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'Iconic' park will rise from former St-Michel dump Kevin Mio, Montreal Gazette More from Kevin Mio, Montreal Gazette Published on: August 28, 2015 | Last Updated: August 28, 2015 3:32 PM EDT What was once a quarry and garbage dump that has marred the city’s St-Michel district for decades will soon become one of Montreal’s — if not the world’s — most iconic parks, Mayor Denis Coderre said on Friday. The St-Michel Environmental Complex will be transformed into the city’s second-largest park, behind Mount Royal, beginning with several new sections that are to be opened to the public for the first time in 2017, in time for the city’s 375th birthday. The whole project is slated to be completed by 2023, Coderre said. “New York has its Central Park, Paris has its Luxembourg Gardens, London has its Hyde Park. If it is true that the major cities of the world can be recognized by their legendary green spaces, Montreal has certainly not been left out,” the mayor said as he made the announcement standing in front of what will become a 12.5 hectare wooded area and lookout in a few years. “We already have Mount Royal Park, our largest park, and in a few years we will soon have another equally iconic (park) right here,” he said. “This transformation represents one of the most ambitious environmental rehabilitation projects ever undertaken in an urban environment in North America,” Coderre said. “We are building a park out of a site that contains 40 million tonnes of garbage.” The cost of this phase of the project is $33.7 million, which the city is paying for from its capital works budget. The final price tag for the remainder of the work is not known. However, Coderre said whatever money is needed will be made available to complete the project. Once finished, the park will include thousands of trees, a lake, wooded areas, pathways, rest spots, an outdoor theatre and more. Anie Samson, the mayor of the Villeray — Saint-Michel — Park Extension borough and member of the executive committee, said the transformation shows that the impossible is possible. “Today is a big day for us and it is one more step forward toward the realization of our dreams (for St-Michel),” she said. “For the past 20 or 30 years, (residents) had a dump over there. Now it is going to be one of the biggest and nicest parks in the world,” Samson said. By 2017, just over 17 hectares of park space will be open to the public. In all, the park will occupy 153 hectares of the 192-hectare site. “A lot of people are talking about sustainable development, but what does it mean? I think we have a living proof here,” Coderre said. “We are providing today a new definition of how to revitalize an area. Frankly, at the end of the day … a lot of people are inspired by other cities. Trust me, this one will be an inspiration for the rest of the world.” Journalists were given a bus tour of the site Friday morning, which included a drive into the lowest point of the former quarry, which will eventually become the lake. It will be five times as big as Beaver Lake on Mount Royal. The lake will be filled with run-off water from the park and will be treated to make it safe to be used for boating and kayaking, but not for swimming. The second major project is a new entrance way to the park along Papineau Ave. that will include, among other things, a sliding area for winter activities, public spaces and areas where people can rest or play outdoor games such as Frisbee or flying kites. Two other sections already opened to the public will be reconfigured and new entrances constructed. There is already a pathway that rings the entire complex, but this is the first time the public will be allowed onto the landfill site. But how they will get to the park, near the corner of Papineau Ave. and Jarry St., is another question since public transit to the area is far from ideal. Coderre said they are working on a plan to address that issue. “We can have the nicest park, but it has to be accessible,” Coderre said. “We want Montrealers to be able to take advantage of the park so there will be an action plan for public transit, a mobility plan.” One challenge city officials face is how to camouflage the more than 500 wells that dot the site. They serve as monitoring stations for the biogas which is emitted by the buried garbage and the city must find a way to hide them while still allowing them to be accessible to workers for repairs. At the same time, they must prevent vandalism. The biogas is recovered and used as fuel on site by Gazmont, producing enough electricity for 2,000 homes. The company signed a new deal this year to recuperate the gas for 25 years once renovations are completed in 2016. The electricity is sold to Hydro-Québec, with the city getting 11.4 per cent of total sales per year. kmio@montrealgazette.com http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/iconic-park-will-rise-from-former-st-michel-dump

New waterpark planned near Montreal Montreal will soon have a new attraction to talk about, as developers prepare to break ground on a new waterpark and leisure facility in the municipality of Sainte-Adèle. Planned to open in September 2016, the La Rolland project will take up 84ha of land. It will offer 60,000sq.m of accommodations for short stays and 24,000sq.m of facilities dedicated to leisure and sports activities as well as catering and an indoor tropical waterpark. La Rolland is currently in development by Jamco Ventures and its international team. M2Leisure is the overall project consultant for the development and operations of this new family oriented resort destination. M2Leisure's program for La Rolland includes 800 lodging units, providing an offering for short breaks and holidays. The facilities consist of a three-pavilion village centre featuring an iconic indoor waterpark set at 29 degrees Celsius 365 days a year; a sports and leisure centre; shopping; restaurants and more. The project is in line with the latest leisure market trends, according to M2Leisure, showing a growing preference for family oriented and proximity-based resort destinations, accessible near major urban centres. The opening of the resort is planned for September 2016. http://www.interpark.co.uk/news/New-waterpark-planned-near-Montreal/3749-19-&cb=0

Would it not be great is Santiago Calatrava did a design for a new Champlain Bridge in Montreal? It would stand as an Iconic symbol as an entrance into Montreal, What do you guys think? I am gonna try to do up some sketches JC

