by PATRICK LEJTENYI

By all accounts, it’s an unlovely thing, the Pine-Parc interchange. A huge chunk of crumbling, concrete spaghetti roads, strewn with filth along its grassy edges, unsafe, unsightly and, as of 2006, unmissed. Deconstruction of the 43-year-old wart begins this winter and, with some luck, hard work and 25-million bucks, by 2006 the interchange will be replaced by a three-light level-crossing similar to the one seen at the northern side of the park at Côte-des-Neiges and Mont-Royal.

But for all its ugliness, the interchange is not without its admirers, of a sort. One is Sigmond Pifko, a hitherto commercial artist who spent the last two years painting images of the interchange from all its different perspectives.

For Pifko, exploring the labyrinthine tunnels and sidewalks was a revelation. He was mulling over the idea of doing a single painting of it as part of a series on Montreal in general; but when looking around, he says he “lost” himself. “I thought, ‘There’s a whole exhibition right here.’ All this graffiti, all these beautiful colours—there is real ugliness and real beauty there at the same time.”

Pifko won’t miss the interchange—“It’s time has come,” he says—but he’s thankful for the inspiration. Nevertheless, it’s a structure that over the decades has bedevilled many, many others, from artists to city bureaucrats to local residents.

King Car

Built in 1961, the interchange is a monument to the age of the automobile. Raphaël Fischler, an associate professor at McGill’s School of Urban Planning, describes it charitably as “the right thing in the wrong place.” He says an interchange like this one “belongs to urban fringe areas, not a developed urban one, especially near the mountain.”

The thinking behind its development came from the post-war notion of efficiency at all costs. With an explosion of car ownership in the ’50s, the Drapeau administration—never one to let little things like public consultations get in the way—believed that access to downtown from the suburbs was key to keeping the city centre vibrant. Thus, says Fischler, traffic engineers were given carte blanche to carve arteries out of city streets: the Décarie, the Ville-Marie and the Pine-Parc are all examples of traffic engineers running amok and tearing through neighbourhoods for the sake of smooth traffic flow. Not invited to the table, says Fischler, were urban planners, designers and landscape architects. They’d just get in the way.

But Pine-Parc was only one of several blights to hit the Milton-Parc neighbourhood (now better known as the McGill ghetto). With Montreal booming through the ’60s, the narrow streets and old apartments—so coveted today—were considered anachronisms and health hazards. In an effort to modernize the city, city hall razed entire swathes to make way for the La Cité complex.

“These projects were all mistakes because they were done in such an excessive manner,” says Fischler. “They were focused on a certain form of efficiency at the cost of liveability, heritage and sustainability. And all this for the incredible gain of half-a-minute in traffic.”

Coming chaos

The new project, say its supporters, will rectify the old’s many shortcomings. Bike paths will be created, three sets of lights, including one at Duluth, will be installed and the crossings will be much more pedestrian-friendly. Also, the interchange’s dank, dark tunnels, where women have been attacked in the past, will be gone. All this will make life easier for locals, they say, even if it means temporary traffic and construction chaos.

It will also slow traffic down. But to the current administration, this isn’t a drawback, but merely a consequence of reclaiming the land around the mountain. It’s also not a new idea. It’s been kicking around since the early ’90s, but languished under the Bourque administration, says Helen Fotopulos, mayor of the Plateau borough and longtime advocate of dismantling the interchange. “This project is a top priority,” she says.

If taking apart the interchange screws things up for drivers booming down Parc, Fotopulos doesn’t seem that concerned. “This isn’t supposed to be the Metropolitan,” she says. “The car cannot remain king and master of downtown Montreal. People are going to have to change their habits.”

Most locals don’t seem to mind. Lucia Kowaluk, who heads the Comité de citoyens de Milton-Parc (CCMP), is by and large happy with the plan. “There will be a huge mess for three years, that’s true, and it may create more traffic jams, but I think that in the final analysis, everyone in the neighbourhood will be glad to see it go,” she says.

What comes next?

She also has warm things to say about the present administration and its openness to citizen concerns. A veteran neighbourhood activist, Kowaluk led the fight in the early 1970s against the bulldozing of parts of the area to make way for the La Cité complex. The Tremblay team, she says, is much more receptive to residents’ concerns than the Drapeau, Doré and Bourque administrations. And while she grumbles that the city should have done a better job at disseminating information about the project, “All’s well that ends well,” she says.

One resident worried about what will happen during and after the interchange’s dismantling is Dimitri Kotsoufis, a 52-year-old sculptor who’s lived in the neighbourhood for 25 years. While not overly fond of the interchange, he says that thanks to increased prosperity north of the interchange, “We need the damn thing now more than we did 40 years ago.” He says that with a little imagination a solution could be found that would make the area greener, safer and not cost the city $25-million.

He’s also concerned about the city’s designs on the neighbourhood after the interchange’s deconstruction, saying it’s only a matter of time before condo developers start hungrily eyeing prime, newly-available real estate. Fotopulos denies that any current buildings will be torn down or that new high-rises will be built. Still, Kowaluk, who says her catchphrase now is “constant vigilance,” is watching events closely. “We can say, ‘Okay, we’ll talk about [possible development] later,’ but they had better be prepared for a fight.”

The art of the matter

To Pifko, all the discussion about money, traffic, noise and construction is secondary. He doesn’t have an opinion on the interchange one way or another, although Sterling Downey, head honcho of Urban X-Pressions, a design company with roots in graffiti culture, does. In 2000, Downey helped run a city-sponsored project to paint over the interchange with both traditional and spray-paint art. The project, he says, ended in fiasco largely thanks to bureaucratic confusion and the zeal of the city’s anti-spray-paint squad. The interchange now mostly sports tags and throw-ups with some smaller, fading murals. Downey says its destruction will only spread graffiti elsewhere, especially onto the old stone walls of the nearby Hôtel-Dieu hospital compound.

“The interchange was always an important space for bombing because it’s high-traffic,” he says. Once it’s gone, “Those stone walls are going to be the choice spot because it’s the only visible spot.”

The Pine-Parc’s legacy will be many things to many people: an eyesore, a barrier, a canvas, a muse. But it’s also a part of Montreal’s history, a symbol of another era when functionality trumped all other considerations. “It’s a strange area,” says Pifko, chuckling. “It always freaked me out whenever I drove through it—this bizarre, strange, fucked up area.”

Pifko’s Exchange of Urban Sensibilities Pre-Demolition Exhibition takes place on Wednesday, Dec. 8 in the Entry Hall of the Air Transat Tower (300 Léo-Parizeau, corner Parc, just below the interchange), 5:30 p.m.