Revamping the
lower Main

>>Where do the crackheads, junkies
and hookers figure in Technopôle
Angus’s big green plans for
St-Laurent’s seedy strip?

REDEVELOPMENT AHOY: St-Laurent Boulevard

by TRACEY LINDEMAN

One needn’t witness many crackhead tranny smackdowns to know that lower St-Laurent is a little rough around the edges. The intersection of St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine teeters on the fine line between red-light district and skid row—bikers, drugs and illegal apartments make for bigger problems than mere prostitution. And Technopôle Angus, a private development company, wants to give part of the area a serious makeover.

“The idea is really to make lower St-Laurent a destination,” says Technopôle Angus director general Christian Yaccarini. He says the buildings between Ste-Catherine and René-Lévesque are crumbling inside and out and are in need of serious repairs—something Janick Langlais can attest to. When Katacombes took over the old Alouette bar in 2006, Langlais and her fellow co-op owners practically gutted the place, stripping the walls down to the brick.

“Crackheads used to count their rocks on the table [at the Alouette], people were fucking in the bathroom. It was really dirty,” she says. “I’ve seen a lot, but fuck, man.”

Yaccarini insists, however, that, despite the work to beautify the Main, its current residents will be welcome.

“We don’t want to take these people and move them elsewhere,” Yaccarini claims, adding that they want to work on these issues with community organizations like Stella, Cactus and the Native Friendship Centre. “We are very conscious that there are social problems. We can’t pretend there aren’t any [by making the area] clean, clean, clean.”

Sleazy iconography

A clean, clean, clean lower Main would look a little incongruous, given its naughty legacy, even though Jenn Clamen at Stella, a sex workers’ support organization, says most sex workers have already vacated the premises. “The Main is actually quite empty,” she says, but those who’ve stuck around can expect more police repression. She says it doesn’t matter who’s doing the project, whether it’s the city or a private company. “They put money into the area, they don’t want any undesirables,” she says.

But Yaccarini claims the folks at Technopôle Angus aren’t in the neighbourhood to clean house. Seeing that they’re only aiming to restore the southwest side of St-Laurent at the moment, their green businesses will face the neon Sexothèque sign morning, noon and night anyway. As for the historic Montreal Pool Room and Café Cleopatra, Yaccarini says that their iconic façades and signs may need to be toned down a little to fit in with the restoration. And so how Technopôle Angus is going to incorporate the existing businesses into a green zone remains to be seen.

Cachet questions

Yaccarini claims he isn’t putting the carriage before the horse—he says they’re only at the beginning of the project, and nothing has been finalized yet. Technopôle Angus is currently in talks to become co-owners with Socrates Goulakos, the proprietor of most of the buildings between the former Burger King and the Monument-National—the man who once told the Mirror his dream was to demolish the whole block.

Katacombes co-owner Langlais thinks that Technopôle Angus is on the right track, for the most part. They took up residence next to Café Cleopatra in November 2006, transforming the Alouette into a punk and metalhead hangout, and Technopôle Angus has also expressed its interest in keeping the co-op bar right where it is.

But Langlais is worried about the block becoming gentrified—she wants it to keep its cachet—though she agrees the decaying area needs some work. “It’s pretty sad what it looks like now,” she says.

Katacombes is owned by the same people who operated Salle de L’X, a sometimes controversial former venue and community centre on Ste-Catherine and Hôtel-de-Ville that closed its doors in 2004. L’X attracted its fair share of “undesirables”—mostly street youth—in its heyday, so Langlais finds it interesting that, juxtaposed against the background of the lower Main, her bar is considered a bright spot.

“Now Katacombes is the best thing, the quietest bar on the street,” she says.