The Derelicts

They sit slumped along busy urban streets, ragged and wanting. People stream by, looking away from their sad decay; they have only pigeons for company.

While the neighbourhoods around them have flourished through a dozen years of revitalisation and yuppie-fueled gentrification, why these poor old souls have been left to slowly fall to bits has long mystified me.

This gracious old gal, hugging the corner of St. Laurent and des Pins at the epicentre of Main bustle, has been largely abandoned since well before I moved here 14 years ago. The falafel joint that used to inhabit the first floor vacated a few years ago. About a month ago, the police had to block off the corner while a crew shored up the outside wall that had shucked a tumble of bricks. She's running out of time, poor thing.

Just IMAGINE the post-dive-bar punked-up trespassing mischief that the spooky top floor must have seen. A veritable rat hotel...
Some of the more humble joints... like the abandoned corner store down the block that apparently hadn't changed since grandpa was a wee mite (wood stove hugging the back wall, painted in that weird old hospital-green colour that you always find about 20 layers down if you strip the window frames of any 100-plus-year-old building; 2 shelves of stock consisting of a few boxes of corn flakes, some batteries, several jars of what may have been bootstrap molasses, maybe even some mustache wax and bottles of tonic for the vapours) are probably owned by an elderly someone who has lost their faculties and are withering away in a home somewhere. Like their owners, these dusty old troopers sit in limbo, wilting echoes of the past, until the grim reaper sets the estate free so it can be stripped of its unique retro-ness and turned into another typically unique organic tea house or some similar fey concern.

In the case of the more elegant shambolics, its probably another case of malicious greed at play. The city has rules to protect heritage properties, which means that renovating these guys to meet city codes can be hugely expensive. So what less-scrupulous property owners are probably doing is letting once-lovely old buildings crumble over time until they can get them condemned, so they can then tear them down and put up a nicely profitable ultra-bland condo building.

There are two of these grand old apartment buildings slowly going to hell next to each other on the swank and highly-desirable stretch of L'Esplanade that looks out across Jeanne-Mance park at the east side of the mountain. A one-bedroom apartment on a less chi-chi block just north is going for $400,000; so condos on these lots would surely reap many millions.

At least one venerable old timer is finally poised for a mega-project make-over, which, for those of us who love a nice bit of rusty brutalism, may or may not be a good thing. Silo No. 5, an incredible hulk on the canal across from the west end of Old Montreal, has come under the ownership of a crown corporation that intends to develop it into some kind of mixed use facility.

Although the agency acknowledges that the building is an iconic symbol of Montreal's industrial heritage (in the days when Canada was known as the “breadbasket of the world”, the silo was used to store grain from the Prairies that was to be shipped out via the St. Lawrence), something tells me that all its rough charm -- the essence of its coolness -- is going to be smoothed over.

Why I can almost smell the rooftop Starbucks now...
But at least it will still be there... hopefully, forever.