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Repairs to Hélène de Champlain building force eatery to shut Restaurant's owner plans to close it down when lease expires at end of 2009 ALAN HUSTAK, The Gazette Published: 8 hours ago The building that houses the Hélène de Champlain restaurant on Île Ste. Hélène needs massive repairs, and the restaurant will close for good in 16 months when its lease expires. Pierre Marcotte, the French- language television personality who has leased the red sandstone building from the city since 1983, says the property needs between $3 million and $5 million in repairs. "We have no choice but to close," he said. "The city has decided not to renew its lease after 2009 in order to undertake the repairs. That could take a year or more to complete. The electrical and heating systems are outdated, and major repairs to the building itself are necessary." Initially meant to be a sports pavilion, the island chalet was built during the Depression as a Quebec government make-work project. It was designed by Émile Daoust to resemble a Norman château, and the grounds were landscaped by Frederick Todd. It was turned over to the city in 1942 and in 1955 became a municipal restaurant, but didn't get a liquor licence until 1960. In 1966, Mayor Jean Drapeau had the building redone as the official residence for Expo 67's Commissioner-General, Pierre Dupuy. It also had a hall of honour next to the main dining room that was used by Drapeau as a reception centre for visiting dignitaries and heads of state. The reception for French President Charles de Gaulle was held in the chalet after he delivered his controversial "Vive le Québec libre" speech. Even though the restaurant proved to be a money-loser, Drapeau kept its five dining rooms open until 1977, when they were closed because of a labour dispute. They reopened in 1981. Marcotte said he does not plan to renew his lease, and no one is certain what will happen to the building once the repair work is done. In the past, there has been talk of converting the site into a hotel for high rollers at the Montreal Casino. ahustak@ thegazette.canwest.com

Quel choix de sujet pour l'article sur Montreal cette semaine dans la section CITIES dans The Guardian quand on compare avec l'article publie sur Toronto ! Jack Todd me déçoit beaucoup ! Welcome to the new Toronto: the most fascinatingly boring city in the world https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/04/new-toronto-most-fascinatingly-boring-city-guardian-canada-week https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/06/40-year-hangover-1976-olympic-games-broke-montreal-canada?CMP=fb_a-cities_b-gdncities#comments Cities Guardian Canada week The 40-year hangover: how the 1976 Olympics nearly broke Montreal The Montreal Olympics left the city with a C$1.6bn debt, a string of corruption scandals, and a creeping sense of economic and social decline. Forty years on, how did the city survive? Mayor Jean Drapeau stands in the Olympic Stadium, Montreal. Photograph: Graham Bezant/Toronto Star/Getty Cities is supported by Jack Todd in Montreal Wednesday 6 July 2016 07.30 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 6 July 201611.17 BST Shares 714 Comments 93 Save for later There is a moment before all our global sporting extravaganzas when it all seems poised on a knife edge. Helicopters hover above the stadium, keyed-up athletes shuffle and bounce with excess energy, and organisers bite their nails as they try to hold down nervous stomachs, worried that despite years of planning and the expenditure of billions, it will all go desperately wrong. Then the trumpets sound, thousands of young people take part in colourful charades, pop stars fight a losing battle with hopeless stadium acoustics – and the Games begin. The formula is pretty much set in stone, but in 1976 Montreal added a wrinkle. On 17 July, with Queen Elizabeth, Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and 73,000 people looking on, the Greek athletes who traditionally led the Parade of Nations came up the ramp toward the Olympic stadium to find their way almost blocked by construction workers. Out of sight of the cameras and the throng inside the stadium, the staff were frantically wielding shovels and brooms to clear away the building debris left from the manic push to complete the facility on time. In the final scrambling months before the Games, 3,000 labourers had worked in teams 24 hours a day to make it possible for the Olympics to begin at all. They barely succeeded. Two weeks later, when the last athlete had gone home, Montreal woke up to what remains the worst hangover in Olympic history: not just a bill that came in at 13 times the original estimate, a string of officials convicted of breach of trust and the greatest white elephant of a stadium ever built, but a creeping sense of economic and social decline. Forty years on, no other Olympics has so thoroughly broken a city. