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(Courtesy of Gothamist)

Voila quelque photos de mon périple en Australie, cette fois ci la ville de Perth. Le centre ville piéton (vraiment semblable à toute les villes australienne) Gare centrale Perth la nuit depuis le jardin botanique Perth depuis l'autre rive du fleuve Swan The bell Tower Transport en commun très agréable à Perth (bus moderne avec air conditionné, et gratuit sur le centre ville)

WTC in NYC : Recession could change the timeline By Julie Shapiro and Josh Rogers January 16-22, 2009 The Port Authority may try to delay the opening of some World Trade Center offices if the economy takes too long to bounce back, the agency’s leader said this week. The best way to ensure that Towers 2 and 3 are successful may be to phase them in over time, said Chris Ward, the Port’s executive director. “It would be naïve to think real estate can respond in the same way it was expected to respond in 2006,” Ward said in an hour-long interview with Downtown Express Tuesday. “It’s a different, different world.” If Towers 2 and 3 do not rise over the next several years, as was expected, Ward promised that something temporary would go in their place. One possibility is to build a retail-filled podium of several stories, then add the skyscrapers when the economy improves. Another possibility is to build a platform at grade. No matter what, the sites will not remain fenced off behind barriers indefinitely. “This will not be left a construction site,” said Ward, who took over the Port last May. “The last thing that’s good economically and the last thing for the community is to…have it feel like some pit.” The two towers are being developed by Silverstein Properties, which signed a 99-year lease with the Port for the World Trade Center two months before 9/11. Larry Silverstein, the firm’s head, has maintained that tough economic times are the ideal time to build offices. “By building now, even if demand for offices either Downtown or anywhere else in the city softens temporarily, we will be ready when the New York and U.S. economies rebound,” Silverstein wrote in a Downtown Express column two months ago. “And have no doubt — they will. They always do.” Silverstein Properties declined to comment Wednesday on Ward’s remarks. Ward said Tower 4 will be the easiest for Silverstein to build on time (2012) because it is the most economically viable — the city and the Port have already agreed to lease two-thirds of the office space from Silverstein. Ward said he was optimistic the incoming Obama administration, which is emphasizing economic stimulus, will back extending the deadline for the tax-free Liberty Bonds beyond the end of the year. Silverstein plans to use the bonds for three W.T.C. office towers and the Port will use them for the Freedom Tower, which is under construction. The bonds will be difficult to sell if they are put on the market long before the buildings’ openings. Ward also spoke Tuesday about the newly released quarterly milestones for the W.T.C. site. The Port met eight of its nine goals for the fourth quarter of 2008 and set nine more goals for this quarter. The one goal the Port did not meet was to turn over the excavated sites for Towers 2, 3 and 4 to Silverstein so he can build the towers. The Port initially said in October that the sites for Towers 2 and 4 were ready, but Silverstein disputed that, and an arbitration panel ruled last month that the Port had more work to do. The largest problem was a 200-foot wall the Port left standing right where a column for Tower 4 needed to go. Ward told Downtown Express that he knew the wall needed to come down, but he thought Silverstein had enough space to work around it and build other parts of the tower’s foundation first. He acknowledged Tuesday that the Port may have overstated its case. “If we were overly aggressive in that assertion, it was in the sense that we were paying a lot of money in the failure to deliver [the site],” Ward said. The Port is paying Silverstein $300,000 a day until the sites are cleared and ready for construction under an agreement renegotiated in 2006. The Port also missed another deadline at the end of the year for work on the sites for Towers 2 and 3 and has racked up $60 million worth of fines to date for missing the June and December 2008 deadlines. As a result of the arbitration, the Port and Silverstein have agreed on more detailed guidelines to determine when the sites are done. Ward said the No. 1 lesson he learned from the arbitration was that communication is essential. “If we’d been there earlier, better and more often, I don’t think we’d have come to this problem,” Ward said. It’s the same lesson he’s