I take up my pen today to tell you, dear metropolis, how much I appreciate you. I hear and read unpleasant things about you. Some say they can no longer bear your construction sites and your potholes and clear off in the countryside to smell the good smell of manure. Sincerely, good riddance! To us the joys of the city.
I’ve always had a crush on you, I confess. Having grown up in Thetford Mines, I never missed any trip to Montreal organized by the students. Each year, they would ogle the cars at the Auto Show, then applaud the Canadians, who, in those distant days, deserved it. I gave them the slip to visit one of your museums, take part in a demonstration, and spend the evening at the TNM or at Duceppe’s. I rushed to become a student at UQAM in 1976, and became a Montrealer for most of my life.
I can therefore testify that you are aging well. I come from the time when you looked like a European city in the aftermath of the Second World War as the parking lots and empty lots in the middle of the city gave the impression that you were recovering from a series of bombardments. I was able to see how, from decade to decade, you have filled up these breaches, extended your urban fabric, taken your place.
I observed you from the neighborhoods where I lived: a student residence in the city center, first; a Villeray entresol; a ground floor of Côte-des-Neiges; Outremont-not-expensive, then Outremont-my-dear; and, for several years, Ahuntsic. I worked in the four corners of downtown, then for a time with a view of the Oratory, then in the heart of Rosemont, where I was a deputy, and I was even, during two pregnancies, your appointed minister. I walked a lot in your streets, sign in hand, especially every March 8, 1er May and June 24 came. I also drove a lot in your city tours, day and night. For marathons, no.
So I come from a time when rare cycle paths were sometimes drawn on sidewalks, before the city became superbly equipped for two-wheelers. I come from a time when the corners of the streets had no idea that they could be pounded to put greenery on them. I come from a time when you admired one or two murals in town, before they swarmed and embellished each neighborhood. The Ville-Marie highway scar was gaping in my youthful years; it gradually closes.
The place of the Olympic Stadium was abandoned; it has become a major pole of attraction. Shop Angus, in Rosemont, was rusting on its feet before giving way to a model district. The Old Port, once gloomy, crumbles every year. I come from the time of the Miron quarry, now transformed into a park, not far from an avenue Papineau which, north of the Metropolitan, is dressed in a surprising abundance of greenery.
Everywhere, from spring on, terraces are now taking parking spaces by storm. Everywhere, street furniture (sometimes built from diseased ash trees that have had to be cut down) transforms the sidewalks into places where people can live.
I’m not telling you about the parks and their inviting facilities for children. I had the misfortune to spend a year in Paris with young children, and I can tell you how much we missed the sliding areas, the outdoor skating rinks, the swings and the water games that we now find everywhere in your home. Not to mention the schoolyards, now reinvented and open even when the bells have finished ringing. And, always, Mount Royal, jewel in your crown.
I do not understand, dear metropolis, the blindness of those who only have eyes for such a dilapidated alley, such graffiti, such heap of dirt accumulated at the end of winter. Don’t they see the growing number of green alleys? The multiplication of community garden spaces? The taxis that now say “Hello! »?
I skim over food, food trucks, festivals, neighborhood parties, nightlife: I’m afraid I’ll bore you with what you already know. But I am told that the well-shod foreign ladies claim that it is at home that one finds the greatest choice at the lowest price. I take them at their word.
Speaking of good taste, can I attest that the increase in the number of your residents of all origins has a massive impact on an unquantifiable, but perfectly verifiable wealth: beauty. I assume my masculine point of view by first recalling that, from time immemorial, the beauty of Quebec women has been praised. In the last half-century, the colors of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia have been added to these, inhabiting you now like so many members of a vast conspiracy of beauty. At the same time, as Stéphane Venne and Renée Claude said, “the colors mingle on the skin”, adding “and that gives the most beautiful children”.
Let, dear Montreal, the execrables execrate you, the deserters desert you, the grumblings go and grumbling elsewhere. We, your fans everyday, know your strengths and your finery. We will stay in the front row to take tomorrow (or the day after) the REM from the East and the West, the SRB Pie-IX, the long blue line, the pink tram to the southwest. We will go frolicking in your new Grand Parc in the West, then in the one in the East. We will walk on the new Sainte-Catherine. That takes time ? Yes. But remember when we said we wouldn’t go to the CHUM in our lifetime?
The fact is, the future is yours. Like your building sites, your moult will never stop; your originality is a renewable resource. We like to dream of a 15-year plan to gradually cover the Décarie Expressway and install a long linear park there. To a solution to put the Metropolitan in a bubble and bring to life, below, offices and recreational and sports facilities, as we do under the Parisian aerial metro. Or, above, an endless Lufa farm crossed in winter by the longest cross-country ski run in the world!
You see, dear Montreal, you make us dream. It is because you have always known how to invent your own future. We are both your artisans and your passengers. And we love travel.
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blog: jflisee.org