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The opening ceremony of the 1976 Montreal Games. Photograph: Tony Duffy/Getty Images*** Advertisement When I arrived in Montreal five years earlier, a war resister from Nebraska with little French and less money, the city was enduring its harshest winter on record. Montreal would receive more than 152 inches of snow in 1970-71, including a March blizzard that killed 17 people. The endless snow, in a sense, was a mercy. It turned down the heat on the city’s simmering political crisis, which had boiled over the previous Octoberwhen the terrorist Front du Libération du Quebec (FLQ) kidnapped the British consul, James Cross, and the province’s minister of justice, Pierre Laporte. Prime minister Trudeau responded by imposing martial law. Armoured personnel carriers patrolled the streets and troops detained hundreds of people without charges. The FLQ would murder Laporte on 17 October. They released Cross on 3 December, effectively ending the crisis but leaving the city battered, bruised and tense. Even before the kidnappings, Montreal was jittery from a series of FLQ bombs: 95 in total, the largest of which blew out the northeast wall of the Montreal Stock Exchange. And yet, in those years, the best place to get a sense of what Montreal was and might have been was Le Bistro. It was really Chez Lou Lou, although no one called it that, and it featured more or less authentic Parisian ambience, right down to the surly French waiters. When I could afford it, Le Bistro was my favourite destination on a weekend morning. One especially frigid Saturday, Leonard Cohen sat at the next table with a blonde companion, both of them sporting deepwater tans from the Greek islands, looking blasé about it all. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Leonard Cohen was born in Westmount, Montreal. Photograph: Roz Kelly/Getty ImagesMontrealers could afford to be blasé. The city was everything that Toronto, its rival, 300 miles to the south-west, was not: urbane, sophisticated, hip, a place where you could dine well and party until the bars closed at 3am. In Toronto, they rolled up the streets at 11pm and toasted the Queen at public functions. Montreal was not just the financial capital of Canada, it was also the most European of North American cities, half English-speaking but overwhelmingly French, profoundly cultured and unfailingly elegant, where the old stone of the cathedrals met the Bauhaus steel-and-glass towers of Mies van der Rohe’s Westmount Square. The crowd at Le Bistro was a cross-section of cultural and political life in a city full of tensions, between separatism and federalism, English, French and Jewish, old money and new. There were political tensions that seemed to feed a creative ferment home that produced Cohen, the bombastic poet Irving Layton, the acerbic novelist Mordecai Richler, the politicians Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque, the actor Geneviève Bujold and the film-maker Denys Arcand. The Olympics can no more run a deficit than a man can have a baby Jean Drapeau, in 1970 When, on 12 May 1970, during the 69th session of the International Olympic Committee held in Amsterdam, Montreal won out over competing bids from Moscow and Los Angeles to be awarded the Games of the XXI Olympiad, it seemed to signal another triumph. The city had hosted one of the most successful World’s Fairs ever in 1967, and a new baseball team, the Expos, began play in 1969, defeating the St Louis Cardinals 8-7 on 14 April at Jarry Park in the first regular season Major League game in Canada. Following those triumphs, the Olympics were sold to the Montreal public as being modest in design and, above all, inexpensive to stage. The mayor, Jean Drapeau – diminutive, autocratic, mustachioed – declared: “The Olympics can no more run a deficit than a man can have a baby.” *** Facebook Twitter Pinterest Leger (left) and Drapeau (right), listen as Taillibert describes the layout of Parc Olympique. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann ArchiveThe 1970 estimate was that the Games would cost C$120m (£65m) in total, with $71m budgeted for the Olympic Stadium itself. Drapeau took a personal hand in the stadium’s design. He and his chief engineer, Claude Phaneuf, selected the French architect Roger Taillibert, who had built the Parc des Princes in Paris and would also design the Olympic Village. Taillibert employed his own team of architects and engineers, and was respected for bringing in projects at, or at least near, budget. (The Parc des Princes, originally budgeted at $12m, cost $18m .) His conception for the “Big O” stadium was grandiose, in a style that might be called space-age fascist: it featured an enormous, inclined tower, the tallest such structure in the world, holding a retractable roof suspended from thick cables and looming over the stadium like a praying mantis over a turtle. There is no evidence, however, that either Taillibert or Drapeau ever had a handle on the management of the various construction sites. There were delays from the very beginning, and construction on the Olympic Park complex (including the Velodrome and Big O) began 18 months late, on 28 April 1973. This put Drapeau right where the powerful and militant Quebec labour unions (the Quebec Federation of Labour and the Confederation of National Trade Unions) wanted him: paying extravagant overtime bills. Out of a total of 530 potential working days between December 1974 and April 1976, the workers would be on strike for 155 days – 30% of the work time available. In one particularly crucial period of construction, from May until the end of October 1975, less than a year before the opening ceremonies were to commence, the unions walked off the job and no work was done at all. Oversight was utterly inadequate on every aspect of the project. During the inflationary 1970s, the price of structural steel alone tripled. In 1973, contractor Regis Trudeau, who had been awarded $6.9m in Olympic construction contracts, built a luxurious chalet costing $163,000 for Gerard Niding, who was Drapeau’s right-hand man and head of Montreal city council’s powerful executive committee. Only when a corruption commission forced his hand, five years later, did Trudeau finally produce a bill charging Niding for the house. Game off! Why the decline of street hockey is a crisis for our kids Read more By 1975, the provincial government had seen enough: they removed Taillibert and formed the Olympic Installations Board (pdf) (OIB) in an