learned with the community and the public as a whole, whether it’s about street closures or the site’s schedule and budget: The more upfront the Port can be, the better. But no matter how candid Ward is, many New Yorkers won’t believe in progress at the site until they see it with their own eyes. “There’s such a cynicism that’s in society right now about building,” Ward said, referring to other major construction projects as well. “That’s just bad for the city, to have the feeling we’re not really building.” Ward expects the perception to change between the middle and end of the year, as steel for the memorial rises above street level and the Freedom Tower continues to grow. This is a critical year for the project, as work shifts from excavating behind construction barriers to pushing steel skyward, Ward said. The quarterly milestones are part of Ward’s effort to gain the public’s trust that he will meet the revised schedule for the site, announced last fall. He hopes to add more detail to the milestones and release the goals further in advance, providing a detailed map the public can trace toward completion. Looking ahead, Ward does not foresee any engineering or planning crises, but he said meeting the deadlines will come down to teamwork and timing — along with good weather. “There’s no leisure to it,” Ward said. “You can’t take a week off. You can’t think about, ‘I’ll make that up later….’ Those days for this project are literally over.” One potential source of delay is 130 Liberty St., the contaminated former Deutsche Bank building that stands right where the Vehicle Security Center will go. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. recently announced another delay of six weeks to three months on the building’s demolition, and that in turn will delay the Vehicle Security Center by the same amount of time. “Unfortunately, there’s not a lot that can be done without having it completely down,” Ward said. As construction of the Trade Center progresses, the many projects crammed onto the 16-acre site will continue coming into conflict over the limited space and resources. Ward described his priorities for the site whenever those conflicts arise, and for him, it all goes back to getting the memorial plaza open by the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. Opening the memorial leads to the priority of finishing the PATH Hub and Vehicle Security Center, which will both open after the 10-year anniversary but will be important to getting people on the site. The 10-year anniversary also made the Port prioritize Greenwich St., the site’s north-south spine, which people will use to access the memorial. After that comes the office towers: the Port’s Freedom Tower and Silverstein’s Towers 2, 3 and 4. Finally, Ward listed the site’s other projects, like Liberty Park and the performing arts center, which are not as integral to the plan. One conflict the Port has already resolved required the redesign of the Santiago Calatrava’s PATH hub. To open the memorial on time, the Port added some columns to Calatrava’s belowground mezzanine, enabling workers to build the roof of the mezzanine first, which gives the memorial a floor. Silverstein, the city and the memorial foundation all lobbied the Port to scale back the $3.2 billion station further, but Ward said that was much more difficult than it seemed because everything is interconnected. “You couldn’t simply say, ‘Make it smaller,’” Ward said, “because then it would have an implication for how much mechanical equipment could you put below-grade, which affected whether or not you could pump the amount of water that you need to pump to make the fountains work…. Probably a fair number of people think we didn’t do enough, but I think we struck the right balance.” Ward is also trying to balance the community’s concerns with his goal of keeping the project on schedule. Nowhere is that clearer than Vesey St., which the Port had said might have to close between Church St. and W. Broadway for utility work. “At some point, for hopefully a limited amount of time, it will have to close, and that’s just a fact of life,” Ward said Tuesday. He expects the closure to last less than a year. More than 15,000 pedestrians use Vesey St. during the morning rush hour, pouring out of the temporary PATH station at Greenwich St., and Ward said he would try to minimize the impact of the closure by keeping the Vesey St. pedestrian bridge open. The community is particularly concerned about Vesey’s closure because the Port is definitely closing Liberty St. on the south side of the site at the end of this year. Liberty St. will be closed for much longer than Vesey St., but the two closures will likely overlap.

