Les Amis Supports Creation of Falaise Saint-Jacques Nature Park

    24/11/2018 by Janice

    Les Amis du Parc Meadowbrook (Les Amis) expressed full support for the creation of a Falaise Saint-Jacques Nature Park in a brief presented to the L’Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) on November 20.

    The OCPM hearings focused on the City of Montreal’s proposal to create a 30-hectare nature park beside the new Turcot interchange, including a lake, forested areas and a north-south link over the highway for pedestrians and cyclists.

    “The City of Montreal’s determination to create a Falaise Saint-Jacques Nature Park that brings together the forested Falaise Saint-Jacques —currently designated as an Eco-territory—and the former Turcot Rail Yards is applauded by Les Amis du Parc Meadowbrook and other environmental groups, as well as thousands of residents from the CDN/NDG and Southwest boroughs, and residents from across the island who want the City to protect wilderness, wetlands, green spaces and former farmland from development as much as possible,” the brief said.

    A park on the Falaise, a long escarpment beside the Turcot area, would help relieve pressure on the overused Mount Royal Park, Les Amis continued, adding that a similar park at nearby Meadowbrook would do the same. Both would decrease vehicular traffic across CDN/NDG, lower greenhouse gas emissions and improve overall traffic flow.

    Les Amis was created by citizens 29 years ago to protect the Meadowbrook golf course from residential development. Its current goal is to turn that 57-hectare property into a nature park. The brief noted that, although the Falaise Saint-Jacques and Meadowbrook are not contiguous, they are interconnected since wildlife use both areas. The existing railway corridor provides a link for animals to travel between the two sites. In addition, a pedestrian and cycling corridor could be created between these two parks.

    The brief added that the Falaise Saint-Jacques has been the site of illegal dumping for years. As a park, it would be cleaned up, replanted with native plant species where necessary, and the animals that live there would be better protected.

    The Falaise Saint-Jacques Nature Park would also provide an opportunity to highlight the history of Lac à la Loutre, also known as Lac Saint-Pierre. The lake, which no longer exists, was fed from the west by the St. Pierre River which has been buried for decades. One of the few remaining open sections of this river is at Meadowbrook.

    Les Amis noted that the plan for the Turcot section of the park calls for the creation of a lake, and this lake could be part of a project to daylight a section of the St. Pierre River. Storm water carried by collector sewers could be brought back to the surface to feed a larger lake here, with all of the advantages of a lake, including biodiversity, flood mitigation, and bioremediation.

    Finally, Les Amis expressed the hope that the city will create a green corridor of parks around downtown Montreal with Meadowbrook, Mount Royal, the Falaise, the new Turcot park and Angrignon Park as its main components.

    You can read our full brief at:

    http://ocpm.qc.ca/sites/ocpm.qc.ca/files/pdf/P98/7.11_les_amis_du_parc_meadowbrooks.pdf

    You will also find all the documents pertaining to the consultation and the briefs of other groups and individuals at the following address:

    http://ocpm.qc.ca/fr/parc-nature/documentation

     

     

     

     

     

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    Daylighting Rivers

    14/09/2018 by Janice

    by Sally Cole

    Daylighting:  A Global Trend Transforming Cities in the 21st Century

    Waterways were once the lungs and arteries of urbanization.  Yet, most of the world’s cities have buried their founding streams under concrete or incorporated them into sewer networks under roads and expressways and housing and industrial developments.  Burying rivers has degraded habitats and increased pollution and the costs of water treatment and waste management.  It has also increased flooding and damages due to flooding that are increasing with climate warming.

    What is Daylighting?

    Daylighting is the process of removing concrete and culverts that are covering and obstructing original rivers, creeks and drainage paths and of revitalizing original wetlands and drainage flow.  Daylighting is part of a larger flood management and water treatment strategy and an attempt to redress the thoughtless neglect of cities that continue to pollute their rivers.

    Why Daylight?

    Bringing back lost urban rivers by removing culverts and integrating flowing rivers into cities again –daylighting – is part of a global movement to rediscover urban rivers in cities worldwide.  In the 21st century, forward-thinking cities and citizens – in London, New York, Seoul, Zurich, Berkeley – are daylighting their historic rivers in a bid to halt pollution end environmental degradation, and increase the liveability and future viability of their cities.