World's Most Stunning City Skylines 13 Greatest urban silhouettes Forbes Traveler.Com What makes a skyline great? It has to be more than merely memorable, it must have some exceptional characteristics: It not only should be instantly recognizable but, from the traveler’s perspective particularly, it should be an enticing view of great buildings and monuments. If it’s really special, you want to be a part of it. So we’ve asked a group of star architects to help us make the choices. See our slideshow of World's Most Stunning City Skylines. It’s no surprise that New York’s skyline is mentioned the most often—and this despite the dolorous replacement of the Twin Towers with Ground Zero. A single iconic building can make a skyline stand out, as can geography, and New York City is a case study for both. According to Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat, partners in Stamberg Aferiat Architecture in New York, the city’s great skyline “is partly a result of Manhattan being a long narrow island, maximizing the impact. And the agglomeration of New York skyscrapers has as its centerpiece the Empire State Building, which is such an iconic romantic building, and through the accidents of economics and zoning, it stands alone.” They architects also cite Chicago as a city of great architectural monuments and major iconic skyscrapers like the Sears Tower. But while the great race for height in which Chicago and New York were longtime contestants has largely shifted overseas, the vertical element in skylines still figures prominently across the board. “The image of a city in the 21st century still depends on the skyscraper idea,” says Andres Lepik, architecture and design curator at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and author of the book Skyscrapers. “City governments know that the economy is pushing forward to gave high-rise buildings in city centers.” Examples? Lepik says London and Frankfurt are standouts. Still, high-rises are not a prerequisite for a great skyline. “City skylines aren’t necessarily defined by skyscrapers,” say Aferiat and Stamberg. “There’s Sydney with its Opera House, for example, which defines the city, St. Louis with the arch,” they add, “and Seattle has the Space Needle.” For that matter, we’ll always have Paris, which thanks to its concentration of historic slate gray-roofed six and seven-story buildings, many of which date from the mid-19th century and before, has a remarkably uniform and distinct skyline. Most architects would agree that a great skyline takes time to develop. “A skyline is something that comes up and comes together and somehow it’s unplanned,” Lepik says. “If you go to Shanghai right now, there are hundreds of skycrapers but they don’t form any really beautiful skyline,” he adds. By contrast, he says, “New York had a certain slow development, which sped up in the 1920s and ‘30s with the Art Deco skyscrapers such as the Chrysler Building and Empire State—but it took 30 years to get the coherent skyline.” What of a future-forward city like Dubai? “I wouldn’t call Dubai’s skyline beautiful,” says Lepik, “because it has grown too fast, without a general idea of what they’re trying to achieve.” But if there is beauty in boldness, Dubai has an incontestably sensational skyline in progress: It started with the erection of the 1,053-foot-tall Burj al Arab Hotel in 1999, a “seven-star” hotel on an artificial island and complete with helicopter landing pad. And soon it will have the tallest skyscraper in the world: the 1,900-foot Burj Dubai tower. Financial crisis or not, more brash towers are in the works for the desert sheikdom. It’s hard to beat Asian tigers like Hong Kong for urban audacity, but our round-up of great skylines holds some surprises, such as… Pittsburgh? Indeed. The city is “right at the intersection of three fairly large rivers, and you approach it through a mountain tunnel, so you arrive completely deprived of a view—and then you’re on a bridge looking at the city,” say Stamberg and Aferiat. “It’s very beautifully proportioned the way it starts fairly low at the river and then climbs to the U.S. Steel building, which is the tallest one there.” As for Europe, it’s not just about historical aesthetics—modernity is moving in. In his book on skyscrapers, Lepik features two Frankfurt towers, one designed by Norman Foster. Cities like London and Paris increasingly represent a mixture of old and new in which traditional icons mingle memorably with new visions of star architects like Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano. By accident or by design, the result is urban landscapes even more compelling for today’s travelers to discover and explore.

Icon of city's night sky going high-tech The Gazette Published: 6 hours ago The iconic clock atop the Molson Canada brewery tower facing downtown Montreal has gone high-tech. Over the past several weeks, the neon tubing in the clock and company logo were replaced with light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, providing an energy-saving source of light that is more direct as well as higher in output and lower in wattage. The switch will allow Molson to save 72 per cent of its energy consumption to operate the largest functioning timepiece in the province at 13.8 metres in diameter. "Our hexagonal clock in the shape of the original label for Molson Export has been an iconic figure on the Montreal landscape helping keep the tempo for neighbours for more than 50 years," said Serge Chevrier, who is responsible for its upkeep. "Every year, in case of a break or during maintenance, many residents of the Ville Marie borough call us to say the Molson clock isn't working and asking when it will be functioning again," Chevrier said. "It seems the clock is essential to their daily lives." Molson spokesperson Marie-Hélène Lagacé said the beermaker is swamped with calls twice a year when the time changes and the clock isn't immediately adjusted. She said it takes up to 48 hours to make the necessary changes to the clock, which was built in 1950. Lagacé said Molson made the change to reduce its environmental footprint. LED lights last six times longer than neon lights, yet consume only 28 per cent as much energy.