Downturn Ends Building Boom in New York Charles Blaichman, at an unfinished tower at West 14th Street, is struggling to finance three proposed hotels by the High Line. NYtimes By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY Published: January 07, 2009 Nearly $5 billion in development projects in New York City have been delayed or canceled because of the economic crisis, an extraordinary body blow to an industry that last year provided 130,000 unionized jobs, according to numbers tracked by a local trade group. The setbacks for development — perhaps the single greatest economic force in the city over the last two decades — are likely to mean, in the words of one researcher, that the landscape of New York will be virtually unchanged for two years. “There’s no way to finance a project,” said the researcher, Stephen R. Blank of the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit group. Charles Blaichman is not about to argue with that assessment. Looking south from the eighth floor of a half-finished office tower on 14th Street on a recent day, Mr. Blaichman pointed to buildings he had developed in the meatpacking district. But when he turned north to the blocks along the High Line, once among the most sought-after areas for development, he surveyed a landscape of frustration: the planned sites of three luxury hotels, all stalled by recession. Several indicators show that developers nationwide have also been affected by the tighter lending markets. The growth rate for construction and land development loans shrunk drastically this year — to 0.08 percent through September, compared with 11.3 percent for all of 2007 and 25.7 percent in 2006, according to data tracked by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. And developers who have loans are missing payments. The percentage of loans in default nationwide jumped to 7.3 percent through September 2008, compared with 1 percent in 2007, according to data tracked by Reis Inc., a New York-based real estate research company. New York’s development world is rife with such stories as developers who have been busy for years are killing projects or scrambling to avoid default because of the credit crunch. Mr. Blaichman, who has built two dozen projects in the past 20 years, is struggling to borrow money: $370 million for the three hotels, which include a venture with Jay-Z, the hip-hop mogul. A year ago, it would have seemed a reasonable amount for Mr. Blaichman. Not now. “Even the banks who want to give us money can’t,” he said. The long-term impact is potentially immense, experts said. Construction generated more than $30 billion in economic activity in New York last year, said Louis J. Coletti, the chief executive of the Building Trades Employers’ Association. The $5 billion in canceled or delayed projects tracked by Mr. Coletti’s association include all types of construction: luxury high-rise buildings, office renovations for major banks and new hospital wings. Mr. Coletti’s association, which represents 27 contractor groups, is talking to the trade unions about accepting wage cuts or freezes. So far there is no deal. Not surprisingly, unemployment in the construction industry is soaring: in October, it was up by more than 50 percent from the same period last year, labor statistics show. Experience does not seem to matter. Over the past 15 years, Josh Guberman, 48, developed 28 condo buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan, many of them purchased by well-paid bankers. He is cutting back to one project in 2009. Donald Capoccia, 53, who has built roughly 4,500 condos and moderate-income housing units in all five boroughs, took the day after Thanksgiving off, for the first time in 20 years, because business was so slow. He is shifting his attention to projects like housing for the elderly on Staten Island, which the government seems willing to finance. Some of their better known and even wealthier counterparts are facing the same problems. In August, Deutsche Bank started foreclosure proceedings against William S. Macklowe over his planned project at the former Drake Hotel on Park Avenue. Kent M. Swig, Mr. Macklowe’s brother-in-law, recently shut down the sales office for a condo tower planned for 25 Broad Street after his lender, Lehman Brothers, declared bankruptcy in September. Several commercial and residential brokers said they were spending nearly half their days advising developers who are trying to find new uses for sites they fear will not be profitable. “That rug has been pulled out from under their feet,” said David Johnson, a real estate broker with Eastern Consolidated who was involved with selling the site for the proposed hotel to Mr. Blaichman, Jay-Z and their business partners for $66 million, which included the property and adjoining air rights. Mr. Johnson