Life, death and Turcot

Facing its demise, an imperiled community
rallies to save itself against another
Montreal megaproject

SHOWING ITS AGE: Interchange above Notre-Dame W.

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Stuffed up against the high curves of the Turcot inter change, Cazelais street is a small, almost forgotten nook of St-Henri that, despite the rumble of traffic overhead and the clouds of exhaust that settle on windows below, a few dozen people enjoy calling home. For now, at least.

The city’s latest megaproject imposed on the Southwest borough—along with the now-stalled Griffintown redevelopment scheme and the long-delayed McGill University Health Centre (MUHC)—is the deconstruction and reincarnation of the concrete spaghetti maze Mordecai Richler described as “multi-decked highways, which swooped here, soared there, unwinding into a pot of prosperity.”

In 1967, the year Richler returned home after years abroad and the high-water mark for Montreal, the provincial Ministry of Transport (Transports Québec) unveiled its biggest landmark work ever. Connecting highways 15, 20 and 720, the Turcot interchange was three levels—average height 18 metres, to make room for ships using the still-functioning Lachine Canal—of 170,000 cubic metres of concrete and 19,000 tons of steel. At the time, it cost $24.5-million, split between the province ($12.5-million), Ottawa ($10.5-million) and the city ($1.5-million). But in 2001, the ministry decided it was time for the interchange, along with its siblings further west, to go.

At $1.5-billion, to be spent over six years, from 2009 to 2015, demolishing the entire chain of interchanges is the kind of big job Montreal used to be famous for, for all the wrong reasons. The proposed Turcot rethink will tear down the iconic skyways and replace them with a lower system of highways supported by earthbound embankments—at least, that’s the plan. The project is currently being evaluated by the provincial Environment Ministry, and a series of public hearings before the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) will be held before the spring is out.

But the demolition, announced in June 2007, is proving controversial. There are some significant worries, especially among residents of St-Henri, that the project will create an unhealthy six-year dust storm, that the lower highways will belch more carbon dioxide at a lower, neighbourhood level and that increasingly rare affordable housing will disappear. Local residents tell the Mirror they fear that a poor but cherished neighbourhood will disappear.

A SOARING FUTURE: The interchange in 1967

A crumbling beauty

Mireille Gagnon has lived on Cazelais for almost nine years, for the past three in a six-and-a-half in a triplex now slated for expropriation and eventual demolition. She dreads the prospect of being forced to move. She and her husband pay only $700 a month, although she admits the place is drafty and costs a pretty penny to heat. She doubts she’ll be able to find something that good again. Vacancy rates are way down in St-Henri, among the lowest in the city, and a five-and-a-half, she says, will set her back as much as $1,000 a month.

“I love the neighbourhood, the community gardens, being close to our child’s daycare, the schools, being close to downtown,” she says. “We lucked out.”

The nearby traffic and pollution are a nuisance, she says—she has to constantly wash the windows so she can see out of them—but what she gets in return and the neighbourhood’s quality of life make up for it. That, she fears, will all disappear once the highway plows through her former home.

The new system will “cut off access to Westmount and turn the area into a mini-ghetto,” she says. She wonders why, of all the possible alternatives, the Ministry of Transport had to go with this project.

The ministry argues that the project is the most sensible one they could come up with. Constantly repairing the crumbling highways, says spokesperson Nicole Ste-Marie, would cost more than tearing it down and rebuilding it. Most people, even those who dislike the project, agree with that, in principle at least. There’s no denying the Turcot interchange, along with the stretch of Highway 20 running from the Angrignon, de la Verendrye and Montreal West interchanges, are in sore need of radical change. Built for Expo 67, the Turcot is a crumbling, if eye-catching and daring relic of an age when the car was king and Montreal’s future seemingly boundless. Even at 40-plus years, it is still a major player in the city’s traffic system, with an estimated 280,000 vehicles using the roadway every day. The new project would be able to handle some 306,000.

DATE WITH A WRECKING BALL: Cazelais Street

Sick and scared

“I like the structure, in a strange way,” says Jody Negley of the Comité des citoyens du village des Tanneries (CCTV), a local group named after the area’s industrial heritage. “It has its own beauty in a very monumental kind of way.”

Negley says the area’s imminent demise has, paradoxically, given it life. When the project was announced, residents began to mobilize to save their homes and their community. With some 160 to 200 dwellings at risk of expropriation (with the ministry paying each dwelling three months’ rent and moving expenses), and a community effectively wiped off the map, a sense of urgency has descended on its residents. Mobilisation Turcot, an active and vocal citizens’ group, was created, a street fair was held and activists set up a network of friends, Web sites, discussion forums and applied political pressure to keep the fight going.

Besides being scattered, the locals fear that the project will also damage the health of people who remain—which is already precarious. St-Henri residents have a lower life expectancy than their wealthier neighbours up the hill, and being flooded with car exhaust, they fear, won’t help. “We talked to experts about the potential for harm and it is pretty significant,” she says.

On the CCVT’s discussion board, studies and news reports about links between traffic exhaust and low infant birth weights, low IQs, higher incidences of asthma and senior mortality abound. “It’s alarming that the government isn’t taking steps to protect its own population,” Negley says. “Half the population is being expropriated, and the other half is going to have to live within steps of one of the biggest construction sites in Canada….