attempt to get a handle on the construction. Ironically, no one has since delivered a pithier assessment of the corruption than Taillibert himself. In 2011, he told le Devoir: “The construction of the Olympic Park and stadium showed me a level of organised corruption, theft, mediocrity, sabotage and indifference that I had never witnessed before and have never witnessed since. The system failed completely and every civil engineering firm involved knew they could just open this veritable cash register and serve themselves.” Drapeau himself was never charged or even suspected of personal corruption, but his remark about men having babies came back to haunt him. At the time, the physician Henry Morgentaler was much in the news for openly performing abortions. As the Olympic bill nearly tripled, to $310m, Montreal Gazette cartoonist Aislin drew one of the most famous cartoons of a brilliant career: it depicted a visibly pregnant Drapeau on the phone, saying: “‘Ello? Morgentaler?” *** When the Games finally opened, problems plagued the event itself, too. As it would do with debt, corruption and construction chaos, the Montreal Olympics inspired a trend in boycotts, when 22 African nations refused to participatebecause the IOC would not ban New Zealand for sending the All Blacks rugby team to tour apartheid South Africa. It caught on: western nations boycotted Moscow in 1980 over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and communist nations retaliated in Los Angeles in 1984. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. Photograph: Design Pics Inc/Alamy Stock PhotoMontreal also broke the mould in security. Following the terrorist tragedy at Munich four years earlier, the security bill ended up running to another $100m (more than 80% of what the entire event was initially supposed to cost), not including the cost of the Canadian forces enlisted to help keep order. Meanwhile, some of the athletes were tainted by accusations of doping, including legendary Finnish postman and distance runner Lasse Virén, who was suspected of transfusing his own blood – a practice that was legal at the time, though Viren has always denied it. Far more serious was the treatment of East German athletes, who dominated their events in part because, the world later learned, they’d been fed performance-enhancing drugs for decades, sometimes without their knowledge, under a programme known as State Plan 14.25. Many later suffered psychological problems and had children with birth defects. The struggle in Iqaluit: north and south collide in Canada's Arctic capital Read more In the end, the athletes themselves redeemed at least some portion of the Olympic expense: the Games themselves went off relatively well. If the relentlessly self-promoting American decathlon gold medalist Bruce Jenner caused a few eyeballs to roll, he was overshadowed by the refrigerator-built Soviet weightlifter Vasily Alekseyev, who repeated his heavyweight gold from Munich and set an Olympic record in the snatch while lifting 440kg. And in the first full day of competition, the 14-year-old diminutive Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci earned a perfect 10 on the uneven bars – she went on to become the 1976 Olympics’ unquestioned individual star. Canada, meanwhile, became the first host nation to fail to win a gold medal on home soil, a feat made no less exceptional for being repeated at the Calgary Winter Olympics 12 years later. The glow began to fade with the closing ceremonies on 1 August. The final tally of the cost for the Olympics was $1.6bn, a more than 13-fold increase, including at least $1.1bn for the stadium alone. In popular lore, the Big O had officially become the Big Owe. When all was said and done, the city was left with debt that took 30 years to pay off. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nadia Comăneci, of Romania, dismounts during a perfect 10 performance. Photograph: Paul Vathis/AP*** On 15 November 1976, running on a platform of good government in the wake of the scandals and cost overruns, René Lévesque’s separatist Parti Québecois (PQ) won its first provincial election. The PQ’s promise to hold a referendum on leaving Canada touched off a full-scale anglophone panic in bilingual Montreal, especially within the business community. Sun Life, the huge insurance company, was the first of a stream of Montreal-based corporations to move down Highway 401 to Toronto. When the referendum was eventually held in 1980, Lévesque and the “yes” side lost decisively, but by the end of the 1980s Canada’s financial capital had shifted firmly from St Jacques Street to Bay Street, Toronto. Between 1971 and 1981, the English-speaking population of Montreal declined by nearly 100,000; over the next 20 years – which included another referendum in 1995, that only kept Quebec in Canada by a narrow margin of 50.6% to 49.4% – it would shrink by another 100,000. It would take 30 years for the city of Montreal to retire the Olympic debt Like some medieval castle under a warlock’s curse, the Olympic stadium – visible from dozens of different vantage points in the city, an inescapable reminder of what went wrong – continued to be plagued with problems. In the 1980s, the tower caught fire. In August of 1986, a chunk of it fell on to the baseball field, forcing the Expos to postpone a game. In September of 1991, a bigger 55-tonne concrete slab fell on to an empty walkway. The OIB reassured the public no one was underneath it, prompting one columnist to ask: “How do they know?” The retractable roof never happened; instead, an orange Kevlar roof was finally installed in April of 1987. It tore repeatedly, until it was replaced in 1998 by a fixed roof, which cost another $37m. In the winter of the next year, that roof tore under a heavy snow load, sending a small avalanche of ice cascading on to workers preparing for a motor show. To this day, in a northern Canadian city that averages roughly 50cm of snow a month in winter, the Olympic Stadium cannot be used if the snow load exceeds 3cm. The OIB claims the only thing more expensive than a permanent steel roof (estimated cost: $200m-$300m) would be to tear the whole thing down (estimated cost: $1bn). Their figure has been widely debunked. The roof remains in place, and the Big O now lacks a full-time tenant: the Expos played their last game in 2004 and the franchise moved to Washington DC. