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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

A trip to Montreal East

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Earlier this month, Montreal City‘s Kate McDonnell took a trip with her friend Ben Soo to Montreal East, where they poked around the vast industrial areas that make up most of the small, overlooked town on the east end of Montreal Island. Kate posted some shots on Urbanphoto and wrote a bit about the place:

There’s always a tang of sulphur in the air from the hydrocarbon cracking. The streets are in poor shape and the sidewalks rudimentary: people mostly don’t walk here, they drive to and from work, and big tanker trucks chew up the roadbed. Even so, Wikipedia says 3,822 people lived here in 2006. There are still some overgrown lots, and plenty of wildflowers in nooks and crannies, and of course there are tracks for freight trains too.

Recent stats show that the refineries in east-end Montreal put out as much greenhouse gas as all its cars do, if not more. Some of it would be for heating oil, asphalt and other products, but most would be for diesel and gasoline.

Montreal East has always intrigued me but I never got a chance to visit. I emailed Kate to find out more about what she thought. Here’s what she wrote back:

We had a look around the whole place. The residential area’s sort of depressing. Just little apartment buildings and houses of the
1950s-ish vintage you might see in Hochelaga or parts of Verdun. Most of the rest of the town consists of big private lots full of tanks and oil refineries. There’s a metal refinery on one side road, near the tracks. The whole area smells of sulphur and stats have shown it’s not a healthy place to live.

There’s a whole chunk of odd stuff in the middle that’s not oil refinery stuff, it’s a real mess, several streets of broken-down looking warehouses and the like. Ben and I have been driving around town late at night on and off for years, and I’d marked down this area as something to have a look at someday by daylight. So we did. After we walked around it became clear the area was some sort of outlying garment trade business, maybe a dye works? We saw a single employee, who didn’t speak to us, but there were trucks clearly loading or unloading in a closed yard, stuff was being done inside some of these really decrepit-looking buildings — some linked together by ducts — and we noticed that the roadbed in one place (this area isn’t even completely paved) had fragments of fabric of different colours embedded in it. It’s difficult to believe that these tar-paper shed-like buildings are up to spec for fire and safety — they don’t look at all savoury places to work.

I suspect some of the other boarded up and run-down warehouse-like structures in that area just might be grow-ops, because it would be a great place to stash one – there’s plenty of electric power available and the area’s so grim that only nutbars like Ben and me are likely to come nosing about. Not that we got a whiff of anything.

Both Kate and Ben ended up with some great photos. Montreal East is certainly off the radar — maybe for good reason.

All photos by Ben Soo

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5 comments

  1. It’s cool how the bike path goes right through it, too. If I recall correctly, there’s a Lafleur’s in the midst of it where you can stop off for a bite (the veggie dog, of course).

  2. Personally, I’d be absolutely terrified of the entire eastern quadrant going up in HUGE fire-related explosion.

    How can anyone possibly want to live out there amongst all that?

  3. However – isn’t Montreal East one of the wealthiest cities on the Island? They did vote to demerge, presumably because all that “oil money” guaranteed them better services than those which Montreal could offer.

  4. Living next to an oil refinery is the closest thing to living in hell. I mean with the sulphur smell and other chemicals in the air. How does the east end affect the air quality for all of Montreal?

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