by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

The city presented Mike Fish with a medal last week for launching Save Montreal back in 1974, a group that helped preserve the city's old buildings.

It reminds me of a much lesser-known group that sprung up around the same time.

It was a late afternoon inside a downtown Victorian living room jammed with too many books and highbacked armchairs that the other movement to deal with Montreal's architectural heritage came to life. The redbrick building with the long verandah tucked behind the Seville theatre is now a women's shelter, but in 1975 it was a petri dish of unconventional and contrarian thought. Visitors ranged from dedicated-but-unmedicated psych ward outpatients to lawyers who would later be imprisoned for fraud. My dad, a chronic civic busybody, convened over the gang that gathered at the home daily to discuss their visions (and possibly hallucinations).

During an era when such elegant Golden-Square-Mile buildings were being levelled with all the relish that could be mustered, these men met behind closed wooden shutters that kept light out of the bay windows. Their goal was to create a new organization to deal with the architectural anarchy that reigned in the jewel on the St. Lawrence.

At the time, downtown landowners like David Azrieli owned homes like the historic Van Horne Mansion, a place that generated too little income to justify its staggering tax bill. Azrieli bought a $5 demolition permit and tore down this irreplaceable treasure so he could replace it with the hideous Liquid Air skyscraper. Many were outraged and politically mobilized by the runaway wreckage.

Those who wanted to enter the political debate over such issues had to move fast, so the earnest, old-fashioned men with wrinkled shirts and sweaty brows created a new organization called Build Montreal Up.

Build Montreal Up wanted to encourage development and construction here. It was meant to counter Fish's Save Montreal, which fought the runaway demolitionism. I suspect Build Montreal Up found Save Montreal a bit sanctimonious and smarty-pants.

Built Montreal Up never got built up itself.

But Save Montreal shaped the city we know, so much so that last week city hall - its former foe - formally fêted its main dude Michael Fish. I went for the booze and a good speech. The salty-tongued architect can deliver an almost hypnotizing rap, savaging the evils of greedy construction villains whom he routinely describes in the most enjoyable of expletives.

The marbled hall at Hôtel de Ville was full of notables, including a grinning but standoffish Prof Joe Baker, Esmond Choeke, who reports all the Celine-news for the Enquirer, and Phyllis Bronfman, who stood unapproachably in the corner. Dinu "I'm in a Hurry" Bumbaru was there in an important-looking trenchcoat, as was the agelessly sizzling Helen Fotopulos. I hit it off with Richard Cannings, a former TV newsguy, Ottawa preservationist and city councillor. I later Googled him and found articles suggesting he once sought to ban winter bike driving and wanted to check for bacteria in restaurant mints. Strange.

Fish struggled self-consciously through his polite talk in French rather than let loose his usual machine-gun diatribes, which sometimes take aim at folks like developer René Lepine, who adorns his home with bronze statues of himself and his family, or the duo of Landau and Cohen, who persuaded the city to turf out 100 tenants on its downtown property in favour of a parking lot. I'd also have liked to hear Fish blast the Caisse de Dépôt for owning way too much property downtown or about his experiences as a small developer and how he turned down the plentiful bribes that flowed with abandon.

Fish's speech mentioned that Drapeau once accused him of wanting to turn Montreal into a museum. Fish denied it. But now he wishes he hadn't. In his full maturity Fish now thinks Montreal should indeed be a museum. And in a way, much of its best parts are just that, thanks in part to him and likeminded others.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca