Dorcester Square

  

restoration of historic dorchester square almost completed, but what about the potholes?

By ANDY RIGA TUE, MAR 23 2010 COMMENTS(0) METROPOLITAN NEWS

Filed under: dorchester square, history, Place du Canada, Dominion Square

Fear not, downtown office workers: you'll have a nice place to munch on your sandwiches this summer.

Dorchester Square has been inaccessible since a major $23-million refurbishment started last year. After a winter break, the work is set to begin in the coming days, city spokesperson Renée Pageau tells Metropolitan News.

A popular lunchtime spot, the square will reopen to the public around the end of June, Pageau said. No more "threadbare lawns, rutted walkways and clunky picnic tables," as Gazette colleague Jeff Heinrich wrote in a feature about the project last year. The new square will feature new trees, new lighting, new granite walkways, new benches and more flowerbeds. 

And what about the embarrassing Dorchester Square St. (AKA rue du Square Dorchester)?

That's the one between the square and the stately Dominion Square Building, home to The Gazette. It's used by many visitors to the city; tour buses stop there, and it's home to a key tourism-information bureau. The roadbed is a mess of potholes and the cobblestone crosswalk is pockmarked, with many stones missing or askew.

Pageau said the street is a local one so it's up to the Ville Marie borough to repair it.

Jacques-Alain Lavallée, a spokesperson for borough, tells me Ville Marie will patch potholes on the street soon.

As for repaving the street and dealing with the crosswalk, he said it's unclear whether the borough will do the work this year.

So the square will be closed during the mid-June Montreal Grand Prix, the city's biggest tourism draw, and the road may be a mess all summer tourist season.

Oh well. Maybe next year.

Once the Dorchester Square project is completed, work will begin on Place du Canada. That job is to be completed by 2012.

The $23-million price tag covers the restoration and modernization of both squares.

For more on the Dorchester Square and Place du Canada renovations, visit this website devoted to the projects. You'll find the detailed plans (and more historical maps and photos) inthis 38-page pdf.  

More maps and historical photos are on this page on the website of Claude Cormier Landscape Architects, which is working on the projects.

Here's a shot of Dorchester Square, circa 1910:

This shot, from The Gazette's archives, show the street (the Dominion Square building is on the right), from Metcalfe St., in the 1960s:

The two squares - Dorchester Square and Place du Canada - used to be one, known as Dominion Square.

This is from a McCord Museum page about Montreal's public squares:

 

A key location in Montreal's history, Dominion Square is bordered by Peel Street to the west, between De La Gauchetière and St. Catherine streets, although it is no longer known by that name. The southern section, below René Lévesque Boulevard, was renamed Place du Canada in 1966, while the northern section has been called Dorchester Square since 1987. These name changes are fairly recent when compared with the square's history, which goes back to the late 18th century.

In 1795, for public health reasons, municipal officials decided to prohibit burials within the city's fortifications. Shortly thereafter, the Notre Dame de Montréal parish council opened a new cemetery in the St. Antoine district, on the site of what would later become Dominion Square. Montreal was just entering a period of rapid urban expansion, and it wasn't long before the new cemetery was once again engulfed by the city. In 1855, the parish council therefore closed the St. Antoine cemetery and opened Notre Dame des Neiges cemetery on Mount Royal. Plans to use the land of the former Catholic cemetery for real estate development were halted by the Sanitary Association of Montreal, which feared that excavation might trigger a renewed outbreak of cholera: the victims of the 1832 epidemic had been buried in the cemetery. It was therefore decided that there would be no excavation and that the site would be turned into a public space, which was done in 1880.

While monuments commemorating Montreal's links with the British Empire are scattered around the square, French-Canadian influence was ensured when Bishop Bourget had Mary, Queen of the World, Cathedral, a small-scale replica of St. Peter's in Rome, built in the square's southeast corner. Toward the end of the 19th century, Montreal's business district migrated to this new area north of the old city. The celebrated Windsor Hotel, which opened in 1878 on Peel Street, on the west side of the square, attracted many well-known figures, including British prime minister Sir Winston Churchill and French actress Sarah Bernhardt. The ice palaces built opposite the Windsor during the annual winter carnival drew huge crowds. The most impressive one, having a tower over 33 m high, was erected for the 1889 carnival. That same year, Canadian Pacific Railway added a new page to the history of Dominion Square by building Windsor Station on the square's southwest corner and making it its head office. On the north side of the square, the Dominion Square Building, which opened in 1930, was for a long time the largest retail and office complex in Canada. As the buildings surrounding this downtown square began to get taller and taller, the City brought in a by-law prohibiting towers taller than Mount Royal.