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Empty yards >> West-end train fields face industrial future
“Whatever they end up putting there, I just hope it brings jobs to the area,” says Pelletier. “I don’t mind if it stays industrial. They’ve made a fair deal of noise already, so it won’t be a change if they keep on doing so.” Those who could visualize the strip dividing NDG from St-Henri transformed into an urban oasis of parks or social housing shouldn’t get their hopes up. According to one residential developer, the empty lands hold little hope for becoming a new city neighbourhood. “We analyzed the land, and price-wise it doesn’t make sense. The price was high and it’s a railyard, so you just know fundamentally there’s a lot of pollution in there,” says Jean Gilbert, vice-president of True North Properties. Gilbert says that one major obstacle to building on many sections of the southwest remains the cost of decontaminating soil, which has jumped from $90 to $235 per cubic ton since January, due to a provincial rearrangement of pollution standards. He says that his company’s current project at de la Montagne and Notre Dame was not nearly as polluted as the Turcot Yards and yet still cost bundles to clean. “In the last century there were houses where people would burn wood and coal and then bury the ashes in the backyard,” he says of the downtown property, “but decontaminating the soil still cost 10 times more than we thought it would.” The railway has agreed in principle to parcel the Turcot Yards off into three sections and sell them to separate industrial and commercial buyers, whose identities cannot be yet revealed, according to CNR media rep Louise Fillion. But the city official in charge of the dossier says it’s too soon to know what the city visualizes as the future of the site. “It’s an extremely complex urban environment and the Ministry of Transport has about half a dozen major projects in that area in terms of road changes. We want to get a clear vision about that property,” says Cameron Charlebois, Montreal’s assistant director general responsible for urban and economic development. Charlebois says that the McGill University hospital complex has bid on the eastern portion of the terrain to build laundry services for the upcoming superhospital. The other two sections have also attracted buyers, although who will be allowed to build what on the site is far from being determined and remains subject to borough council input. “We’ve got to see what’s feasible on this site from an urban point of view and the city point of view. We’re going to make a specific urban plan and that could take several months, so it’ll be a bit of a spell before it’s decided,” Charlebois says. : |
For 40 years Léo Pelletier has lived just a stone’s throw
from the fence that separates his neighbourhood from a 200-acre valley
under the St-Jacques cliff. Since 1963, the residents of the isolated
labyrinth of cul-de-sacs known as the Turcot Village could peek over
and witness countless trains rolling by to stop and switch their cargo
containers onto trucks. It’s a view he’ll no longer know,
as the Canadian National Railway has moved their loading activities
to the 360-acre Taschereau Yards in the area straddling Ville St-Laurent
and LaSalle. Now the Turcot Yards have suddenly become the island’s
largest and most sought-after unused space.