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The 200,000 sq ft, 65-tonne Kevlar roof at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal was expected to last 25 years. Photograph: Shaun Best/ReutersThe stadium aside, Montreal did get some bang for its Olympic buck. The excellent Claude Robillard Sports Centre in the city’s north end is still used by thousands of athletes, and the one-time Velodrome has been converted to the Biodome, an enormously popular indoor nature museum. The claim has also been made that the Montreal Olympics proper turned a profit, which is true only if you chalk up the various purpose-built venues, the stadium in particular, to infrastructure. In any case, it would take 30 years for the city of Montreal to retire the Olympic debt. A commission headed by superior court judge Albert Malouf to probe Olympic corruption spent three years, and another $3m, before releasing a 908-page report in 1980 that laid blame squarely at the feet of the mayor. Taillibert, Phaneuf and others shared some of the responsibility, in Malouf’s view, but Drapeau was the principal culprit, with his hands-on style and his habit of turning a blind eye to the shenanigans around him. Top officials and contractors were convicted of fraud and corruption. They included Niding, Drapeau’s right-hand man, who was convicted of breach of trust and sentenced to one day in jail and a $75,000 fine, and contractor Regis Trudeau, who also received a one-day jail sentence and a $100,000 fine. Even Claude Rouleau, head of the OIB installed to stop the bleeding, was found guilty of breach of trust for accepting gifts in connection with the Olympic construction and was ordered to pay $31,000. Fining the miscreants, unfortunately, didn’t help pay off much of the debt. In order to rid itself of the Olympic burden city hall had to skimp on urban essentials for years. Even now, with a belated rush to repair its crumbling infrastructure,Montreal is still paying the price for decades of neglect. *** Forty years on, however, Montreal has endured. The sour jokes about the stadium, the corruption and the Olympic debt are now part of the culture. The separatist movement that convulsed the city in the immediate aftermath of the debacle also brought some much-needed social change. Welcome to the new Toronto: the most fascinatingly boring city in the world Read more Montreal survived by reinventing itself on a smaller, more viable scale. If Toronto seized the mantle of Canada’s financial capital, Montreal is the unquestioned capital of culture, a vibrant city of street art, sculpture and world-class jazz, fireworks, comedy and fringe festivals, the city no longer just of Leonard Cohen but of Arcade Fire and Cirque du Soleil. Le Bistro is long gone, but Montreal is still hip, the bars and restaurants and clubs the liveliest in the country, a walking city where the cafes are full all day long and joie de vivretrumps quotidian worries over such inconvenient details as bounced rent cheques and unpaid parking tickets. Montreal remains the polar opposite of money and real-estate obsessed Toronto – though where it was once a smaller, colder Paris, Montreal is now more North American, less European, less blithely certain of its position in the universe. Nevertheless, the Olympic debt is paid, separatism is a diminished force and there is even a tentative plan afoot to bring back the Expos. When spring finally comes after the long winters, there is a buoyant sense of rebirth and confidence in the future. If you can ignore the potholes and the still-simmering controversies over municipal corruption, Montreal is once again a great place to live. But you can’t escape the sense that the city might have had it all. In truth, before the Olympics, it did. Guardian Cities is devoting a week to exploring all things Canada. Get involved onTwitter and Facebook and share your thoughts with #GuardianCanada

MAAM - Musée d'Art et d'Affaires Métropolitain présente « Business'Art - Logo Design » MONTRÉAL, le 21 mai 2013 /CNW Telbec/ - Exposition de 20 logos d'entreprises réalisés À LA MAIN par l'artiste Pierre Bibeau selon les normes de présentation visuelle tel qu'exigé par les entreprises : Air Canada, Apple, Assur 'art, Banque Scotia, Banque Desjardins, Bénévoles d'affaires, Drapeau du Canada, Fédération des Chambres de Commerce du Québec, Ferrari, IBM, Journal Métro, Mercedes, Nike, Omer DeSerres, Drapeau du Québec, Rubiks, Safec, SAQ, STM, Théâtre du Nouveau monde, Videotron, Ville de Montréal et le Centre de Commerce Mondial de Montréal Notre mission : Collecter, conserver et exposer des œuvres d'art venant du milieu des affaires, ceci pour la communication, la connaissance et la culture. Du 21 au 24 MAI 2013 Ruelles des Fortifications Centre de commerce mondial de Montréal 747, rue du Square Victoria Montréal (Québec) H2Y 3Y9 Téléphone : (514) 982-9888 SOURCE : Musée d'Art et d'Affaires Métropolitain Renseignements : Judith-Leba Présidente - Fondatrice MAAM - Musée d'Art et d'Affaires Métropolitain Là où la culture entrepreneuriale devient une œuvre d'art Merci de célébrer l'art dans toute sa diversité culturelle Tél. : 514 793-2526 info@maam-international.ca http://www.maam-international.ca Musée d'Art et d'Affaires Métropolitain - Renseignements sur cet organisme Communiqués de presse

