Late Monday afternoon in the Quartier des Spectacles: on the Promenade des artistes, a tiny girl, held at arm’s length by her mother, is having fun activating the module of the city orchestra, newly created by Robocut Studio, Dpt. and Duhamel Valley. A few meters further, an idle young man is resting on one of the benches of the installation. Almost everywhere, pedestrians circulate. Emerging from its enforced lethargy, downtown Montreal is slowly reviving, but not yet as it once was, as workers streamed out of offices at rush hour and into crowded subway cars.
After more than two years of slump, the city center is once again preparing to welcome a pre-pandemic level cultural life. This summer, all the festivals will be back at maximum capacity, and there should even be newcomers, promises Éric Lefebvre, general manager of the Quartier des Spectacles Partnership. Should we add that it is until further notice from public health?
We already know, in any case, that the city center will never be quite the same again. While Montrealers were confined to their homes, large residential towers rose from the ground in the heart of the Quartier des spectacles, to the point that festival organizers must now look for places to set up the backstage of artists.
new residents
While office towers are likely to remain less busy than they were before the pandemic, residential spaces have taken over. As we know, teleworking is here to stay in the population, at least in hybrid mode. “Virtually all the interventions and all the studies indicate that people will return to work downtown around three days a week,” says Éric Lefebvre.
The challenge facing investors, managers and even artists alike is to make the downtown area a desirable place, rather than an imposed one. And this approach now almost necessarily involves cultural activities.
For Mr. Lefebvre, the pandemic has meant that the business community now needs the cultural community to convince office workers to return to the city center. “Office people will want to have an experience by going downtown. This can be through public art or the presentation of performances. There are many people who call us asking if we can help them get in touch with representatives of the cultural world,” he says.
A few hundred meters west of the traditional Quartier des Spectacles, the group Ivanhoé Cambridge, owner of Place Ville Marie, has completely redone its esplanade and will soon suspend a gigantic ring 30 meters in diameter framing the view of the esplanade on McGill College Avenue and Mount Royal. “We also want there to be entertainment in the square,” says Annik Desmarteau, vice-president of offices in Quebec at Ivanhoé Cambridge, who intends to unveil the program shortly and thus hopes to attract the occupants of the buildings again. Place Ville Marie offices.
The return of cultural activity to the city center, “it will be a great test that will allow us to see how culture will bring people back to the city center,” says Valérie Beaulieu, general manager of Culture Montréal.
A walk from west to east
In fact, the configuration of the city center itself is about to change, in particular with the eventual completion of the reorganization work on Sainte-Catherine Street and McGill College Avenue, to provide more pedestrian space. Éric Lefebvre likes to think that rue Sainte-Catherine, which will have pedestrian spaces from east to west, will somehow unite the cultural heart of the Quartier des spectacles with the more commercial center traditionally deployed west of avenue du Parc.
For urban planner Gérard Beaudet, the pandemic will have made it possible to realize how much space we had conceded, in the past, to the automobile in the city center, of which pedestrians occupied the bare minimum. The resumption of professional activities will show, however, he believes, if the concept of pedestrian streets really works in our country.
The disaffection observed in the downtown area in recent years has also forced Tourisme Montréal to modify its short-term objectives. In 2019, says Manuela Goya, the organization’s vice president of destination development and public affairs, the trend was more towards the development of cultural life in neighborhoods, where tourists were looking for a more authentic experience, more rooted in the local culture.
Need love
Two years of the pandemic later, it is the downtown area, which remains the beacon of the Montreal tourist experience, which now most “needs love”, she says. Far from lamenting the galloping real estate development experienced by the Quartier des Spectacles, Mme Goya believes this ensures that the city center will not become a deserted, dead city after rush hour. Valérie Beaulieu, of Culture Montréal, is also delighted that the city center has retained this social mix that distinguishes it from that of certain large American cities. Following in the footsteps of the promoters of green alleys, which have greened Montreal in recent years, Manuela Goya speaks in particular of a project to revitalize the alleys of the city center through mural art, which would take the form of a walk for passers-by.
For Valérie Beaulieu, the city center will be, over the next few years, a kind of “big laboratory”. She predicts that “a uniqueness, a stronger identity” will emerge. In the meantime, a first test will be done when the major summer festivals resume. Already, Tourisme Montréal has seen a recovery in reservations by tourists from Ontario, the United States and France, even if we have not yet reached the reservation levels of 2019. Éric Lefebvre notes that large consumers of culture are at the rendezvous of the festivals. For the rest, we have to deal with a greater factor of unpredictability. “People wait more until the last minute to book,” he says.