has turned to the arts to fight the COVID-19 blues. This summer, 30 vacant retail spaces were made available to visual artists as part of a municipally funded initiative to spur foot traffic.
Some of the winning projects already existed before the pandemic. Art Souterrain, founded in 2009, will use $315,000 in new financing to extend its 2022 edition to five or six months instead of the usual 30 days, said Frédéric Loury, director of the festival, which presents art displays in Montreal's underground city.
Montreal's biggest sports franchise is also doing its part to liven up the area. Together with partners LNDMRK and Lumenpulse, the Canadiens plan to erect a 130-square-metre display of “urban graffiti” on the Bell Centre's eastern facade that will come with a light show. Around $415,000 in Chamber of Commerce money will go toward covering the cost of the mural.
“We're going to be painting all the way to the roof,” Jon Trzcienski, the club's vice-president of marketing, said in an interview. “Weather permitting, we hope to have it ready for opening night, Oct. 16. The lighting all around the building will take a little bit longer to come on line, but the end result should be pretty spectacular. We want to be reflective of our history, but also youthful.”
Perhaps the most ambitious project is a $595,600 installation from Moment Factory that seeks to turn part of the Eaton Centre into an “immersive playground” through a concept called “augmented games” that the company developed.
“What we're hoping to do is to propose a unique, fun experience that's never been done anywhere else,” said Moment Factory partner Eric Fournier. “Augmented games transpose video games into real life. The human body becomes the joystick.”
Such installations are not only fun, insists Fournier, “they favour team-building. If people are going to come back downtown, it has to be about more than just the work.”