    These cities report that their daylighting projects have:

    – reduced water treatment costs

    – aided flood management

    – increased property values

    – revitalized natural habitats with the return of indigenous plants, trees, fish, birds    and other wildlife

    – added greenbelts, bike routes and walking paths that have produced connectivity within and between neighbourhoods

    – increased social health and volunteer citizen engagement;

    – created tourism and related business opportunities.

    Montreal has an opportunity to join this progressive urban trend and invest in the future of our city by daylighting our historic St. Pierre River, the river on which our city was founded.

    The Lachine Canal bike path crosses where the bed of the St. Pierre used to be.

    Models of Successful Daylighting in Cities Around the World

    Since 2009, London has opened up more than 17kms of waterways.  Throughout the U.K. – where daylighting is known as deculverting — municipal governments have incorporated deculverting into legislation on water and flood management.

    Zurich, which has undertaken more daylighting than any other city in the world, has tracked, documented and analyzed the combined social, environmental and economic benefits.  The city has found the economic rewards of daylighting in reduced wastewater treatment costs.  Channeling clean water out of sewers and back into original rivers and streams reduces the volume of water that flows to sewage waste management facilities for treatment.  Zurich also reports an increase in public desire and civic engagement to recapture lost spaces and to improve the quality of life in the city.  https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/09/daylighting-is-a-new-trend-that-s-transforming-cities/

    The daylighted Cheonggyecheon Stream in Seoul, South Korea, transformed a polluted, urban, crime-ridden wasteland into a major flood relief channel and a 10.9km public downtown recreation space that has revived the city centre and attracts more than 60,000 visitors each day.  Restoration of two historic bridges over the restored river, along with managed changes in the downtown traffic system, has reduced by 2.3% the volume of cars entering downtown Seoul each day and increased bus and subway use.  Along with reducing air pollution, daylighting the Cheonggyecheon has created an environment with clean water and natural habitats that also helps to cool temperatures in the downtown area to 3.6 C lower than other parts of Seoul.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheonggyecheon

    Daylighting the Sawmill River in Yonkers, New York, has created a vibrant green corridor in the city and revitalized the downtown.

    http://www.sawmillrivercoalition.org/whats-happening/daylighting-the-saw-mill-river-in-yonkers/.

    In an effort to reduce future flood risk, after hundreds of basements flooded in a 1999 storm, the city of Dubuque, Iowa invested in an engineering study.  The key recommendation of the study was to restore, through daylighting, a one-mile section of the buried Bee Creek that flows under the city centre. https://www.americanrivers.org/conservation-resource/daylighting-streams-breathing-life-urban-streams-communities/

    To manage frequent flooding in the downtown area of Kalamazoo, Michigan, city engineers found that it was cheaper to daylight the buried Arcadia Creek than to rebuild and expand the century-old culvert system.

    Friends of Meadowbrook Are Daylighting the St Pierre River!

    The first step in daylighting is to map the route and extent of a buried river under the city.  The route of the St Pierre River is well known — from its source on Mont Royal through its various tributaries and down to its original outlet into the St. Lawrence River at Pointe-à-Callière.

    The St. Pierre River in 1834. source: carte de l’ile de Montreal, 1834, by A. Jobin, BAnQ http://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/2243990?docsearchtext=ile%20de%20Montreal%201834

    The next step in daylighting is called cultural restoration of the river.  Cultural restoration celebrates a buried river through markers, public art and activities to inform the public of its historic path and ecological role, and to raise awareness of the environmental issues and economic costs that have been created over time.

    In the case of Montreal, the city has buried the St Pierre River and channelled it into its sewage system until only 200 metres of the original river remain above ground today – in the Meadowbrook golf course.  And those 200 metres are severely polluted through the continued crossing of sewage and floodwater pipes.  Members of Friends of Meadowbrook have begun the work of cultural restoration of the St Pierre River by organizing an annual bike ride along the river’s route from Meadowbrook to Pointe-à-Callière.

