Behind The Curtain (11 August, 2023)
Accessible Audio for this week’s Behind The Curtain will be available soon!
Everyone Has a Park/Pine Interchange to Overcome
It was a winding concrete orgy of overpasses and underpasses. Treacherous and sketchy for pedestrians, confusing for motorists, and ultimately pointless for everyone. It was the kind of Spaghetti Junction you would expect to see when suburban highways meet, or when there was something unavoidable like train tracks or a body of water, to work around. But this was simply an urban intersection in a largely residential area, and at the foot of a major green space and tourist attraction. Yet, the monstrosity known as the Park/Pine Interchange seemed perfectly normal, or at least it did to a young me.
When I first started going to Tam Tams in the late 90s, everyone who didn’t come down from Mile-End, or across from the Plateau, knew that if you weren’t taking the 80 bus, you had best be prepared to think quickly, and, if you had to, run to beat the traffic. If you were coming in on the 144 bus, you had to first disembark in a tunnel that looked, by day, like you were in a movie set in an urban area with graffiti-strewn walls. At night, it appeared downright ominous, and probably saw some unsavory acts. Plus I’m sure that forcing people returning from Tam Tams in various states of intoxication to navigate this maze was not a good idea in the slightest. I can’t imagine what this must have been like for people with mobility issues.
Park/Pine Interchange, pre-2007
For those who didn’t grow up here, or who weren’t out and about on the Plateau in the early 2000s or earlier, the intersection of du Parc and des Pins, at the foot of the Mountain, used to be a very different place. There were literal highway signs telling people what lanes to stay in or enter to go to places like du Parc Nord, or des Pins Ouest. This was conceived in the 1950s, and realized in 1962 under then-Mayor Jean-Drapeau’s administration. I’d get away with calling this Drapeau’s Folly, if it wasn’t for the fact that he also gave us the Olympic Stadium, which raises the bar quite a bit. I don’t know if I can fully blame him, either. I mean I can, and I do, but you can also see that he was swept up in the thinking of the day that prioritized the car over everything else. I don’t know if building the metro makes up for building this monstrosity, but I do know that Drapeau wasn’t the reason the thing stayed up for over 40 years. That was a combination of apathy mixed with collective acceptance.
In 2004, the City decided to renovate the area, rather than simply repair the dilapidated structure. There were four proposals, and the one they settled on was…wait for it…a simple ground-level intersection. Sure, there was a separate turnoff for people heading south on du Parc and heading west on des Pins (with a green space in the middle), but the overall concept was just that. It took three years and $25 million to complete the project, and by fall 2007 things were functioning as they should, and have been ever since. Credit should, and does, go to then-Plateau Borough Mayor Helen Fotopulos, who spearheaded the project and asked the City to “think bold”. Now I’ve had issues with Fotopulos, and even once was part of a guerilla theatre intervention at a Borough Council meeting she chaired. I, along with others, used to call her Helen Foto-op-ulos, due to her never missing out on a photo-op. But in this case, she was right, and really helped reshape Montreal for the better.
Was Fotopulos some sort of visionary? Was she really that bold? No, of course not. It’s not groundbreaking to think that a highway on-ramp leading from and to a city street, just so cars don’t have to stop at an intersection, is a bad idea. Discussions at the time in newspapers and on TV were what you might expect. Balancing the needs of pedestrians and aesthetics with the needs of cars. Except cars didn’t need this. Getting to speed up a bit at an urban intersection is pointless when you just have to slow down or stop at the next light. You don’t need a highway on-ramp when there’s no highway.
None of the pundits that I read, or listened to, even mentioned that this concrete bungle was an arbitrary, arrogant miscalculation, and not part of our cultural heritage. Of course, I’m one to talk. I was pretty active politically from 2004 to 2007. Sure, that was mostly on the local arts scene, but the group I was part of occasionally branched out into theatre stunts protesting a variety of issues, some local, and some international. Over corporatization of the St-Laurent Street Fair? Sure! The war in Iraq? You Betcha! Demolishing the Park/Pine Interchange? Um, yeah, sure. They should demolish it. I mean that could be a good thing. But it’s not exactly a hot button issue, is it?
