Has anyone ever been to the corner of St. Laurent and St. Catherine? S'got reputation, does it not? I've still never found a corner that'll give you so many reasons to cry into your poutine, sittin' in the window of the LBP, watching tired men and women hustle for crack and bustle with booze. Dangerous and sad for the lifers and just Saturday night for half the city.
The south-east corner's conversion from empty space to a reliable, high end computer store is one thing. I can deal with that. Couple years ago it was "the most cracked out Burger King in the city" but I missed that. Not something I would have clung to with much nostalgia, I suspect. This week, though, the entire south-west corner was eradicated. Remember the looped video of silhouetted naked women, grinding it out on the second floor? I know some of you do. Skeezy little shops leaning against each other for support. Just a thin line of building containing that abscess of an empty lot next to Club Soda that Girl Talk turned into a block party at the jazz fest last year.
It'll be hard not to miss the slightly surreal touch of a doorman in a tux standing outside what was not even a strip club, if memory serves, but a jizz parlour. An ex-roommate once worked in one of those skeezy little shops selling trinkets and little spandex things. And though it's dumb romanticism to bemoan the civilizing of an intersection whose main traffic has often been human misery, for whatever reason a city needs something like this. Times square of the eighties, downtown Yonge street in the nineties. This corner, these blocks are the balls of Montreal, and we are beginning to squeeze them, as other cities have, into a tighter and tighter space.
What is now truly surreal; the fact that an entire block face at the heart of the city is empty save for one classic building, a closed ice cream shop and computer game store. There's too much sky.
And something's coming. I can smell the businessmen rubbing their hands. Not a bank, probably not a club, perhaps an american apparel, quite possibly condos.
Whatever it is, my spine tells me it bodes ill.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
How do you know the gentrification didn't start with you moving into the neighborhood? How do you know you are not an undercover operative working for starbucks? You don't know, but you should find out.
Post a Comment