Going, going...gone.

by RAF KATIGBAK

Like most of my guilty pleasures—crappy VH1 series, franchise coffee houses, Steven Seagal movies—I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. On the upside, I can now find people I have lost touch with over the years. The downside is that they can also find me. “Hey, we never really talked in high school and in fact, I remember making fun of you in the cafeteria because you wore cowboy boots with spiked spurs and had a gold hoop and cross earring because you got into George Michael way too late in life, but now I’m older and our paths and personal interests have diverged even further. Let’s be friends!”

Despite all the daily requests to relive the awkward, painful moments of my adolescence, and the creepy fact that signing up to Facebook grants the owners licence to sell your information and statistics to various marketing companies (Google, “Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?”), there are some fun things you can discover there beyond the fact that your friend Charles is “totally hating hump days :(”

One thing I recently discovered was a group called Disappearing Montreal started by fellow Montreal Mirror writer/film editor Mark Slutsky, where people can upload photos of weird and interesting Montreal sites and start discussions about odd places like abandoned crack houses and the future of Ben’s Deli.

“This group is for stuff—buildings, businesses, anything, really—that’s either gone, or on its way out,” explains Slutsky, “I’ve always appreciated weird old shit in this city. The kind of stuff that might not make it as a heritage site, but still had its own character. Stuff with an unconventional architectural heritage and could disappear at any moment, as is wont to happen with this decade of development.

“For various reasons, there was a long stretch where Montreal had a wicked mish mash arch styles, where buildings that were not maintained because lack of funds would sit next to more modern structure. So there would be these rotting 19th century buildings next to weird ’70’s modern ones.” Slutsky sites Gillman’s corner store (once standing on Duluth and Coloniale) as a prime example and indeed one of the impetuses for starting the group.

“Gillman’s was a great example, nobody really understood what it was. It was obvious that it was some kind of general store, but it was completely frozen in another era, it wasn’t kept up, it was never open, it was an enigma. When Mr. Gillman passed away, I started figuring out the history and what it was. That’s when I realized everyone noticed this stuff and I thought it would be interesting to talk about it.”

Unlike the popular and equally fascinating Flickr group Vanished Montreal—where members post old photos of buildings lost to demolition—Disappearing Montreal is very much rooted in the now. It’s about noticing things about your city that you may have not noticed before and strange or beautiful sites that you have walked by and always wondered, “What is up with that place?” What Disappearing Montreal isn’t about is blind flat-out preservation.

“So many great buildings have been lost for stupid reasons,” says Slutsky. “Sometimes you can save a building by doing something new with it. Like the Hotel Godin on Sherbrooke and St-Laurent. Or like in Paris, where interiors have been renovated a million times. There is a way. But I don’t think all change is bad; turning part of a city into a museum has its own problems as well. Not everything old is good. Also, sometimes great old stuff turns into great new stuff.”

Slutsky cites the example of the old mansion once on downtown’s Phillips Square where now stands a bizarre, muscular mid-century modern building housing, among other things, a Burger King. “It’s beautiful in its own way and definitely worthy of note.”

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca