The remaking of Montreal’s famous Ste-Catherine Street

Montreal is getting a rare chance to remake a major artery almost from scratch.

Thestar.com
May 11, 2015
By Allan Woods

It was once Canada’s Fifth Avenue, the frontline of the retail sector in what was known a century ago as the country’s commercial metropolis.

Standing sentry were department store giants like Ogilvy, Birks and Scroggie, which turned Montreal’s then-residential Ste-Catherine Street into the country’s pre-eminent shopping district. Nearly 100 years later, with the retail shopping sector in turmoil, downtown stores losing business to suburban supermalls, and aging infrastructure that is starting to fail, Montreal is getting a rare chance in the life of a metropolis as it prepares to remake a major artery almost from scratch.

As this city braces for the official plan to be unveiled later this week by Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, there is excitement about the possibilities but also trepidation for those who make their livelihoods running Ste-Catherine Street bars, boutiques and restaurants.

This is, after all, the city of the never-ending construction cones, of crumbling bridges and of potholes - one that is just emerging from a more than two-year inquiry into corruption in Quebec’s construction industry.

“I think the city recognizes that messing this up is not an option,” said Mario Lefebvre, president and chief executive of Quebec’s Institute for Urban Development, an association that represents commercial property owners in the province.

The plan to be announced this week could revolutionize what is an already iconic - through fairly traditional - downtown strip. The city has collected nearly three dozen submissions from individuals and associations with options such as doing away with street parking, installing heated sidewalks to melt winter snow, making extra space for patios and commercial kiosks, and even designating car-free zones to turn a shopping district into a pedestrian paradise.

“I want to see students sitting on patios ... I want to see the residents of the new condos outside smoking, drinking their coffees and reading the newspapers on Ste-Catherine Street,” said Luc Ferrandez, the leader of Montreal’s municipal opposition party and the mayor of the bohemian Le Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhood.

“When you take away street parking on either side of the road, you can add things like kiosks where you can sell coffee or apples ... You can have pop-up stores where you invite the person with the best croissants in Montreal to set up a shop for six months."

Not everybody shares Ferrandez’s idealistic enthusiasm, and some are quick to mention that his summertime vision of Ste-Catherine Street evaporates for at least five months of the year when Montreal is covered by snow and assaulted by freezing temperatures.

Business owners who are most stridently opposed to the pro-pedestrian groups are rarely the demographic most open to change, but their worries are understandable. Retailers who see themselves as being in competition with shopping malls north and south of the city, with their vast parking lots, are terrified by talk of less accessibility for customers in cars.

What good will heated sidewalks be to the shop owners if a car-free Ste-Catherine Street also loses its pedestrian traffic? The typical entrepreneur’s dystopian vision for the future looks something like Ottawa’s barren Sparks Street mall - empty by 6 p.m. each day.

Many business owners say they are hopeful they will be able to make it through the initial construction period, which is scheduled start in 2016 at a cost of nearly $100 million. But each and every one is drafting a back-up plan in case the certain financial hit to their bottom line turns out to be a knockout punch.

Those plans will certainly come in handy for some because the only guarantee in an overhaul that is unlikely to be completed before the end of the decade is that there will be short-term suffering, Lefebvre said.

“If you close a store for more than three months it starts to become very difficult because clients of that store start to develop new habits and will start to go elsewhere,” he said. “Less than three months and people will understand that it’s temporary. But if you start to close boutiques for nine months, a year, a year-and-a-half, it becomes catastrophic.”

In short, Montreal is embarking on a gamble that is on par with that made by the audacious retailers who decided a century-or-so ago to move from historic Old Montreal and to tree-lined Ste-Catherine Street with its dirt roads and wooden sidewalks. In doing so they created an economic lung, breathing new life into an expanding city.

“We have to (get back) that cachet so that it becomes the principal attraction of downtown Montreal,” said Carlos Ferreira, owner of the Ferreira Cafe at the corner of Peel and Ste-Catherine streets.

“People must have the desire to come to Ste-Catherine, and so the work needs to be done with intelligence and quickly - as quickly as possible.”