said that because many banks are not lending, the only option for many developers is to take on debt from less traditional lenders like foreign investors or private equity firms that charge interest rates as high as 20 percent. That doesn’t mean that all construction in New York will grind to a halt immediately. Mr. Guberman is moving forward with one condo tower at 87th Street and Broadway that awaits approval for a loan; he expects it will attract buyers even in a slowing economy. Mr. Capoccia is trying to finish selling units at a Downtown Brooklyn condominium project, and is slowly moving ahead on applying for permits for an East Village project. Mr. Blaichman, 54, is keeping busy with four buildings financed before the slowdown. He has found fashion and advertising firms to rent space in his tower at 450 West 14th Street and buyers for two downtown condo buildings. He recently rented a Lower East Side building to the School of Visual Arts as a dorm. Mr. Blaichman had success in Greenwich Village and the meatpacking district, where he developed the private club SoHo House, the restaurant Spice Market and the Theory store. He had similar hopes for the area along the High Line, where he bought properties last year when they were fetching record prices. An art collector, he considered the area destined for growth because of its many galleries and its proximity to the park being built on elevated railroad tracks that have given the area its name. The park, which extends 1.45 miles from Gansevoort Street to 34th Street, is expected to be completed in the spring. Other developers have shown that buyers will pay high prices to be in the area. Condo projects designed by well-known architects like Jean Nouvel and Annabelle Selldorf have been eagerly anticipated. In recent months, buyers have paid $2 million for a two-bedroom unit and $3 million for a three-bedroom at Ms. Selldorf’s project, according to Streeteasy.com, a real estate Web site. “It’s one of the greatest stretches of undeveloped areas,” Mr. Blaichman said. “I still think it’s going to take off.” In August 2007, Mr. Blaichman bought the site and air rights of a former Time Warner Cable warehouse. He thought the neighborhood needed its first full-service five-star hotel, in contrast to the many boutique hotels sprouting up downtown. So with his partners, Jay-Z and Abram and Scott Shnay, he envisioned a hotel with a pool, gym, spa and multiple restaurants under a brand called J Hotels. But since his mortgage brokers started shopping in late summer for roughly $200 million in financing, they have only one serious prospect for a lender. For now, he is seeking an extension on the mortgage — monthly payments are to begin in the coming months — and trying to rent the warehouse. (He currently has no income from the property.) It is perhaps small comfort that his fellow developers are having as many problems getting loans. Shaya Boymelgreen had banks “pull back” recently on financing for a 107-unit rental tower the developer is building at 500 West 23rd Street, according to Sara Mirski, managing director of development for Boymelgreen Developers. The half-finished project looked abandoned on two recent visits, but Ms. Mirski said that construction will continue. Banks have “invited” the developer to reapply for a loan next year and have offered interim bridge loans for up to $30 million. Mr. Blaichman cuts a more mellow figure than many other developers do. He avoids the real estate social scene, tries to turn his cellphone off after 6 p.m. and plays folk guitar in his spare time. For now, Mr. Blaichman seems stoic about his plight. At a diner, he polished off a Swiss-cheese omelet and calmly noted that he had no near-term way to pay off his debts. He exercises several times a week and tells his three children to curb their shopping even as he regularly presses his mortgage bankers for answers. “I sleep pretty well,” Mr. Blaichman said. “There’s nothing you can do in the middle of the night that will help your projects.” But even when the lending market improves — in months, or years — restarting large-scale projects will not be a quick process. A freeze in development, in fact, could continue well after the recession ends. Mr. Blank of the Urban Land Institute said he has taken to giving the following advice to real estate executives: “We told them to take up golf.” Correction: An article on Saturday about the end of the building boom in New York City referred incorrectly to the family relationship between the developers William S. Macklowe, whose planned project at the former Drake Hotel is in foreclosure, and Kent M. Swig, who shut down the sales office for a condominium tower on Broad Street after his lender, Lehman Brothers, declared bankruptcy. Mr. Swig is Mr. Macklowe’s brother-in-law, not his son-in-law.

