Susan and Maya enjoy doing photoessays together because it gives them a chance to truly get to know the city.

             Mount Royal Park, designed by Olmsted of Central-Park-in-New-York-fame  is an oasis of greenery right smack in the middle of the busy island-port of Montreal. From the Saint Lawrence River you can look up at what Montrealers fondly call “The Mountain” and from the top, you can see the blue depths of the river below. Montreal became a great metropolis thanks to the canal that linked the port to the factories in the hinterland. This canal, known as Lachine Canal, is no longer an industrial waterway and has been  converted  into a  leisure navigation route that  leads to the lakes. The factories  on either side are slowly being converted into high-end condominiums. Centuries of  industrial sludge and other pollutants  in the canal, however, have left  their  mark. City administrators and developers claim the canal  has been “cleaned” but the truth is that the toxic sludge has simply been swept under a rug of  “watertight” underwater pavement. Cleaning up, after all, delays development  and raises construction costs. Time alone will tell when and how  this band-aid will disintegrate.

            Montrealers are just beginning to become aware of the environmental damage that the city has endured throughout its history and they are trying to reverse it by greening the city, building bicycle paths along the canal, converting old buildings  to efficient heating and cooling systems and trying to curb the prolific car.  The results are mixed. But we love our city, regardless of all the good, the bad and the ugly that it contains.

Lachine Canal condo development in former factories.

 

Old railway bridge along the bicycle path leading to the Old Port.

 

Wild flowers thriving along the bicycle path.

 

Cultivated flower bed in the Old Port, now a Leisure Centre.

 

Benny Farms. Low-income housing turned into a show-case  for solar and geothermal heating and cooling.

 

Decarie Expressway sucking up all the oxygen released by the trees.

 

A homeless man sleeping near the bicycle path. The billboards display the city’s beautification programme.

 

Forgotten but not destroyed. Old Montreal in the background.

 

Broken but not dead. Downtown in the background

 

The working port was moved eastward to give way to a leisure marina.

 

Annual garden show in the Old Port with an old silo as backdrop.

 

Roof Top kitchen  garden in Maison de la Culture Côte-des-Neiges, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Borough.

 

Same green-roof  with flowers in the front, kitchen  garden in the middle and Université de Montréal in the background.

 

 

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