Édit par Monctezuma : Voici une historique complète du projet, gracieuseté de Hildephonse: Été 1984 : Cadillac-Fairview projette d’inclure la salle de l’OSM dans un grand complexe multifonctionnel sur McGill College. Arcop dessine les plans ci-dessous. Le complexe chevauche la travée ouest prévue de la future avenue McGill College, ce qui crée de l’opposition. Juste après la guerre, l’urbaniste français Jacques Gréber avait proposé de conserver une large percée visuelle à cet endroit entre la montagne et le fleuve. Il y prévoyait deux places publiques dont l’une a été créée par les concepteurs de la place Ville-Marie. Le projet menace le concept et est contesté par les propriétaires voisins (qui ont respecté l’alignement proposé dans leurs nouveaux immeubles) autant que par les groupes de protection du patrimoine. Le projet sera annulé et l’avenue conservera son gabarit prévu de 36,5 mètres de largeur. 1984-12-05 : Drapeau annonce que le site Berri (maintenant la place Émilie-Gamelin) est à l’étude pour la salle de l’OSM. 1985-01-31 : On annonce une entente avec le promoteur Sofati, pour le site Berri. Arcop fait les plans de la salle (2600 places) alors que Jacques Béique s’occupe des équipements périphériques. (voir le rendu ci-dessous). Le projet comprend un parking souterrain de 600 places, une galerie de boutiques souterraine et l’école de musique de l’UQAM qui doit occuper trois étages au-dessus des locaux administratifs de l’OSM sur la face N-E du complexe. L’école doit aussi occuper une petite salle de 700 places côté ouest. Montréal aménagera un parc sur l’espace résiduel. Le maire Drapeau a réussi à convaincre le chef de l’OSM qui favorisait le site de Cadillac-Fairview. 1985-02-05 : Le choix est approuvé par le Conseil. Les analyses de sol sont faites en février. 1985-05-05 : René Lévesque confirme une subvention de 30 M $ pour la salle. 1985-07-11 : « “C’est bien ici que se trouve le centre-ville” lance Lévesque » Première pelletée de terre par René Lévesque et Jean Drapeau. Les plans ne sont pas terminés et le bail emphytéotique (99 ans de la Ville pour 1 $) n’est pas signé. Le projet est de 50 M $ dont 34 de fonds publics. La petite salle (800 places) est devenue optionnelle. 1985-08-19 : Les plans et devis préliminaires sont déposés. 1985-10-12 : Sofati s’impatiente car le temps presse : il faut 24 mois pour construire et la salle doit être prête pour la saison 1987-1988. Les plans et devis ne sont pas approuvés encore. Il y a des problèmes de négociations avec la STCUM, l’UQAM et les locataires du Métro Berri-UQAM. 1986-01-11 : « Tout est à peu près en place, mais… » titre La Presse, mais « rien n’indique que le [nouveau gouvernement libéral élu en décembre 1985] ait quelque intérêt que ce soit à stopper tout le processus engagé depuis deux ans. » 1986-01-19 : Le projet est plus ou moins mis en veilleuse. Les mois suivants, il sera jugé non prioritaire. 1986-01-24 : Le site d’Hydro-Québec face à Place des arts est proposé (St-Laurent, St-Urbain, Ste-Catherine, Dorchester, incluant le Monument national). 1986-10-16 : Le Comité consultatif du gouvernement recommande le report mais que la salle devrait être intégrée à la PdA. 1986-12 : Lise Bacon, ministre des Affaires culturelles donne son appui à l’îlot au nord de PdA : (Jeanne-Mance, St-Urbain, Sherbrooke, Président-Kennedy). La PdA est satisfaite, car elle trouvait que le site Berri était trop éloigné. 1988-09-15 : John Gardiner annonce pour 1991 un projet de square sur le site Berri. La place Émilie-Gamelin y sera inaugurée le 5 mai 1992. *************************** Il y a ensuite eu le projet de 2002 avec images ci-bas, gracieuseté de Gilbert. *************************** Début du message de Gilbert : Je n'apprendrai rien à personne en disant qu'il y avait, en 2002, un projet de développement sur l'Îlot Balmoral incluant une nouvelle salle pour l'OSM. Le projet a été annulé. Il était tout de même important, car 112 concurrents de 23 pays différents participèrent au concour pour le projet. 5 furent retenus pour le 2e tour. Sept images. Je vous donne donc la chance de voter pour le projet que vous aimez le plus parmis ceux du 2e tour! C'est juste pour savoir... ----------------------------------------------------------- Projet 1 Cohlmeyer Architects Limited / Provencher Roy + associés architectes / Jodoin Lamarre Pratte et associés, architectes (JLP) / Cardinal Hardy et associés, architectes ----------------------------------------------------------- Projet 2 NOMADE architecture / Les architectes Lemay et associés ----------------------------------------------------------- Projet 3 De Architekten Cie. / Aedifica inc. / Les architectes Tétrault Parent Languedoc et associés ----------------------------------------------------------- Projet 4 Saucier et Perrotte, architectes (Saucier+Perrotte) / Menkès Shooner Dagenais, architectes ----------------------------------------------------------- Projet 5 Busby + Associates Architects Ltd. / Proscenium Architecture + Interiors Inc. / Beauchamp Bourbeau Réal Paul, architectes / le Groupe Arcop ************************* Finalement, la salle de l'OSM voit le jour. Voici le fil : http://mtlurb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=108

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Municipal+noise+limits+imposed+Parc+Jean+Drapeau/4839778/story.html#ixzz1NPXKEnKy :eek:

Dans le cadre de l'éventuelle tenue de l'Exposition Universelle de 1897 à Montréal, un certain Mainville avait proposé ce projet (bien avant Drapeau, héhéhé!!!).