Construction loan on hold for Waterview Tower By Alby Gallun, Nov. 05, 2008 (Crain) — About seven months after agreeing to finance the 90-story Waterview Tower and Shangri-La Hotel, the Export-Import Bank of China has gotten cold feet over the stalled Wacker Drive development. The Waterview Tower and Shangri-La Hotel at 111 W. Wacker Drive remains unfinished. The bank’s refusal to approve a $400-million construction loan for the condominium-and-hotel high-rise reduces the already slim chances that the building’s current developer, a group led by Teng & Associates Inc. President and CEO Ivan Dvorak, will be able to finish the luxury project. And it increases the odds that Bank of America Corp. will move to foreclose on the property at 111 W. Wacker Drive. The Export-Import Bank has put the financing on hold until the U.S. economy improves and it sees “signs that there is a market for the condominiums,” says Zac Henson, CEO of the U.S. subsidiary of Beijing Construction Engineering Group Ltd., which was arranging the loan. While that could be a very long time, he stopped short of saying the loan had been denied. “We’re not pushing rewind, we’re not pushing eject, we’re just pushing pause,” Mr. Henson says. “I certainly think that the for-sale condo market in the U.S. needs to rebound” for the bank to reconsider the loan. The bank’s decision leaves Mr. Dvorak in a tough spot. He has been courting equity partners for the $500-million project for some time, and more recently has been trying to sell off its hotel, condo and parking components separately, according to people familiar with the development. Under one scenario, the developer would finish the hotel and sell the rights to build the condos later, when the condo market recovers. But running a luxury hotel while construction is under way on the building’s upper floors would be extremely disruptive and a potential deal-killer. Another option: Convert the current structure, a 26-story concrete shell, into apartments. “They’re looking for anything, any option for a transaction,” says one person aware of Mr. Dvorak’s plans. Mr. Dvorak and Teng executive Sean McMahon did not return phone calls for comment. Unlike most developers, who don’t break ground until they get a construction loan, Mr. Dvorak and his partners financed the early construction of the Waterview project with their own money, betting that they could secure a loan later. They took out a $20-million bridge loan from Chicago-based LaSalle Bank N.A. in February 2007, but financing sources started to dry up several months later as the credit markets froze. With U.S. banks halting most construction lending, Mr. Dvorak looked overseas for a savior and seemed to have found one in April, when the Export-Import Bank said it would finance the project. But as the loan approval process dragged on and panic gripped the financial markets this fall, the financing looked increasingly shaky. LaSalle has already extended its loan once, but the bank’s new owner, Bank of America, probably won’t be as patient given the project’s dimming prospects. The loan has yet to be transferred to Bank of America’s workout group, but it may be only a matter of time before the bank files a foreclosure suit, say the people familiar with the project. A bank spokesman declines to comment. Construction firms walked off the job several months ago, and liens for unpaid bills from them have been piling up. The list of firms that are owed money include Teng, a Chicago-based architecture and engineering firm, and its affiliates, which together have filed liens on the project for more than $32 million. Buyers have signed contracts for 156, or 67%, of the residential condos in the building, according to Chicago-based consulting firm Appraisal Research Counselors. With an average price of more than $800 a square foot, the condos are among the most expensive in new buildings in the city. The tower’s 200 hotel units are also being sold off individually as condos; buyers have signed contracts for 80 of the condo-hotel units, or 40%, according to Appraisal Research. Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts, the Hong Kong-based luxury hotel chain that would run the hotel, remains committed to the development, according to an executive. The developer “has fulfilled its obligations to us,” says Shangri-La Regional Vice-president Stephen Darling. “We’re excited about the project and we hope that everything will materialize as it should.”