    The ultimate goal of daylighting is natural restoration: to revitalize some or all of a river to recreate its original ecology and habitats and its rightful place as the centrepiece – the lungs and heart — of a community.

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    The St. Pierre River: Montreal’s Lost River

    12/08/2018 by Janice

    by Sally Cole

    This article was originally published in 2018.  It has been extensively revised, and republished 12/03/2021.

    The history of the St. Pierre River is deeply intertwined with the history of Montreal.  The story of the river tells the story of the development of the city itself.  Yet most Montrealers are unaware of its existence.

    Long ago rerouted and buried in the city’s sewers and canals, the St. Pierre River is today largely invisible. It is a lost river.

    The St. Pierre river in better days

    Many cities in the world today are reclaiming and renaturalizing their lost rivers as historic sites, tourist attractions, recreational public parks and biodiverse habitats for plants and animals.  The most visible stretch of the St. Pierre River system remaining above ground today is 200 metres long and nestled in the 57-hectare green space of an ageing golf course in Montreal’s west end. Yet even this vestige of the river may soon be allowed to dry up and disappear.

    For millennia, the rich river habitat and wetlands of the Island of Montreal supported the hunting, fishing, foraging and farming activities of Indigenous peoples. When Samuel de Champlain first saw the Island in 1611, he reported that the rivers and streams teemed with fish. Game birds nested. Strawberries, fruit trees and nuts thrived. Montreal Island’s network of rivers and streams gave access to, and shelter from, the strong waters of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. Nearby meadows offered fertile soil to farm and provide food for the settlement that de Maisonneuve founded 30 years later as Ville Marie. European settlement grew as the site became a hub in the North American fur trade and a port for lumber export to Europe.

    The St. Pierre River is one of more than 30 rivers and streams that once traversed the Island of Montreal.  Originating in streams on Mount Royal, the St. Pierre River flowed via several tributaries through Côte Saint-Luc, Ville Saint-Pierre, Saint-Henri and Verdun. It flowed over the Notre Dame de Grâce Escarpment (now the Falaise St. Jacques), draining the higher ground and widening into a lake below that was called Lac Saint-Pierre or Otter Lake, now the site of the Turcot interchange. The river finally flowed into the St. Lawrence River, across from Nun’s Island.

    Diverted Early

    In the late 17th century (ca. 1697), the Sulpicians, who in 1657 had been granted the Ville Marie seigneury, built the Saint-Gabriel canal to divert water from the St. Pierre River and increase the flow of water powering their flour mills. The waters of Otter Lake gradually drained. In the 1820s, the St. Pierre River was tunneled under the new Lachine Canal to control erosion.

    Eventually, the canalized St. Pierre River joined other streams, including the ruisseau Prud’homme draining NDG and the ruisseau Saint-Martin which drained the Plateau, combining to form the Petite Rivière flowing on the edge of Griffintown, through Place d’Youville and out into the St. Lawrence at Pointe à Callière.  In 1832-38, the St. Pierre-Petite Rivière system was incorporated into the city’s first stone sewer, the William Collector, which can be visited today at the Point à Callière museum.

    Throughout the 19th century, the industrializing city straightened, dredged and diverted the St. Pierre-Petite Rivière system as it built the city waterworks, supplied steam engines to drive industry, and developed the urban sewer system. By the mid-19th century, when the first railway yards were built, Otter Lake was little more than a marsh (that nonetheless managed to swallow two locomotives). By the early 20th century, more than one third of the river had disappeared into sewers.

    In the 1950s, sewer construction for new housing in the suburb of Côte Saint-Luc covered open sections of the Little St. Pierre tributary, and the Côte Saint-Luc shopping centre was built on a wetland of the original St. Pierre river drainage system. The 200 metres of the old St. Pierre River system that survive today remain because this tributary, the Little St. Pierre, was a key feature of the 57-hectare recreational area that the Canadian Pacific Railway created for its workers after World War I and that, in the mid-20th century, became the Meadowbrook golf course.