An older colleague of mine in the Montreal Infringement Festival, Gary St-Laurent, would talk to me about the importance of getting rid of the interchange, about Drapeau, and how it wasn’t always like this. I remember agreeing with him, but not prioritizing it. Why would I? For me, the Park-Pine Interchange was merely a fact of life, albeit an annoying one. It had always been there. It was a natural part of the city’s infrastructure. There has always been a pseudo-highway at Park and Pine. Oceania has always been at war with East Asia. I couldn’t realistically imagine it any other way. Until they finally took the damn thing down and put in an actual ground-level intersection.
Park/Pine Intersection, post-2007
Photo courtesy of Journal Métro
Then it all made sense. This is what should have been here all along. And I can’t believe it took the thing actually happening for me to see it. It wasn’t like I rarely visited the area, either. During those years, I lived on, or near, du Parc north of Mont-Royal, at three different locations (I moved a lot back in the day), and spent quite a bit of time at the “office” on St-Laurent below des Pins. Fine, Bar Bifteck, they had free popcorn, and sausage sandwiches were $2.50 just down the street. (Editor’s Note: Years, many years later, Biftek would also serve as my office space!) So navigating or avoiding the interchange was a constant thing for me. But yet, getting rid of it wasn’t a priority.
So what can we learn from this? In the urban planning realm, the only real takeaway is “Don’t do stuff like this in the future, and don’t elect people who want to do stuff like this!”, and I think we’re safe on that front with the current municipal administration. Also, we should probably take a look at other structures with no real practical purpose. I think the real lesson, though, is that if we want to overcome hurdles and break barriers in life, through artistic projects, or anywhere else, we first need to identify surmountable hurdles as such, and not treat them as something natural and unavoidable. The trick is to ask “Does this obstacle serve a purpose, or is it just something created on a whim?” We all have our own Park-Pine Interchanges to conquer, and the first step is knowing that they exist.
NOTES THIS WEEK
Share Like The Wind
As you may have heard, Meta, in response to the Canadian Government’s Bill C-18, has blocked all news content on Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada. It’s a terrible situation all around, and one that had me concerned about friends and former colleagues that do produce independent news content. But I didn’t think it would affect us here at FTB, because on this site, we don’t report the news. Meta somehow disagrees, or at least their bots do. Just read what’s above, or my dive into JC Sunshine last week and tell me if you think this is news. Dawn McSweeney has a very introspective and nuanced take on this, which I’m not capable of at this time. Back when I had Dawn’s job, I never considered anything truly published until it was shared on Facebook, so this new reality is difficult for me, and leaves me in a very rant-ey mood. What you can do is share this and other articles on your personal socials (even if you don’t like the article, but want to mess with the government and/or Meta, that’s fine, too), or “buy us a coffee” so we can pay for other advertising methods:
Walking Wellington
With so many streets going pedestrian-only for the summer, there’s now a push to extend that year-round, And it’s coming from Verdun. Wait. What? Yes. A petition to make Wellington Street car-free the whole year got 3300 signatures, 269 more than what is needed to trigger a public consultation. I went to a special neighbourhood edition of the Jazz Fest on Wellington one night in 2019, and it surprised me. Because of that experience, however, this move coming from there doesn’t. Maybe Verdun will be ahead of the curb on this one.
Iyo Won
As I predicted last week, Iyo Sky won the Undisputed WWE Women’s Universal Championship via a Money in the Bank cash-in at SummerSlam (a good omen for us). And now, I’m reading that Montreal-based hardcore wrestling promotion IWS is hosting a show, without a ring, in a bar (Turbo Haüs) tonight at 7pm (see McSweeney’s List for details). I can’t make it tonight, but I’m definitely intrigued. And they have another show on September 16th, this time with a ring. Andrew, since I’m sure you’re going, please let me know how it was, who’s feuding with whom, all that stuff.
Well then, that’s it for now. Check back next week for another When the Concrete Crumbles, aka Behind The Curtain.
FTB Founder Jason C. McLean returns every Friday for another installment in his series, Behind The Curtain.