Economic turmoil halts glitzy condo project FRANCES BULA Special to The Globe and Mail November 14, 2008 Tony Pappajohn's Greek immigrant parents spent half a century building up a modest empire of apartment and commercial buildings in Vancouver. After taking that business into big-time development, Mr. Pappajohn this week had to sit down with contractors and tell them that his latest project - a cutting-edge new condo tower - has become another casualty of global economic turbulence. Working with his two brothers, he had taken his parents' empire to an ambitious new level in the past decade. They built a couple of small, attractive apartment buildings in Kitsilano and South Granville that sold or rented immediately. Then, five years ago, they decided to climb even further up the ladder in Vancouver's booming development world. They bought property downtown and, as plans progressed, found themselves the developers of a 37-storey, London-architect-designed glass tower with condos priced between $500,000 and $5.3-million. Print Edition - Section Front Section S Front Enlarge Image The Globe and Mail Mr. Pappajohn loved the project, the Jameson House, which combined cutting-edge environmental architecture by a team from the prestigious Norman Foster firm with the chance to restore two heritage buildings next door. Although it was in the city's business district - an unusual location for a condo tower - and not on the waterfront, it had the cachet of being on the same block as two of the city's most exclusive private clubs, and brochures promised stylish Italian fittings. But on Wednesday, he told his contractors he was stopping construction because one of his key lenders from a syndicate of three had backed out of the $180-million project. The lender, a major Canadian bank that Mr. Pappajohn declined to identify, pulled out Oct. 28, telling the Pappajohns only that "market conditions" weren't good. There was no reference to any doubts about his ability to sell remaining condos and Mr. Pappajohn said their presentation centre had still been getting steady business. He has spent the past two weeks looking for another lender and been unable to find one. While he's still frantically working with his lead lender to fill in the missing major piece, he decided he couldn't keep people working when he might run out of cash with which to pay them. "We made the hardest decision to stop," Mr. Pappajohn said yesterday in an interview at the downtown office of his family's company, Jameson Holdings. "But I had to ask myself, 'Is that fair to keep them working when you don't know if you can pay the bills? What if it doesn't work out and I can't get the financing and I can't pay these people? They have families.' " About 40 people were working on the site, and had just finished digging a 21-metre hole. Mr. Pappajohn now has to decide what to do for the people who bought 105 of the 144 condos. His marketer, Bob Rennie, said he's waiting to hear the results of Mr. Pappajohn's efforts at financing before figuring out what to do for the original purchasers, who had to provide deposits of 15 to 25 per cent of the price. The Jameson House is one of a growing number of condo projects in the Vancouver region that have been hit by a storm of bad economics: high construction costs, an abrupt condo sales slowdown that started in June, and a global financial crisis that has resulted in some lenders collapsing entirely while remaining banks are reluctant to lend. Two projects in Surrey have been halted, while the Olympic athletes village has been making headlines because of its difficulties in getting additional financing for cost overruns. And major developers like Concord Pacific, Westbank, ParkLane and others say that they are simply putting projects on hold until the market steadies. "It's not a project failure," Mr. Pappajohn said about his situation. "It's a market failure." Analysts say it could be months before the condo market becomes stable. That's a long time for a developer to hold expensive land and outstanding construction loans from a project halfway done. Mr. Pappajohn said he'd like to find a solution sooner than that. "Would I sell the project? In a heartbeat. I need to do what's prudent for everybody. If I could pay everybody's bills and be back to where I was five years ago, I'd have the world's most expensive MBA and be happy." In the meantime, "I'm out there. I'm looking for an angel. I'm looking for help to finish a beautiful project."

Voici quelque photos de mon dernier voyage à Toronto en 2007, et de Montreal en 2006 le skydome de Toronto CBD avec midtown et uptown

