by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Montreal's commercial strips might seem like a haphazard series of shops and businesses, but behind them sits a desperate set of exuberant characters trying to get you to come spend time - and cash - on their street.

Wellington, one of the very few strips I'd go out of my way to visit, might seem like it was given no thought at all, but even they have a strategy. "Some places on Wellington haven't been painted in years, it's a little shocking when you walk by," says city councillor and former Verdun mayor Georges Bossé. So the paint comes out this summer, as do the shovels. After 13 years of merchants chipping into a special fund, Wellington's electrical wires will be buried. Bossé's also twisting arms to get the few remaining businesses at the dilapidated end of the street transformed into housing. He's also offering cash to anybody willing to clothe Wellington shoppers, noting that while some strips house up to 60 per cent clothing boutiques, only 20 per cent of Wellington's stores sell clothes. That might explain the way people dress down there.

Even the well-heeled shopping strips battle for your visit. On Sherbrooke West, stores are wrestling against the big box one-stop buy-all stores of St-Jacques. Evelyn Znoj of the Sherbrooke Street Merchants Association explains that, "Our goal is to keep the little guy going." She says that such associations don't deliberately poach businesses away from other strips, although she doesn't sound disappointed to announce that two restaurants, the Alex H and the B&M, have recently moved down from Monkland.

Strip boosters speak with frothy exuberance and all consider their turf one groovy café or artsy loft gallery away from absolute heaven. Some even welcome the colonization of cool, such as Ontario's merchant-group-guy Roger Gallagher, who lets me know that a hip Outremont café plans to open a new branch on his row. More bakeries and fromageries and fewer 99-cent pizza slice joints seem to be his formula. Oh, he also gurgles with boyish delight in discussing a $30-million, 290-home project planned near Valois. The "terrific," "beautiful," "nice" Ontario strip that once saw one in three storefronts abandoned is no longer "a place where people think somebody is about to grab their purse," he reports.

If there was a trophy for one-upmanship in enthusiasm, it would go to the St-Hubert Plaza folks. I always saw St-Hubert Plaza as a kinda dumb place, with its ridiculous thingies overhanging the sidewalks and lame stores with cartoon T-shirts in the windows. Strip association boss Edith Keays has tried to convince me I'm wrong. Six years ago, when she took over the organization, the strip between Bellechasse and Jean-Talon was home to 72 empty storefronts. Now there's only one. That's thanks partly to a hefty $100,000 in grants doled out to trendy entrepreneurs willing to set up shop. The next step is to attract more hipsters with café terraces and by converting second floors into groovy lofts: 12 lofts are done, 50 more await. She admits that reviews of the 16-year-old glass-sidewalk awnings are mixed, but "it'd cost millions to get rid of them." And not everybody is crazy about the one-side-only parking deal, but she assures the world that "eight big parking lots lie just off the strip. But everybody wants to park right in front of the store."

Sylvain Gagné once organized the Notre-Dame merchants in St-Henri. First thing he did was to nice-ify empty storefronts and lobby then-mayor Bourque, who eventually agreed to demolish an ugly overpass. Gagné blames merchants themselves for "95 per cent of the problems" faced by the area. "Some don't want to chip in to help the street and others don't want to rent out their empty spaces even for reasonable prices."

Even as a retired strip booster, Gagné still raves about his street. "Everybody wants to live down here now." Some habits die hard. :

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