by PATRICK LEJTENYI

It was, in many ways, a classic scene last Friday night in the gym of Notre-Dame de la Défense, a Little Italy elementary school near the Jean-Talon Market: a business-type man is surrounded by irate citizens berating him for attempting to destroy their neighbourhood with a construction project. The man, trying to speak but repeatedly cut off, eventually sits down at a table, visibly riled, not to be heard from again. For the rest of evening, neighbourhood residents by and large denounce the project, which they say will change the traditional, unique, open-air market into one more upscale, more crowded and far less pleasant.

The crux of the problem is parking. There simply isn’t enough of it to accommodate the market’s popularity, so the city is resorting to something it tried, and failed, to do in 1998 - build more of it. The project will add hundreds of additional spots in an underground garage below the market’s eastern section on Henri-Julien. Above it will be a new, 16,000-square-foot building housing boutiques, community space and offices. The total cost is slated at $16-million, split evenly between the provincial government and the Corporations de gestion des marchés publics de Montréal (CGMPM), a non-profit organization that manages the market.

But it’s the incidentals of the project that concern residents most. The noise, the increased traffic in an already congested area, the effect it will have on the price of goods sold at the market and the changing of the neighbourhood’s very make-up are all at stake, they say.

"Traffic is a problem only for 40 days of the year," says Anne Thibault, a protest leader at the Comité logement Petite-Patrie. "The problem lasts from mid-May to mid-September on weekends only. There’s a former police station on Casgrain that’s been empty for years - if they need more office space, why not renovate there?"

"They want to turn the market into a supermarket, where people will stay longer - most shoppers now spend less than an hour there - with all kinds of terrasses and fast food spots," adds Esther Bozzer, a long-time Little Italy resident.

Nonsense, says Stéphane Ricci, the director of the CGMPM. He states that the market will not lose any of its distinct atmosphere, nor will rents for the sellers increase. He dismisses fears that the price of produce will rise.

"I found it unfortunate that the information presented [by the project’s opponents] last Friday wasn’t correct," he says. "The new structure will be a single storey with the same kinds of stalls as there are now, with some boutiques to sell products that can’t be sold outside due to hygiene, such as meats and dairy products."

Nevertheless, on Feb. 12, residents are being invited to sign a register to push for a petition to force a vote on the market’s future at the local borough office. They need 301 signatures. "We’ll be organizing transport and daycare services for people who need it," Thibault says. "We’ve been doing a lot of door-to-door and people seem very receptive." :