Archive for March, 2011
Dr. David Bird ecrit au Maire Tremblay – Dr. David Bird’s letter to Mayor
Saving Meadowbrook is key to protecting our landscape heritage
l’Article disponible uniquement en anglais
By ERICA BROWN, The Gazette February 24, 2011
We’ll never know how W Sir William Van Horne would have reacted to the destruction in 1973 of his mansion at Sherbrooke and Stanley Sts. because the railway tycoon and builder of the Canadian Pacific Railway died in 1915.
We do know that on the evening the Victorian builing was demolished, John Colicos, who portrayed Van Horne in the CBC miniseries The National Dream, called the wrecking “a shame and a disgrace.” By morning, the last remaining Canadian example of a Collonna Art Nouveau interior was mounds of rubble.
The demolition was a hinge event, marking a turning point for Montreal’s architectural heritage that remained in private hands. Like campaigning Venuses emerging from dusty waves of debris, groups of citizens arose, intent on historic and cultural preservation. They would continue to prod the city administration to create bylaws protecting heritage zones and restricting development, realizing the truth of what Thomas Fuller wrote in the mid-18th century, “We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.”
Now another Van Horne legacy, the 57 sylvan hectares of Meadowbrook Golf Club, faces the threat of development. The club, formerly the Canadian Pacific Recreation Association’s park for its railway workers and a golf course since the 1920s, has been a bone of contention between citizens who want to preserve the green space intact, and the developer Group Pacific who wants to build condos on it.
Last fall Alan DeSousa, vice-chair of Montreal’s executive committee, announced that the city would not approve the developer’s plans for Meadowbrook. Future development still remains possible, however. Perhaps it is time to recognize that it is not only our architectural heritage that is worth preserving. We have a landscape heritage to protect as well.
Ironically, today’s battles to protect and naturalize green spaces echo the efforts of the city’s early landscape architects to preserve what they created. The reality is that the parks in which today we cycle, play and walk our dogs were created by 19th and early-20th century visionaries. Preserving their landscape designs required civic commitment and constant vigilance, which just like today was often in short supply, and their parks’ acreage diminished as the years went by.
Creating them in the first place took commendable acts of municipal vision and a willingness to innovate. More than 135 years ago, Montreal’s parks were born during a golden age of landscape architecture. In 1874, Montreal hired Frederick Law Olmsted of New York’s Central Park fame, to create a park out of the Royal Montreal Golf Club and the hobby farms situated on Fletcher’s Field on the east side of Mount Royal. It was not alone. Parc Lafontaine was established from a British garrison on land that was once the experimental farm of James Logan. Angrignon Parc, then countryside and fox-hunting grounds, was saved from development by the city of Verdun in 1930. Parc des Rapides and Parc Dorval were transformed from golf courses, and Parc Maisonneuve, which originally contained a golf course, was protected when the Olympic Park was created.
The first to use the term “landscape architect,” Olmsted gifted Montreal with the English garden look and with his experience, convincing city hall to create green havens for city dwellers. Holding that “lives are shortened and made painful by city air,” he designed the winding trails and soothing vistas that mark his parks. Presciently, Olmsted also predicted the ills of littering, pollution, and city blight, long before doing so became common wisdom.
Olmsted’s acolyte, Frederick Todd, arrived in Montreal from Massachusetts in 1900 to work with his mentor and never left. Todd turned Olmsted’s precepts into public and private projects across Canada, producing gems that inhabitants take for granted.
Todd certainly left his mark on Montreal. Because of him we have Beaver Lake, created on a site originally chosen by Olmsted and appropriately over an ancient beaver dam. Todd designed the Town of Mount Royal and the chalet on the mountain, and transformed the deserted garrison of Île Ste. Hélène into a park.
In the late 1950s, another visionary, Montreal Parks director Claude Robillard, tried to revive the city’s illustrious heritage of acquiring private lands for the public park system, declaring that 15 per cent of Montreal land should be reserved as green space. His message often fell on the deaf ears of Jean Drapeau, who clearly believed that If We Build It, Tourists Will Come.