Toronto : OMERS grabs rest of TD Tower LORI MCLEOD From Saturday's Globe and Mail July 25, 2008 at 8:34 PM EDT Brookfield Properties Corp. has sold its stake in one of the two Toronto skyscrapers that make up its flagship Brookfield Place, a surprise deal that set a new price record for Canadian office space. Brookfield said Friday it sold its half-interest in the TD Canada Trust Tower to co-owner OMERS Realty Corp. for $721 a square foot. OMERS, part of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, acquired full ownership after triggering the shotgun clause in its partnership agreement with Brookfield, a commercial property company based in New York. The move led to rumblings that friction between the partners may have sparked the deal, but this wasn't the case, said Tom Farley, president and chief operating officer of Brookfield's Canadian commercial operations. “Absolutely not. Brookfield and OMERS have a terrific relationship. The building was and is 100-per-cent leased, OMERS decided they wanted to own 100 per cent … and we found the price to be attractive,” Mr. Farley said. If Brookfield had not wanted to sell its stake, it would have had the option of buying OMERS' stake under the partnership agreement, he added. The record price paid for the 51-storey tower built in 1990 suggests demand for top quality buildings remains strong despite fears of a spreading real estate slump, said Michael Smith, analyst at National Bank Financial. “This sets a new benchmark price for rare, trophy assets, which simply don't come on the market that often,” he said. The next highest recorded price paid for a large office building was $625 a square foot for the Harry Hays Building in Calgary in 2007, according to data from CB Richard Ellis Ltd. Friday's purchase comes at a time when Canada is experiencing its greatest shortage of office space in 10 years. However with 3.7 million square feet in development in Toronto alone, vacancy rates in the city are expected to pop to 10 to 12 per cent in the next two years from 4.4 per cent in the second quarter of 2008, according to CB Richard Ellis. The market will still have strong fundamentals, and the deal confirms Brookfield Place's position as a premier asset in the downtown core, said Paul Morse, senior managing director of office leasing at Cushman & Wakefield LePage. Brookfield still owns 100 per cent of Brookfield Place's larger Bay Wellington Tower, 50 per cent of the complex's shared retail space and 56 per cent of the parking, Mr. Farley said. “If in fact we had sold out our entire interest in the property I would have had mixed feelings, but we still have a significant ownership interest in one of the best properties in Canada, if not North America,” he said. Brookfield's gross proceeds from the sale of $425-million could be used for a variety of purposes, including acquisitions in North America, Mr. Farley said. The funds could also be used to buy back shares or pay down debt, he added. Mr. Smith said the purchase makes sense strategically for OMERS, which has already been doing extensive renovations at the Royal Bank Plaza across the street from Brookfield Place. Representatives from OMERS weren't available to comment on the deal. http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080725.wtdcentre0725/BNStory/Business/home

Barcelona, from the beach to my apartment, what I see when I go to the beach. Olympic beach / port:

Montreal church stands as mariners' rock A view westward, toward the core of downtown Montreal, from a tower of the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel in the Old Montreal district. The Marguerite Bourgeoys Museum is adjoined to the church. (Marcos Townsend for the Boston Globe) By Patricia Harris and David Lyon, Globe Correspondents | May 9, 2007 MONTREAL -- Poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen was hardly the first Montrealer to gaze fondly on the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours when he wrote "the sun pours down like honey / on Our Lady of the Harbour" in his pop hit "Suzanne." While the statue of the "Lady" wasn't erected until 1893, homecoming mariners have watched for the welcoming visage of the Old Port church since the first wooden chapel was erected on the spot in 1655. Although the church is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, it is equally a monument to its founder, Marguerite Bourgeoys , who was born in France in 1620 , became known as "the mother of the colony," and was ultimately canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1982 . In an era when most women rarely left their villages, Bourgeoys crossed the Atlantic Ocean seven times in her mission to educate the women of Montreal and raise money in her homeland to support the Congrégation de Notre-Dame , the religious order she founded. Just as Bourgeoys's legend became ever more expansive over the years, so did the church. She persuaded the community to rebuild it in stone in the late 1670s , and when that church burned in 1754 , it was replaced with the stone structure that stands today. In 1893 it sprouted a central tower topped with the nearly 20-foot-high open-armed statue of "Mary, Star of the Sea," flanked by two herald angels. The single-vault chapel's intimacy contrasts sharply with Montreal's more bombastic churches, and ship models suspended from the ceiling as ex-votos for voyages survived identify the church as the mariners' own. With the rapid secularization of Montreal (the Catholic Church dominated education, health care, and social services through the 1960s), public recognition of Bourgeoys has declined. But she remains one of the rocks on which the city was built, and the Marguerite Bourgeoys Museum , attached to the chapel, memorializes her accomplishments. The