THANKS for stopping by, I do my best to acknowledge when someone leaves a comment,you do not have to be a member here & everyone is welcome. Ps: This site is monitored but not actively posting on a regular basis. Mostly these are stories & some photos saved from a defunct site known as Verdun Connections which was on MSN Groups initially then on a social network called Multiply.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Verdun Condo
The Montreal Gazette has a weekly article named 'shelter' where they review or visit someone's house / Condo & show us the updates etc etc ,.We've posted some before, but this particular one is in Verdun ( although I do not remember this street at all) Do you ? Rue de la Poudriere ???Shelter
Shelter is a weekly series featuring a conversation with tenants or condo owners.
Occupants: Diego Creimer-Medina, 38, Julie-Audree Marcoux, sons Felix, 7, Gaspard, 2
Location: Rue de la Poudriere, in Verdun
Size: 1,450 sq. ft. on 2 floors
Bought for: $245,000 in 2009
Been there: one year
After living together in three other residences, Argentine-born Diego Creimer-Medina and Quebecker Julie-Audree Marcoux bought a split-level condo in an area of Verdun that started undergoing redevelopment in 1985. The terrain where a factory once stood was gradually transformed into elegant condos, townhouses and co-ops on winding tree-lined streets.
A two-floor walkup brings you to their door, which opens to an extremely high-ceilinged living room. Overhead, the upper- floor bedroom overlooks the living room.
That's quite a high ceiling.
Creimer-Medina: Seven-and-a-half metres. The three-panel bedroom window is almost three metres high.
Your living room furniture is eclectic but seems to match.
Creimer-Medina: It's a mix of IKEA, second-hand and some valuable pieces. The wooden, glass-panelled cabinet goes back to 1870. It's been fully refurbished. It belonged to Julie's great grandmother. That's the oldest piece we have. The chairs are 19th century -refurbished, too. All the rest is inexpensive stuff. But everything on the wall is original even if it's not particularly expensive. The elephant painting is from Uganda. The scroll is from Japan.
Marcoux: I bought it in a flea market in Japan. (Julie, a professional editor/ translator, lived in japan for five years and knows Japanese).
Creimer-Medina: We used to cover the table with an obi, the belt that goes around a kimono.
What are these small antique objects on the shelf?
Marcoux: This 19th century iron was my grandmom's. She used it to iron but also to make thin toast. It served for a while to hold doors ...
Creimer-Medina: The small scale for weighing letters belonged to my father and before that, to a post office in a little town in Argentina.
Was the kitchen always open to the living room like this, with a long narrow wooden bar-table?
Creimer-Medina: It was open but it was useless because it was only the width of the wall. Since there was not a lot of space in the kitchen to cook -and we cook every day - we needed an extra surface, so I made a bar out of pine wood with seven coats of varnish. I call this the 5-to-7 spot. Usually, guests with a glass of wine stand on one side and watch while we cook on the other.
The recessed kitchen lights create a pleasant effect.
Creimer-Medina: All the light sources are hidden. The worst light for creating any ambience comes from the ceiling. (Moving past a full bathroom and washer-dryer niche to one of two back rooms, where there's a child's bed, a crib and a closet, and a large, plastic playhouse.)
Creimer-Medina: We gave this room to the kids because we wanted to be upstairs. We'll put in bunk beds later so we can free space and so each can have a desk for school work. (The neighbouring guest room has a 1920s art deco desk with a computer and Julie's diplomas on the wall.)
Creimer-Medina: This room exits to steps leading downstairs to the garden where the kids play and we have a locker. The parking included with the condo is on the side. (Taking the stairs, we enter the master bedroom, full of light.)
Creimer-Medina: Here's the best view. You're overlooking the living room and outside. (The bedroom leads directly to a large terrace with tables and chairs, a barbecue, and two large potted shrubs.)
Creimer-Medina: We're on the terrace every day when it's not raining. Our apartment faces east. You can see the fireworks in the summer and also, when there are no leaves on the trees, the CBC building where I work.
How did you find this place?
Marcoux: Our agent called us the day it went on sale. We visited and bought it the next day. There were three other interested parties. Places here sell in 24 hours. Verdun still has good places that are comparatively low-priced.
What about local services?
Creimer-Medina: The Atwater market is a short walk -we use it a lot. They have excellent coffee. Metro stop Lasalle is at the corner. One reason we bought here was the metro. We wanted to get as close to downtown as our budget would allow. The metro and bike path are the two ways we get to work. We either drive Felix or he takes the schoolbus. The little one goes to daycare less than two kilometres
HF&RV
Remember traffic in the old days----
Traffic from the old days
.........................................HF&RV.....................................
I Don't Miss This ...Do You?
MONTREAL - Traffic pain this weekend doesn't end with the Champlain Bridge construction. Montreal motorists will face obstacles around Mount Royal, too, during Sunday's Grand Prix Cycliste de Montreal.
The Grand Prix will mainly affect the streets surrounding the mountain, some of which will also be closed Saturday. Bike paths along the race route will also be closed to non-participants. Parking at Mount Royal will not be available.
Park Ave. from Pine Ave. to Mont Royal Ave. W. will be closed Saturday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Côte Ste. Catherine Rd. from Park to Mont Royal will be closed starting Saturday at 7 a.m. until Sunday night at 10 p.m.
Sunday, roads including de la Tour, de la Polytechnique, and de la Rampe will close from 6 a.m. until 5:15 p.m. Camillien Houde Drive, Remembrance Rd., and a section of Côte des Neiges Rd. will close from 8 a.m. until 5:15 p.m.