It’s not a bad idea to raise ghosts for good causes. Every time we’re in a Montreal park, we’d do well to remember what we owe to Robillard, Olmsted and Todd. Olmsted’s warning that it’s impossible to recapture space to which urbanites can escape is timely given Meadowbrook’s uncertain future. Just as gardeners know that to naturalize and maintain the picturesque takes effort, we should apply equal effort to reclaim our landscape heritage.
Olmstead was right in his own day, and he remains so today, when he said: “conserve, protect, build only what is necessary.”
Erica Brown is a freelance writer and editor living in N.D.G.
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Heat Island – Highlights: an investigative story by William Marsden
HEAT ISLAND – an investigative Story by WILLIAM MARSDEN
The Gazette 29 Jan 2011
http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Cities+feeling+heat/4189913/story.html
l’Article disponible uniquement en anglais
Highlights that pertain to saving GREEN SPACES on the Island of Montreal
- CITIES ARE ON THE FRONT LINE OF CLIMATE CHANGE. THEY NEED DENSITY. ENERGY EFFICIENCY. GREEN SPACES. PUBLIC TRANSIT. SEWER SYSTEMS THAT CAN HANDLE TORRENTIAL RAINS.
- What worried officials most were urban heat islands where concrete sidewalks, asphalt roofs, roads and parking lots absorb heat and combine to increase temperatures by as much as 16 degrees Celsius over the regional average
- Montreal and surrounding communities are preparing to spend billions of dollars to reduce emissions and to adapt to the dangers posed by climate change.
- Cities inevitably are the front-line troops when dealing with extreme weather. “The climate change challenge for cities is dire,” Andrew Steer, the World Bank’s special envoy for climate change, said.
- Here in Montreal the challenge is no different. “We see the effects in our communities, on the ground and across the board,” Montreal city councillor Alan DeSousa said. “We don’t have the luxury to wait. We have to act now to meet the problems we are seeing now and those that will come in the future. That’s why cities are the major drivers. That’s why we are not waiting.”
- Of course, cities have been talking about sustainable development and climate change for years. For the most part it has been a story of “nice plans no action,” DeSousa said.
That passivity, he claimed, is in the past. Time is running out.
- As Montreal’s executive committee member with responsibility for sustainable development, finance and administration, DeSousa sees all sides of the issue: what needs to be done to reduce emissions; what needs to be done to adapt to the impacts of climate change; how much it will cost; and where the money will come from.
- Climate change actions often provide benefits well beyond climate change concerns. They result in economic, social and environmental improvements.
“An energy efficient city that is well adapted to climate change will be more
livable and therefore more attractive to business
“We expect to see a growing competition among clean cities.”[according to Andrew Steer,
the World Bank’s special envoy for climate change]
- To combat the heat island effect, Montreal has been slowly doubling its green spaces from three per cent of the Island to six per cent, which is the average for most cities in Canada. DeSousa said the city is also planting more trees. St. Laurent, Verdun and several other areas are planting trees to expand their canopy to up to 40 per cent. In the last few years, St. Laurent, where DeSousa is borough mayor, alone has planted 13,046 full grown and seedling/ sapling trees with a net gain of about 11,000 trees. Not only will this help cool the municipality and retain water, it will also consume more carbon dioxide. A heavy tree canopy can reduce temperatures several degrees.
- “The health of Canadians and Canada’s natural environment, communities, and economy are vulnerable to the impacts of a changing climate,” Canada’s Auditor General, Sheila Fraser, reported last fall. “ Montreal and Quebec City experience more intense snow storms, wind storms, heat waves and torrential rain than ever before;
Alan DeSousa ‘s comments:
- Inaction by the federal government has meant many voters remain unconvinced of the dangers of climate change,
- “If we are going to make a dent and if we are going to be able to supply a coherent series of reasons to the population, we need the federal government on side,”
- “You can imagine how much simpler our lives would be if you have a coherent, cohesive message being sent by all levels of government to the population. Not only would people better understand the impact of climate change on their daily lives but there would also be a series of integrated measures across the board that are coherent. That definitely handicaps our efforts, particularly at jurisdictions at senior levels of government where we don’t have any particular role, for example in industrial emissions.”
