right: Le Dalhousie cul-de-sac, a wedge of space between the CNR viaduct and the New City Gas buildng
below: a still from Théâtre Nulle Part .’s ‘L’espace quotidien’
The transformation of the Dalhousie cul-de-sac was just one of many debates over the city’s contentious plan to revitalise Griffintown. Local stakeholders — business proprietors, residents and members of the ad hoc Community for the Sustainable Redevelopment of Griffintown (CSRG) opposed the Dalhousie Corridor project and circulated a petition to stop its development. 2 Key issues were increased air and noise pollution, high density traffic, the projected and prohibitive cost of the project (originally estimated at $119 million) and how the change would compromise the integrity of existing historic buildings in the neighbourhood. These concerns were presented to city officials through a series of public consultations. In June 2010, the community initiative Le Corridor culturel de Griffintown named this cul-de-sac ‘ Le Dalhousie ’, and launched a number of community events on the site. Between July 2010 and August 2011, Le Dalhousie became a site that invited creative responses, rehearsing its own publicness. The site’s reclamation for public and social activities appeared as an act of resistance to municipal plans for the bus corridor. Equally, those temporarily using the site were determining another kind of space that
reorients the discourse away from the tropes of historical preservation and resistance, and towards a re-conceptualisation of what constitutes public space. Spatially, Le Dalhousie is a wedge that defies those spatial boundaries typically associated with what constitutes a public space, such as the public square. Le Dalhousie is shadowed by two historically modern structures that frame this recess in the city. From a performative point of view, the surfaces of Le Dalhousie’s edges provide a number of scenographic possibilities. The mouth of the cul-de-sac increases its volume. Its texture is characterised by a bruised and cracking surface on the remains of the New City Gas building and rust etching itself into the skin of the Canadian National Railway viaduct. Le Dalhousie has an evolving ecological life: a tree grows out of the viaduct façade and peeling asphalt reveals weeds pushing through the street’s original nineteenth- century cobblestones. From an architectural perspective, Griffintown, and likewise interstitial urban spaces like Le Dalhousie , while perceived to be indeterminate, are in fact determined by more than the residue of the site’s urban morphology.
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2 As a result of the public consultations the original proposals for the Dalhousie Corridor were revised in 2010. To date, it appears the Dalhousie Corridor project has been terminated. See www.griffintown.org
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