Le Séville - 7, 11, 11, 20 étages (2013)

[ProposMontréal]

Je viens de passer par la. Selon Héritage MOntréal, l'édifice ne vaut pas grand chose mais la facade doit être sauvegardé. Je ne m'y connais pas dans la construction, mais ça ressemble à une façon de retenir la facade. Corrigé moi si j'ai tort svp.

[jesseps]

They might be planing on selling the building.

[ProposMontréal]

Le journaliste ne dit pas grand choses de plus, mais au moins ils en parlent.

 

 

 

New act for old Seville?

Boarded-up landmark is undergoing work to reinforce its facade, suggesting the owners might be preparing to sell

Andy Riga

The Gazette

Thursday, January 17, 2008

 

Passersby got a peek yesterday at the long-shuttered box office of the Seville Theatre on St. Catherine St. W., but it's unclear whether the landmark building is about to be resurrected.

 

In an effort to reinforce the former theatre's facade, which is protected by a heritage designation, workers removed wood panels that for years have covered the building at street level.

 

Steel beams and chain-link fencing were installed to support the Ste. Catherine-side wall, as well as a section on Chomedey St., where part of the wall collapsed in 1994.

 

The owners of the building informed the city the work was to be done but they have not submitted plans to redevelop the land, said Jacques-Alain Lavallée, a spokesperson for the Ville Marie borough.

 

The current work is not being performed at the city's request.

 

"The owners' engineers recommended it," Lavallée said.

 

Officials at Claridge Properties Ltd., which bought the theatre and the rest of the block between Chomedey and Lambert Closse Sts. in 2002 for $10 million, did not return calls from The Gazette yesterday.

 

Claridge - an investment company controlled by Montreal's Bronfman family - initially planned to create an environmentally friendly, mixed-use complex featuring retail space, offices, apartments and condominiums. That plan fell through.

 

The entire block (on the north side of Ste. Catherine) has been abandoned since October, when the last tenant, the Bombay Palace restaurant, moved out.

 

The wall-reinforcement work may be a sign Claridge is ready to sell, said Roger Peace, president of the Shaughnessy Village Association, which represents neighbourhood residents.

 

"We understand they're trying to fix it up and clean it up to make it easier to sell," he said.

 

Peace said some residents are concerned about safety because the decrepit block and the alley behind it attract squatters, drug users and panhandlers drinking alcohol.

 

"They may be harmless but some people are nervous about what might happen. If the block was fixed up, it would clean up a lot of the problems we're having," he said.

 

"It's ridiculous - it's been 14 years since it started falling down. I'm all for heritage and all for saving the place, but there's nothing much left."

 

The Seville was gutted in 1998, part of the previous owner's never-completed plan to build retail and office space.

 

Opened in 1929, the Seville's interior was designed in the "atmospheric style" meant to stimulate a fantasy outdoor setting, the walls and ceiling painted to look like a nighttime scene. None of that interior remains.

 

In the years before the Seville closed in 1985, it was a live-theatre venue, a concert hall, a movie theatre and a repertory cinema. Entertainers who performed there include Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong.

[monctezuma]

Ça s'en vient !

 

[rockstardude450]

Est-ce qu'il y a du nouveau sur ce projet car ils sont entrain de tout démolir dans ce secteur. Un gros paté de maison va disparaitre

[rockstardude450]

Est-ce qu'il y a du nouveau sur ce projet car ils sont entrain de tout démolir dans ce secteur. Un gros paté de maison va disparaitre

[cjb]

Ah ouin ils démolissent t'es sûr ?

 

je vais aller faire un tour demain.

[jesseps]

I wont be holding my breath. It's been so long since they were suppose to fix or destroy the Seville and build a new commercial/residential thing

[MartinMtl]

Source: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=f3b11b6b-1029-4164-8362-1e702038f000&k=50510

 

Teams make plans to revive Cabot Square

James Mennie, The Gazette

 

A trio of proposals on just how to resuscitate downtown's moribund Cabot Square neighbourhood include demolishing the Pepsi Forum, installing wider sidewalks and more residential units, installing an underground bus terminal and erecting office towers.

 

"There's a trade between higher density and green space," architect Daniel Pearl said Wednesday. "You have a choice on how you spread that out. Spreading out lower density but taking away green space is another alternative.

 

 

"It's interesting that none of the three schemes have gone in that direction because they recognize the importance ... these green spaces play in order to bring the liveliness back to the community - especially in relaunching Ste. Catherine St."

Pearl is co-founder of a firm that specializes in environmentally friendly architecture. It's also a firm that says it like to push architecture's envelope. This professional willingness to keep an open mind is probably coming in handy for Pearl at the moment, given that he's standing in front of a scale model that depicts a Cabot Square neighbourhood where the block occupied by the Pepsi Forum has been turned into a park and the site of an office tower that appears about 30 floors tall.

But Pearl is also overseeing a project where three teams of architects, landscapers and urban planners have tried to come up with a vision for a neighbourhood that never quite recovered once the original Forum was vacated and its shows and sporting events moved east to the Bell Centre.

"This has always been a destination," Pearl said. "The Forum brought 18,000 people a time to this neighbourhood. But there's also a local neighbourhood that has its needs.

"But when the Forum left, both the regional and the communal goals started to die.

"And so the goal is, how can we revive them?"

The teams were formed after a collection of 25 local businesses, property-owners and residents associations started the Table de concertation du centre-ville ouest in an effort to find a way to halt the neighbourhood's deterioration. Their efforts were on public display Wednesday at the Pepsi Forum after being examined by a blue-ribbon panel of judges including Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Dinu Bumbaru of Heritage Montreal, and architect and Harvard University professor Joan Busquest.

The judges' observations on the submissions, coupled with whatever public reaction was garnered from questionnaires handed out to passersby Wednesday, will form the basis for an urban plan prepared by the Ville Marie borough.

If the three submissions share a common vision, it's one that imagines an increase in the amount of residential construction south of Ste. Catherine St. (Two plans convert the Montreal Children's Hospital - once it has been folded into the superhospital in Montreal's west end - into various forms of housing.)

Multi-storey office or residential towers also play a role, either soaring above the space now occupied by the Pepsi Forum or as part of a highrise skyline that would "frame" the area.

Cabot Square itself, now the site of a Montreal Transit Corp. bus terminal at Atwater Ave. and Ste. Catherine St., would either have that terminal moved underground or a block north or east.

The borough is expected to decide next month what elements of the submissions will end up in its urban plan. Final say on the plan rests with the city's executive committee.

Details on the submissions can be obtained at http://www.convercite.org

[MartinMtl]

J'aimbe bien l'idée des tours à bureaux et résidentielle, évidemment, mais l'idée de démolir le Forum Pepsi me semble irréaliste, même si l'immeuble dans sa forme actuelle est absolument horrible. Comment peux-t-on sérieusement penser que le Forum, avec ses cinémas et ses commerces, peux être rayé de la carte aussi facilement?