Devimco urban plan view for Village Griffintown development, by Arbour and Associates, 2007
Economic decline and depopulation followed the closing of the Lachine Canal in 1959. In 1962 Griffintown was re-zoned light industrial and the City no longer maintained social services in the area. By 1967 one public document described Parc Gallery as abandoned. Despite the absence of lighting and water fountains, the park remained in continual use as a baseball field and, by the 1990s, an official dog run. 1 People from across the southwest of Montréal bring their dogs to this space for fresh air and exercise. The chain-link fence that surrounds the park today marks the exact borders that activists created eighty years ago. Rosalyn Deutsche argues that publicness is not a given or a natural feature of urban parks and squares. For Deutsche, and David Harvey, it is only when space is the site of conflict, not consensus, that its publicness is exercised and is thus meaningful. Taking this critical stance as our guide, pouf! called upon park users to resist the City’s decision to strip Parc Gallery of its public status and to insist on their collective ownership as citizens of Montréal. 2 In this way, the moment when the imminent loss of the park entered its users’ awareness became the moment in which its ‘publicness’ began to actualise. 1 All official dog parks in Montréal have signs on their gates identifying them as such (there are many informal dog runs too, which do not have these signs). Although Parc Gallery lost its standing as public space in 2007, the sign remained, one of the reasons why the park’s users didn’t realise the space was slated for development. 2 The normal social contract between a city and its citizens is buried under the grandiose legacy projects of politicians, a mafia- driven building trade and widespread corruption. Citizens believe that power in this city is not looking out for them — roads are a commonly-cited example, poorly built and then re-built at great expense by an industry that through huge campaign contributions directly puts mayors and councillors into power. The Charbonneau Commission has made this open secret more open, but so far there has been no change.
Griffintown’s urban morphology and social history are part of Montréal’s larger transition from a hub of industrial production and shipping in the nineteenth century to its current emphasis on leisure and consumption. Since 2005, the re-purposing of Griffintown’s industrial urban landscape for waterfront parkland and upscale condominiums has signalled this shift. In the late- nineteenth century, labourers lived and worked in this heavily industrialised district, separated from the city’s salaried and professional classes by a steep slope and several railway lines. The impoverished living conditions of French, Irish and English immigrant workers inspired Herbert Brown Ames’ 1897 book, The City Below the Hill: A Sociological Study of a Portion of the City of Montreal . pouf! ’s intervention took place on a lot that was once at the centre of this district. Archives indicate that after the Ogdensburg Coal and Towing Company closed towards the end of WWI, this rectangular plot of land was abandoned. Heritage specialist, David B. Hanna notes that Irish community activists fought in the 1930s to create the first public green space on this site, called the Basin Street Playground (below). In 1945 the City of Montréal purchased the land and it became known as Parc Gallery.
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Plan view of Parc Gallery, indicated by the large dark rectangle at centre- left of the map. St.Anne’s Church is directly above the right-half of Parc Gallery. detail, St.Ann’s Ward, Land Use Map of Montréal, 1947
There are also wildly different rules regarding public space from one district to another. For example, you can be fined for sitting on the grass in public parks in the Central South borough while in other parts of the city these laws either do not exist or are not enforced.
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