    In 2006, real estate developer Groupe Pacific bought the golf course for a housing development they called “The Petite Rivière Project.” The company submitted a proposal to the City of Montreal to develop the Lachine side of the site. The plan was to build more than 1600 residential units, keeping the 31 hectares located in Côte Saint-Luc as a nine-hole golf course. The proposal listed five actions as key to create the new Petite Rivière neighbourhood, and action #1 was to “Bring the distressed Petite Rivière stream back to life as a healthy, restored river.” The city eventually rejected the housing development proposal.

    Pollution Problems

    The river is polluted because of crossed connections between household sewage pipes and storm sewers in Côte Saint-Luc and Montreal West. In its original proposal, the developer stated that Groupe Pacific itself would purify the river through a system of reed beds and shallow ponds to manage rainwater and snow melt and bring back the biodiversity of the river’s habitat for amphibians, birds and small mammals. The regenerated river and wetlands were to become the centrepiece of a park for the new residential community. As a tribute to the vibrant agricultural heritage of the banks of the Little St. Pierre River tributary, the developer also proposed to preserve one of the original farm hedges that still remain on Meadowbrook.

    The St. Pierre river in 2020

    However, as time passed, Groupe Pacific began referring to the Little St. Pierre River as a smelly “ditch” and sued the City of Montreal, demanding that the “open sewer” be buried.  In June 2018, a Quebec Superior Court Judge ordered the City to stop polluting the river and to clean up the riverbanks.  A month later, both the City of Montreal and Groupe Pacific launched appeals.  The city asked for time to correct the crossed sewer connections in Montreal West and Côte Saint-Luc, citing Quebec’s Environmental Quality Act that calls for integrated water management to prevent the loss of wetlands and bodies of water. The city argued that rehabilitation of the river is part of a larger plan for rainwater management and the maintenance of its green corridors.

    Meanwhile, Groupe Pacific also appealed the Superior Court ruling, asking that the judgment be modified to order the city to cut off any flow of water to the property—whether contaminated or not—and not be subject to provincial environmental regulations. In January 2021, the Quebec Court of Appeal ordered the City of Montreal to stop all discharge into the river.

    We are now a long way away from Groupe Pacific’s proposal to make the Little St. Pierre River the centerpiece of its real estate development!

    Public Debate

    Only a few small sections of this historic river system are still visible on Meadowbrook, in Angrignon Park and near the Lachine Canal. Clearly, however, the St. Pierre River continues to play a defining role in public debate about the future of Montreal and the kind of city we want to live in.

    Beyond its significance to Montreal’s historical patrimony, the St. Pierre River and its wetlands also play important environmental roles in maintaining biodiversity, preserving century-old trees, offering sanctuary to migrating birds and assisting in the management of rainfall, snow melt and flood control.  For many of us, flooded basements after summer rainstorms are a common occurrence—potent reminders that our neighbourhoods were built on wetlands and over buried streambeds.

    Many of the world’s great cities, including Seoul, Paris, New York, London and Toronto, are working to bring back—to “daylight”—their original rivers, streams and wetlands. As climate warming increases the frequency and scale of flood events, these cities recognize that it is crucial to use their underground rivers and wetlands as an economical, clean and natural means to manage increasing drainage problems.  These cities also know that clean streams, rivers and wetlands within their cities add measurable value to real estate and immeasurable aesthetic pleasure, educational opportunities and health and well-being to residents.

     

    Let’s Clean and “Daylight” the St. Pierre River

    Let’s NOT allow it to dry up or be buried

    Let’s Keep the Brook in MeadowBROOK!

    Links

    The film Lost Rivers by Montreal director Caroline Bacle explores the phenomenon of daylighting: http://undermontreal.com/lost-rivers-documentary

    Gazette journalist Marion Scott also covered the River extensively in 2009 https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/from-the-archives-our-islands-lost-rivers

    See also “At the mouth of Riviere St. Pierre during the early stages of Montreal in1700” and “Approximate path of river, circa 1800” in http://undermontreal.com/riviere-st-pierre-part-i-start-to-finish/

    photos by Nigel Dove and Andy Dodge

     

     

     

     

     

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