“Until the time that the air quality improves, it is irresponsible for governments to put people next to a highway,” she says. “We need a real transformation in terms of policies on air quality and vulnerable populations.”

Fighting with city hall

The project—and the fight against it—extends beyond the Turcot interchange and the people living in its shadow. Alongside citizens’ groups, academic urban planners and environmentalists, local politicians are joining together to denounce the project and urge its rethink. Last November, Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay’s office issued a press release “demanding that the Quebec Ministry of Transport reevaluates certain fundamental elements of the project to redevelop the Turcot interchange.” While the city’s executive committee, like everyone else, does not dispute the need for a change, they want the new project to be more than just “a paved corridor, but rather a real urban project integrated into its milieu.” The city is also calling for more and better help for the families about to be expropriated, and more measures to minimize noise and pollution.

But if any politician is taking the project to heart, it has to be Pierre Fréchette, the neighbourhood’s salty-tongued borough councillor. Fréchette is as St-Henri as they come, with roots in the area stretching back to his great-grandmother. A lifelong borough resident (“and I hope I die here”), Fréchette is unquestionably passionate about the need to redo the demolition job’s plans.

“I was born on Cazelais, it’s my home,” he says. He says the project was “shoved down our throats” and, to kick back, he organized the citizens groups’ meetings and claims credit for urging the Tremblay administration to speak out against the project’s current incarnation. Popular with his constituents—Jody Negley singles him out for praise among all the elected officials—and obviously enthusiastic about politics, Fréchette understands that expropriation is an unavoidable evil, but one that does not have to be unnecessarily brutal.

“What I would love to see is the creation of some sort of co-op” for expropriated residents, he tells the Mirror. “I said in 2008 that we should have a civilized expropriation.”

St-Henri already has one of the highest rates of social housing—including rent-controlled housing (HLM), non-profit housing and co-ops—in the city. According to figures drawn from city and federal statistics provided to the Mirror by POPIR, a Southwest borough low-income housing advocacy organization, 25 per cent of all units in the Southwest borough are of one form of social housing or another. For St-Henri, the number climbs to nearly 30 per cent. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, there are 25,243 social housing units in the Southwest and Verdun.

But with an estimated $10.5-billion in megaprojects coming to the Southwest borough, from the Turcot to Griffintown to the MUHC and the CN yards, Fréchette says housing speculation is ramping up. The housing issue also worries the staff at POPIR.

“We need more housing in the neighbourhood,” says POPIR’s Karina Montambeault. “Affordable housing is becoming rarer and rarer. Will these [expropriated] people find new homes in St-Henri? I doubt it.”

Neighbourhood slice and dice

What bothers Peter McQueen about the Turcot project is the wasted potential. As the NDG Green Party of Quebec candidate and member of the St-Raymond Residents Association, McQueen says the strip of land at the bottom of the Falaise St-Jacques is going to waste. By abutting the cliff, McQueen says, the proposed new highway will eliminate any chance of a small park at its feet, and cut access off from NDG to the city’s southwest.

“We strongly favour the creation of a linear park, with a wetland and a bike path,” he says. The current proposal, he says, seems to favour “freeing up the land near Notre-Dame [for industrial purposes].” McQueen says that, since the land is too polluted to build housing on top of it, it could be transformed into a large park with minimum fuss—or returned to its train yard roots, this time for commuter trains, since the word on almost everyone’s lips these days is sustainability.

“What we could have is a green right of way,” he says. Using a new north-south axis, the city could link lower NDG to the Lachine Canal and LaSalle, then Angrignon Park, on to the Douglas Hospital’s grounds and eventually the river. “We could fill in a network of green, linear parks in the West End,” he says.

All of this is a lot for Transports Québec to digest, although Nicole Ste-Marie, the ministry spokesperson, is trying. She says the current plan includes a bike path along the length of the highway, and reserved lanes are planned for public transport. That isn’t enough for advocates of a direct light rail link between downtown and Trudeau airport like McQueen, but Ste-Marie says “part of the project includes increasing the number of lanes that could allow more buses to encourage people to use public transportation.” The ministry wants to increase overall bus use and reduce the number of cars on the road, even while planning for an increase in the number of vehicles the highway can handle.

Ken McLaughlin, who runs the Walking Turcot blog, has built an online identity that began with his fascination with the structure. Summing up many southwesterners’ feelings, he writes in an e-mail that he has “never loved elevated freeways but Turcot grew on me for its daring lines, curves, height and energy. It’s a masterwork of 1960s Quebec architecture and engineering and I can easily imagine how much fun its designers must have had. Still, I think the decision is not well thought out…. The plan to replace it seems like the least attractive option of all.”

Mobilisation Turcot meets next on Thursday, Feb. 5 at CRCS St-Zotique (75 Sir George Etienne Cartier, Rm 118), at 6:30 p.m.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE
TURCOT PLAN, SEE MTQ.GOUV.QC.CA.
FOR MORE ABOUT CITIZEN
RESISTANCE TO SAME, SEE
MOBILISATION-TURCOT.INFO.