Residents made a heartfelt plea Tuesday to save the last vacant green space in western downtown as a park at public hearings on two proposed condo towers on René-Lévesque Blvd. W.
“We create dog runs so dogs can run free. Bravo! But why do we lack compassion for ordinary citizens who don’t have a chance to get out of the city?” asked Marielle Ouellette, a retired language teacher of French as a second language who moved into the Shaughnessy Village neighbourhood last September.
Ouellette was among about two dozen local residents who packed a hearing by Montreal’s consultation bureau on developer Prével’s project for two 60-metre condo towers on the south side of René-Lévesque Blvd., just west of Fort St.
The 20-storey condo project, next to the access road to the westbound Ville-Marie Expressway, would replace a former Franciscan monastery that burned down in 2010. The two towers, to be connected by a one-storey base at the ground level, would rise between two historic houses dating from 1850 and 1874.
“You don’t have to be an urban planner” to see that the historic villas will “be crushed by this new building,” Ouellette said.
“Montreal is losing its soul,” she told the hearing.
“And we want to build 360 condos on a piece of land that has trees on it now. … Condos that will add to all the other condos we’re already building in the district,” said Ouellette, who said that what the neighbourhood really needs is not more condos, but a park.
But heritage icon Phyllis Lambert, founder of the neighbouring Canadian Centre for Architecture, told the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) she agreed in principle with the condo towers.
“The neighbourhood really needs good, middle-class people,” Lambert said in an interview with the Montreal Gazette after delivering her brief.
“The park doesn’t make sense to me at all,” she said.
Lambert, 89, said she considered the project’s architecture unfinished and said an advisory committee should be set up to oversee the design of the building and that a competition should be held to design the landscaping around it.
She said the district rivals Old Montreal for its historic past and high-quality architecture.
Jacques Larin, 82, who has lived in a restored greystone in the neighbourhood for 40 years, said the neighbourhood is already densely inhabited but lacks parks, community centres and recreation facilities.
He noted that area residents — of whom 42 per cent live on low incomes, compared to 23 per cent for Montreal as a whole — are poorly served compared to those in other districts. “There is a great inequity,” Larin said.
Four out of five of the district’s 34,000 residents live in apartment buildings of five storeys or more.
Residents who oppose the project accuse Mayor Denis Coderre of turning a deaf ear to their appeals for a park where local children could play soccer and adults could stroll.
The area between Atwater Ave., Sherbrooke St., Bishop St. and the cliff south of René-Lévesque is called the Quartier des grands jardins, because of vast religious properties like the former Grey Nuns’ Mother House at René-Lévesque and Guy St., now part of Concordia University.
But the Peter McGill Community Council noted the public does not have access to the private gardens around such institutions.
The district has 0.6 hectares (one and a half acres) of green space per 1,000 residents, while the recommended amount is four hectares (10 acres) per 1,000 residents. The average in Montreal is two hectares per 1,000 residents.
The council said the neighbourhood saw its population grow by 16 per cent from 2006 to 2011 and will receive 8,990 new residents in the next few years.
The council also criticized Coderre for revoking citizens’ right to demand a referendum on the condo project.
Normally, residents would have been able to force a referendum if enough people were opposed and signed a register. However, in March the Ville-Marie borough invoked an article of the city charter that bars that recourse. Article 89 allows a borough to bypass a referendum for a project judged to be of exceptional importance.
The hearings continue Wednesday and Thursday.