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/Lambert+shouts+enough/3317503/story.html#ixzz0uhaLT8LV

Do we dare think big again? After three decades of decline, stagnation and costly federalist-separatist battles, Montreal politicians have taken to looking in rear-view mirrors to the Drapeau era megaprojects, when the term 'Big O' could have stood for 'optimism' JAMES MENNIE, The Gazette Published: 10 hours ago "Of all the achievements of the Drapeau administration," says Paul-André Linteau, a professor of history at the Université du Québec à Montréal, "Expo 67 occupies a special place in our collective imagination. "When we marked the 40th anniversary of Expo last year, it was heavily covered by the media, and full of teary-eyed, nostalgic baby boomers recalling the extraordinary summer they spent at Expo 67. "But often we experience a kind of deformation of memory that sees an individual's recollection transformed into something the entire community believes it experienced. Not everybody had a great summer in 1967, but the boomers expressing themselves on TV or radio (create) a strong, positive perception of Expo 67." Nostalgia is a valuable commodity in politics. Candidates who campaign on a platform of change usually depict their promises through the prism of the past. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama hearkens to a day when the United States was economically strong and enjoyed the world's respect and opponent John McCain speaks of a simpler age when ordinary people had a role in determining what direction their country took. How much truth exists in either version of the past is debatable, but it makes for good oratory. Locally, where the political stakes may be less, the good old days aren't hard to locate. After 30 years of economic decline, an exodus of taxpayers to the suburbs and political trench warfare that pitted separatists against federalists, Montreal politicians in the here and now are hard pressed to rally the electorate to the promise of a better tomorrow. They've decided, instead, to stake their political futures on the memory of a better yesterday - in fact, a very specific collection of yesterdays from April 27 to Oct. 29, 1967, the golden days of Expo and a mayor named Jean Drapeau. The latest example occurred last week, when municipal opposition leader Benoit Labonté announced that he wanted Montrealers to work together to submit their city as a candidate to host the Universal Exposition for 2020. Brandishing a pair of passports from Expo 67, Labonté said the fair evokes memories of "the greatness of Montreal ... of a time when everything seemed possible. "The future seemed to belong to us, and it was probably the biggest moment of collective pride felt by Montrealers in the 20th century." Arguing that a second exposition could jump-start Montreal as a world class metropolis, Labonté invited all Montrealers - including Mayor Gérald Tremblay- to join in an effort to bring the show here. While some news organizations reported that Labonté's plan seemed to come out of the blue, the opposition leader had hinted broadly at it during an interview with The Gazette in May, saying that Montrealers needed a common cause they could focus their energies on and noting that the last time such a sentiment existed here was between Expo 67 and the 1976 summer Olympics. Whatever the genesis of Labonté's invitation, it was dismissed by city hall three hours after being made. "We like to dream with our eyes open," said Montreal executive committee member Alan De Sousa, describing Labonté's plan as "an electoral balloon." De Sousa's response wasn't totally unexpected, but it ignored the fact that pointing to the Drapeau-era as an inspiration for the future isn't a ploy invented by the municipal opposition. Tremblay has never spoken publicly about staging another world's fair here, but three years ago he did float the idea of luring another major event from the Drapeau-era back to Montreal. In August 2005 and flushed by the apparent success of the World Aquatics Championships, Tremblay mused that "Montreal will not wait another 30 years to renew acquaintances with the world," and that the city would "think" about bidding for the 2016 Olympic Games. Even though the idea went over like a lead balloon, the mayor's reverence for the Montreal of a generation ago came to the fore in speeches given during the 40th anniversary of Expo 67. "We owe to Jean Drapeau a great part of Montreal's recognition and international growth," Tremblay told a Board of Trade lunch as a slide show of Expo 67 pavilions flickered behind him. "Expo was a great project that marked our history and our imagination - an audacious project, the expression of an immense confidence in ourselves, in our capacity to create and invent." Even Projet Montréal, an opposition party holding one seat on city council and an equal amount of contempt for Tremblay and Labonté's policies, isn't immune from the lure of Expo. Party leader Richard Bergeron once observing that if Drapeau had dithered as much as the present administration, "the métro would never have been built." But while Linteau acknowledges that changes were afoot in Montreal and Quebec in 1967, it would be a mistake to think it was a magical time for Montreal. "The '60s were exceptional years," he says. "It was the Kennedy years in the United States. "We often look only at what Quebec was going through, but we were in the middle of a universe in transition." In fact, while the year may be remembered through rose-coloured mists, the reality was that the bloom was already leaving this city. Linteau acknowledges the optimism of the time - "when you consider all the projects that were being proposed, we thought there'd be 7 million people living in Montreal by 1980, that there would be 15 million visitors at Montreal airport by the end of the 1970s." But, he adds, "that optimism was quickly deflated because Expo occurred about the same time the decline of Montreal began. "Drapeau didn't care. Economic development and things of that nature were too trivial for him. He didn't notice our being overtaken by Toronto which, even by 1960, had passed Montreal as a major metropolis." Linteau notes that people usually like to be a part of something bigger than themselves. "A lot of humanity's monuments are the result of policies of grandeur and waste," he says. "Big projects are a bit megalomanical, but they get things moving, create change. "What's certain is that it's been a long while since we had that kind of project in Montreal. Just look at the bickering over the superhospitals." jmennie@thegazette.canwest.com

JO: querelles autour du drapeau Le vendredi 08 août 2008 Martin Ouellet La Presse Canadienne Pauline Marois presse le premier ministre Jean Charest de protester contre l'interdit qui empêche les athlètes québécois de brandir le fleurdelisé au Jeux olympiques de Pékin. La chef du Parti québécois juge inacceptable la décision des organisateurs des jeux de ne tolérer que les drapeaux des 205 pays membres du mouvement olympique. En vertu de ce règlement, les athlètes du Québec et leurs accompagnateurs, toutcomme ceux d'Ecosse, du Pays de Galles, de la Flandre ou de la Catalogne, nepeuvent agiter leurs drapeaux nationaux respectifs sur les sites de compétition. La leader souverainiste québécoise n'est pas la seule à condamner ce règlement adopté à l'origine pour empêcher toute manifestation d'appui au Tibet. Ailleurs dans le monde, des voix s'élèvent contre la décision des organisateurs chinois. En Belgique, le ministre flamand du Tourisme, Geert Bourgeois, a écrit une lettre de protestation à l'ambassadeur de Chine. Des partis politiques gallois ont aussi fait connaître leur mécontentement. En visite dans le pays hôte des jeux, le premier ministre Charest doit lui aussi contester le règlement et faire connaître son insatisfaction auprès des autorités olympiques, a fait valoir Mme Marois, en entrevue vendredi à La Presse Canadienne. Sans aller jusqu'à défier l'interdit, les athlètes eux-mêmes devraient aussi manifester leur désaccord, a-t-elle soutenu.

