Montreal’s Olympic Stadium in Febraury, 2024. The stadium is now in the midst of a four-year closure as a new fixed roof is installed.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Daniel Sanger is a journalist, writer and consultant on urban issues in Montreal. His most recent book is Saving the City: The Challenge of Transforming a Modern Metropolis.
Most of us are too young to remember, and those of us old enough have probably forgotten, but Toronto’s CN Tower and Montreal’s Olympic Stadium opened within days of each other 50 years ago. Both shouted “Look at me!” to the wider world and quickly became icons of their cities, instantly recognizable, visible from miles – er, kilometres – away. (The year 1976, when both buildings opened, was also during Canada’s transition to the metric system.)
Meanwhile, the building experience of each structure proved to be something of a portent for the country’s principal metropoles over subsequent decades.
The CN Tower, which opened to the public on June 26, cost $63-million to build, was built on schedule, and paid itself off within 15 years. Toronto, already surging in 1976, boomed. The Olympic Stadium, meanwhile, cost $800-million by the time it opened on July 17 – and, well, it has never really been completed, and certainly it never paid for itself. Mired in scandal years before delivery, and falling apart almost immediately, it heralded several troubled decades for Montreal, decades which were anything but prosperous. (The stadium is now in the midst of a four-year closure as a new fixed roof is installed – at a cost of $870-million.)
The Big O during the 1976 Olympic Games opening ceremonies. The 1970s in Montreal ushered in an era of public buildings that, for better or worse, strove to stand out.The Globe and Mail
In terms of public architecture, the debacle of the Big O (or “Big Owe,” as some prefer) also cast a chill. If the 1960s in Montreal saw Habitat ‘67 and the metro system (rubber wheels!), and the 1970s the Olympic Stadium, not to mention the Olympic Village and the Velodrome (now the wonderful Biodome), the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s saw not that much that could be described as m’as-tu vu? architecture – public buildings that, for better or worse, strive to be different, to be seen, to stand out. If not exactly becoming sensible in managing taxpayer money, public authorities in Quebec became cautious, frileux when it came to big-ticket architectural audacity.
One recent construction, however, suggests things may have thawed a bit. It’s not a building made for a summer party like Expo 67 or the Olympics. It’s largely underground, so it can’t be said to stand out. It is unlikely to ever be visited by hordes of tourists and, indeed, isn’t even open to the public. Still, the Bellechasse bus garage – yes, that is its official name, since it happens to be on Rue Bellechasse – is a structure which suggests that the daring, the ambition, the confidence that Montreal felt in the 1960s and 1970s might start to be seen in its public buildings again.
Like the Big O, the new bus garage went obscenely over budget. It was supposed to cost $254-million, but it is now creeping up on $600-million.
From the sky, and Google Maps, the garage looks like a scaled-down version of the Apple headquarters in Cupertino: a giant ring, with green space at its centre. From Rue Bellechasse, it resembles a futuristic temple at the top of a large mound, with 70 metres or so of sloping park leading up to it from the sidewalk. The meadow-like park is divided into three irregular sections by glass and concrete walls that bring natural light into the cavernous garage below, and paths lead up each section to the top of the mound. There, under immense beams of engineered wood, is a sheltered plaza-like space with tables and benches, which in turn leads to another, smaller sloping park down the back of the building.
The business of the garage – the coming and going, the repairing and cleaning of hundreds of buses – is carried out remarkably discreetly via the two streets, Rue St-Dominique and Avenue de Gaspé, which run along the sides of the building and from which huge doors lead to the ramps descending to the garage’s depths.
In this way, for anyone who is not a Société de transport de Montréal bus driver or maintenance worker, the garage is more park and public space than anything else, and on the border between the dense Plateau and Rosemont neighbourhoods, it has become, since opening last year, a place to lounge, read, or have an outdoor beer. It is most magical in the evening, when the sun sets to the northwest, directly up Rue Casgrain, and the lights come on behind the frosted-glass walls of the above-ground portion of the garage, and the birds and insects wrap up their days among the wild bergamot, the goldenrod, the cornflower, the milkweed, the yarrow and the umpteen other plants in the sloping meadows.
That said, it is one expensive place for a bucolic beer. Like the Big O, the new bus garage went obscenely over budget. It was supposed to cost $254-million – pricey enough for a garage, even a very large one – but it is now creeping up on $600-million. Negligence has been alleged, lawsuits have been filed. Like the Big O, it missed its delivery date by years. And again like the Big O, whose most interesting feature – a retractable Kevlar roof designed to be lifted like a magician’s cape – never really worked, one of the main functions of the bus garage won’t be utilized any time soon.
Valérie Plante ran for mayor in 2017 promising that, if elected, hundreds of new electric buses would soon be prowling Montreal’s streets. After winning, her administration realized that to fulfill the promise, charging facilities for the buses would also be required. So the underground garage was proposed. Two years ago, however, it was determined that, given the fact that lithium batteries occasionally burst into flame and cause fires that are a challenge to put out, the sprinkler and ventilation systems weren’t up to scratch. The timeline now for electric buses to start using the garage: “quelques années.” Several years.
Still, until then and for years afterward, the garage – or the park and plaza above it – will continue to be a wonderful place to flâner among wildflowers, have a picnic, or quietly survey the city as it goes about its business all around it. In time, like the Big O, Montrealers may even forget the cost, stop thinking of what else might have been done with all that money, and feel a bit of pride about a building that tried something new.