exhibits evoke an intimate vision of the early years of Montreal. Visitors can inspect the original foundations of the early chapels and view artifacts exhumed during archeological work here in the 1990s . Cracked blue and white porcelain cups and plates, discarded belt buckles, and broken pipes seem to conjure up their long-ago owners, who were determined to maintain the veneer of civilization in the distant wilds. They never stopped thinking of themselves as French, as the green glass wine bottles attest. The tour winds up a 69-step staircase to the 19th-century tower. Walls along this level's open walkway are lined with images of the St. Lawrence River and the port of Montreal in 1685 . For a perfect juxtaposition of old and new, turn and look outside to see people strolling and cycling along the modern-day Old Port promenade while the grand geodesic dome of the Biosphère shines in the distance. Another 23 steps lead up to the belvedere, where visitors are suddenly almost face to face with the herald angels and the broad expanse of the modern city extends down the waterfront to the horizon. By 1668 , Bourgeoys had moved her religious order from the center of the town to a rural farm on Pointe St-Charles near the Lachine rapids , a short bike ride or bus trip from Old Montreal. Bourgeoys originally taught the women of the colony to read, but soon expanded her activities to include schools for surrounding First Peoples villages and the care of the "filles du roy," the young women given dowries by Louis XIV and sent to the colony to marry and multiply. The old stone farmstead, Maison St-Gabriel , now functions as a heritage museum of 17th-century rural life with a focus on the filles du roy, who still loom large in Quebecois legend. Often recruited among the urban poor, many of the women lacked even rudimentary skills for colonial life. Tours in English and French by guides in 17th-century garb focus on the transformation of the filles du roy into sturdy colonists. Their re-created period vegetable gardens underline the need for self-sufficiency. The property's 19th-century fieldstone barn holds temporary exhibitions, such as "An Iron in Time," which opens this month. It recounts the evolution of clothes-pressing, lest there be any doubt about the hard work of women in New France. When Marguerite Bourgeoys died in 1700 , she was interred on the farm. But in 2003 , the 350th anniversary of her arrival in Montreal, her remains were placed in the left side altar of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours below the statue she had brought back from France in 1672. Marguerite Bourgeoys Museum and Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel 400 rue St-Paul Est, Montreal 514-282-8670 marguerite-bourgeoys.com Tuesday-Sunday 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. May-October, 11-3:30 November-mid-January and March-April. Adults $5.10, seniors and students $3.40, family $10.20. Maison St-Gabriel 2146 place Dublin Pointe-St-Charles 514-935-8136 maisonsaint-gabriel.qc.ca Tuesday-Sunday 1-5 p.m. April 15-June 23 and Sept. 4-Dec. 21, 11-6 June 24-Sept. 2. Adults $6.80, seniors $5.10, students $3.40. Patricia Harris and David Lyon, freelance writers in Cambridge and authors of the "Compass American Guide: Montreal," can be reached at harris.lyon@verizon.net. © Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

I had rented a Canon L 100-400mm for the weekend,... let me tell you that it is an incredible but also very difficult to manipulate due to sheer weight and shaking issues even with the IS. I took about 500 to 600 pics up there at the Tour de Montréal (Olympics stadium inclined tower). Once i came back home, i noticed many pics were unasble because they were too blurry... (camera shake). Plus, the images aren't incredibly sharp and thats not because of the lense, but I believe because of atmosphere heat and sheer distance ( light diffraction?) plus the fact that i am behind a greenish glass. Anyhow, I managed to capture some incredible angles... I was very surprised with how I saw Montréal from up there. Enjoy! 1. From Parc and Prince Arthur avenue looking south on Parc. (we can see a boat from the port). 2. Up to the tower. 3.To the east with the Biodome and the masses gathering for the closing ceremonies of the Outgames. 4. St-Laurence with the south shore. Larger version 5. closeup 6. some height 6. 7. close up 8. 9. Bateau mouche with the bridges. 10. 11.This scene is so complexe i'll let you figure it out by yourself 12.Old port 13. 14. Tallest back in the days. 18. commie blocks. 19. 20. To the north west, with a plane preparing to land. 21.A view to the east with the port and its activity. More pictures... 22. The incinerators with the huge chimnees will be demolished in the near future i believe. 23.The clusters of Appts far away are in st-Laurent. 24.Chabanel 25. The cluster near the Metropolitan, the twin towers in Laval farther away. 26.What are they building over there that we didn't hear about? 27. Density in the east end... 28. Petrochimical complexes in the east end 29. 30. containers containers containers... 31. unloading... Here's the final part... going down... back on Earth