Haro sur le fleurdelisé à Pékin Jean-François Bégin La Presse Envoyé spécial Pékin Une chance que Jennifer Carroll ne participe pas aux Jeux olympiques de Pékin. La nageuse, qui avait suscité l'ire de Natation Canada en montant sur le podium avec un drapeau du Québec lors des Jeux du Commonwealth, en 2002, n'aurait même pas le droit de se présenter au Cube d'eau de Pékin avec un étendard fleurdelisé dans son sac. En fait, même les parents présents à Pékin, qui souhaiteraient agiter le drapeau du Québec pour encourager leur enfant lors d'une compétition au cours de la quinzaine olympique, ne pourront le faire. Les organisateurs des Jeux, soucieux d'éviter toute forme de propagande politique - à commencer, selon toute vraisemblance, par les gestes pro-tibétains -, l'ont formellement interdit. Seuls les drapeaux des 205 pays membres du mouvement olympique seront admis sur les sites de compétition. «Ça a été discuté et nos athlètes et leurs parents et amis sont au courant, a indiqué hier la chef de mission du Canada, Sylvie Bernier. Ça fait partie des lois chinoises. Ils ne peuvent pas connaître les drapeaux de partout dans le monde entier. Ils connaissent les drapeaux de chaque pays, ils ne peuvent pas savoir de quoi il s'agit quand quelqu'un sort un drapeau du Québec ou de la Colombie-Britannique. Pour eux, ça peut être une forme de manifestation, de propagande. Alors la consigne est de limiter uniquement au drapeau du pays représenté.» «L'équipe canadienne» Règlement ou non, la chef de mission doute que des athlètes québécois auraient sorti leur drapeau de la province. «On est une équipe, l'équipe canadienne, et on est tous fiers de ça. On est ici pour trois semaines ou un mois et des liens se créent. Je suis fière Québécoise, mais ici, dans le contexte des Jeux olympiques, on est représentant de l'équipe canadienne.» L'interdit a été critiqué au Royaume-Uni, où il n'est pas rare que les fans d'athlètes originaires d'Angleterre, du Pays de Galles ou de l'Écosse (comme ceux du tennisman Andy Murray, par exemple) agitent des drapeaux de ces régions du pays plutôt que l'Union Jack. «Le droit d'agiter votre drapeau national a toujours été un aspect essentiel de l'expérience d'être un spectateur aux Jeux olympiques. Que ce droit soit bafoué maintenant pour des raisons de politique interne va à l'encontre () de la liberté d'expression», a dit au Daily Telegraph de Londres le critique conservateur en matière de sports, Hugh Robertson.

Puisque c’est à la mode c’est temps ci, voici les miennes ! Prises le 8 mai 2008. Skyline Rive-sud Faucon au centre-ville Le penthouse de Pier-Karl Si la phase 2 de SNC se fait, bye bye à cette vue Les Étoiles et Westin Le 400 Louis-Bohème La grue du 400 n’a plus son drapeau du Canadiens, mais la grue du Louis-Bohème l’a encore ! Place des festivals Combo Le Concorde Métro Place-des-arts Le Crystal

Plateau Mont-Royal L'avenue du Parc en bleu et blancMise à jour le vendredi 28 mars 2008, 12 h 54 . L'avenue du Parc (archives) L'avenue du Parc sera fleurie aux couleurs du drapeau grec cet été. L'arrondissement Plateau Mont-Royal entend souligner le caractère hellénique de l'avenue du Parc, entre les rues Mont-Royal et Van Horne, en fournissant les bacs à fleurs de végétaux à la floraison bleue et blanche. Les 36 bacs à fleurs situés entre les avenues Mont-Royal et Van Horne seront composés d'Ageratum leilanii blue, Angelonia serena mélange, Anthirinum maximum blanche, Coleus palissandra (bleu-mauve), Helichrysum silver, Pennisetum jester, Petunia wave blue et Salvia farinacea victoria. L'arrondissement entend ainsi souligner le caractère hellénique du quartier en affichant deux types d'oriflammes. Le premier modèle affichera des photos de citoyens d'origine grecque avec un petit drapeau hellène dans le coin inférieur. Un deuxième type utilisera un lettrage dont la police rappellera l'origine grecque du quartier. « Au cours de la prochaine année, nous travaillerons en étroite collaboration avec l'Association des marchands et des propriétaires fonciers de l'avenue du Parc pour préciser la forme que prendra concrètement le caractère hellénique que nous souhaitons tous donner à l'avenue du Parc », a déclaré la mairesse de l'arrondissement Helen Fotopulos. Le plan de revitalisation du quartier sera complété par l'ajout de bancs, de stationnements pour vélos et l'installation de parcomètres électroniques. Le coût total des aménagements réalisés cette année sera de 50 000 $. http://www.radio-canada.ca/regions/Montreal/2008/03/28/005-Grecs-du-Parc.shtml

Revisiting Drapeau's personal Versaille Alan Richman, National Post Published: Friday, January 25, 2008 Story Tools Gordon Beck/Canwest News Service The Olympic Stadium adds grandeur to a part of Montreal that is woefully lacking in it, even if it is too large and impractical for just about every sport, including baseball, the sport played there ... Having once worked simultaneously as both the sports columnist and the restaurant critic for the long-defunct Montreal Star - employing a sportswriter as a restaurant critic might well have contributed to its demise - I am used to my commentary being greeted with derision from numerous walks of life. Nothing I said then might equal the mockery I anticipate from what I am about to say now. I take a deep breath. I ask: Is it possible that the Montreal Olympic Stadium, built for the 1976 Games, is an enduring work of art? I have always loathed the stadium, but not for esthetic reasons. I have hated it for far longer than is healthy for a man to despise an inanimate object, entirely because of what the stadium represented: Greed. Extravagance. Envy. Pride. That's more than half the original seven deadly sins. I don't include gluttony, simply because I recall the smoked meat sold during athletic events as being ordinary. I disliked the stadium because of the considerable pain and suffering it caused the city and the province. It infamously cost about $1-billion, and we're talking 1970s dollars. It was wrong for the climate, forever showing water stains, like a suede jacket worn in the rain. It is no longer utilized in winter, because engineers worry it might not be able to withstand the weight of a significant snowfall. It's too large for just about any legitimate sports event except the opening and closing ceremonies of an Olympic Games. The one sport that was played there most often, professional baseball, didn't fit. Famously, the retractable roof never worked properly. The space was finally covered with some kind of hideous fabric. It reminds me of a tarp thrown over a sports car parked out of doors. I have one fond memory of covering an event there. I was standing in line for free food in the press room during the 1976 Olympics. Mick Jagger was in front of me, wearing a lime-green suit with a cigarette burn in the shoulder, looking like a guy who needed free food. A few days later he would send a note down to the field during the women's pentathlon, trying to meet Diane Jones, a member of the Canadian team. I left Montreal in 1977, a year after the Olympics had nearly bankrupted the province of Quebec, so the problems that kept popping up were no longer of concern to me. I stopped covering events, except as an occasional visiting sportswriter. I no longer paid income taxes to the province, so I stopped feeling cheated by the cost overruns. My bad attitude lingered on, though. In 1975 and '76, when I was the sports columnist for the Star, I had written often and angrily about the abuses that were permitted - I should say promulgated - by the city government. I recall being consumed with outrage when two workers died in an accident on the job, and Mayor Jean Drapeau justified the deaths by pointing out that in construction-deaths-per-dollar-spent, the stadium lagged behind virtually every other major project. From then on, I was in a rage. I couldn't really decide whether the mayor or the stadium was the more irrational piece of work. I shouldn't have blamed the government for everything. Let's not forget the unionized workers who built the place. Knowing of the alarmingly tight deadline, they responded with strikes, walkouts and protests. When those led to a crisis, they demanded more money for having to work so hard. The stadium was so impractical, so ridiculous and so wrong-headed that I never considered the possibility that it might be beautiful. Drapeau had it built by French architect Roger Taillibert, calling his works "poems in concrete." To me, the stadium was blank verse. Drapeau was no longer at the peak of his powers when he commissioned it. He was out of touch with practicality. But he was also something of a visionary, successor to the French profligates who built the great tourist attractions of France. The Olympic Stadium was his Versailles. A few months ago, on a visit to Montreal, I was driving through the eastern part of the city in search of a trendy restaurant: Nothing trendy ever happened in the eastern part of Montreal when I lived there. I drove past the stadium. It was sunset, and it seemed to glow. I was caught up in the gracefulness of its sweeping, melodious lines. I thought it was stunning, capable of taking flight. Others have called it a toilet bowl. Writer Josh Freed once said, "It killed the Olympics. It killed baseball and city finances. Please, let's take it down before it kills again." My old pal Mike Boone, who worked with me on the Montreal Star and is now city columnist for the Montreal Gazette, recently reminded me that baseball players never liked it, either. He recalls Ross Grimsley, a pitcher who once won 20 games for the Montreal Expos, telling him, "I was looking for the locker room. I walked a hundred miles, down corridors that didn't lead anywhere." Boone calls the stadium "a bidet with a dildo attached to it." I now think of it as Starship Drapeau. I risk being thought as addled as Drapeau when I say this: shortsighted, all of them. To be fair, even Boone concedes that if you drive up to the eastern lookout on Mount Royal, park your car and look east when the stadium is lit up, it does look lovely at a distance. I don't know if this entered into Drapeau's thoughts, but that part of Montreal is woefully lacking in grandeur, and the stadium provides what little there is. Drapeau believed that great cities needed spectacular monuments. He had wanted a symbolic structure built for his enormously successful Expo 67, but never got the building because it would have cost too much: $22-million. That's about a 50th of what the Olympic Stadium finally cost. Had he been successful in the '60s, the Montreal Olympics might not have been such a fiscal tragedy in the '70s. Of course, the stadium has been a disaster. It remains one. In 1991, a 55-ton concrete beam fell, not killing anybody, an unexpected break. In 1997, the province spent about $40-million for a new roof that was supposed to last 50 years. It soon ripped. Canadians should start thinking of the stadium as a great old pile. Sure it's obsolete, drafty and ruinous. So are castles in France. But if it hadn't been so terrible, it wouldn't be nearly so fascinating. http://www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=264191