Road work on the Champlain Bridge will proceed as follows:
Only one lane will be open on the northbound side of the bridge, heading toward Montreal, between 10 p.m. Friday night and 5 a.m. Monday.
The southbound side of the bridge, heading to the South Shore, will use only two lanes between midnight Friday night and noon Sunday. Only one lane will be available along the Nuns' Island bridge in this direction.
Motorists may want to consider using the Victoria, Mercier or Jacques Cartier bridges instead.
For more details on the bridge construction, visit champlainbridge.ca
....................................................HF&RV.............................
A Taste of the 'Main' to Verdun ..............what ?
$$
Good bet
4436 Wellington St. (near Rielle St.)
Phone: 514-439-1119
Licensed: Yes
Credit cards: Cash or Interac
Wheelchair accessible: Yes
Vegetarian friendly: No
Open: Sun. and Mon. 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., Tues. and Wed. noon to 10 p.m., Thur. to Sat. noon to 11 p.m.
Price range: Appetizers $4.95-$8.95, mains $7.95-$17.95, desserts $5
If Verdun is perpetually "the next Plateau," as has been heralded for well over a decade, the presence of Portuguese restaurants, traditionally concentrated around St. Laurent Blvd., brings it another step closer. So if Casa Manolo feels familiar, that's because it's a typical grill in what until recently would have been considered an atypical location.
Enter the blue-walled space, and check all the boxes: rustic tablecloths, guitarra music, bottles of Super-Bock, sizzling chicken, meaty fries, hot sauce with basting brushes. It's not pushing Portuguese cooking forward, but it's making good use of its charcoal. Opened in January by Manolo Ferreira Costa, who credits his Madeiran mother with sharing her recipes and is helped by his aunt in the kitchen (it would be great to eventually see a few regional dishes here), the story of this Casa is very much the story of Manolo: he grew up on the Plateau before moving to Verdun.
It's the kind of place you'd be glad to have down the street, and the neighbourhood seems to be on-board. On a Tuesday night, Manolo's terrasse was packed, partly because it was steamy inside (but only slightly more so than the humidity outside). The advantage of the interior tables was the view of the long grill behind the tiled counter, where the multi-generational team was hard at work. The waitresses were enthusiastic and almost too energetic.
We started with some decent sardines, always a great catch on a few counts: they're sustainable, pleasantly oily, moist, and, well, they actually tasted like fish. Soft croquettes stuffed with beef or shrimp were easier to just pop into the mouth, and the clean frying oil suggested an attentiveness behind the scenes.
For main courses, we made like tourists and ordered two combination platters so we could tour as many of the offerings as possible in one sitting.
First, the duo of shrimp and squid. Both elements were standard yet somewhat surprising: the shrimp was generously doused in garlic, and the calamari was gently marinated for an extra layer of spiciness. This was presented as a single unit, trimmed of tentacles, nicely chewy. A small bowl of pan sauce, made on the spot (more attentiveness) with white wine, lemon juice and Portuguese olive oil, was good for dunking seafood or fries. These were the wet, dark, heavy kind -balatas being the yin to the yang of light, crisped bistro frites.
I liked everything on the mixed platter (a reasonable $12.95). It came with a small piece of chorizo, but really, this sausage was so salty that you wouldn't want a lot more -well, you would, but you'd be better not to. Especially when there's a pork filet waiting there -this one was also quite salty and could have used a tad less time. The cooks really went to town on blackening the skin of the chicken -it stood away from the meat and emitted a soft crunch of char that was almost audible as it was cut. It was rounded out with fries and the usual Portuguese salad -pale, crunchy lettuce, tomato and cuke in astringent vinaigrette -that inevitably gets soaked in meaty juices.
For dessert, there was a dense pudding made with three kinds of chocolate, and instead of the usual natas, we had a flan with vanilla and lemon -ending with something cool, smooth and eggy. That was the way to go after a meal of hot, sharp, spicy, salty -and summery -things.
....................................HF&RV......................
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Point Saint Charles man stabbed in bar -------no one saw anything,of course
Montreal police Constable Yannick Ouimet said witnesses saw the man enter the bar on Centre St. about 2:30 a.m. and they saw him leave but nobody saw him get stabbed.
“We have no suspects,” Ouimet said, adding that the incident was being considered an attempted murder.
Montreal police Constable Yannick Paradis said the victim was stabbed in the throat and that the weapon had not been found.
“The man was seen going toward the back of the establishment where the bathrooms are,” Paradis said. “When he came out he was visibly wounded in the upper body.”
The victim, who is known to police and has some type of criminal record – although Paradis could not provide details – stumbled out and collapsed on the sidewalk near Shearer St.
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
---------------------HF&RV--------------
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Metro '77 More Montreal Metro Stations ...these are cool .
Montreal's Metro stations are at the very least stylish, I've been in a few different subway systems & these (for their day) were built with style,& not just a dingy feel to them,being brightly lit, and sporting different artwork ,...These pics are from the 1977ish era, with two others more recent......
Friday, September 3, 2010
Metro '72 Nothing Cool about this one
.........................HF&RV......................
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Metro 66.............seemed cool to us,.just not inside the cars..lol
In 1966 ,with much anticipation we awaited the 'new Metro subway sytem' too cool ,travel underground and all over Montreal.....Wow , neat stuff.....
Yikes !! Another Oil Rig Explosion in the Gulf ( deja-vu all over again)
A Miner Energy platford 80 miles off the coact of Louisiana was rocked by an explosion on Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard has said, according to Bloomberg News.
CNN reports that all 13 people on board the rig have been accounted for, with only one suffering injuries. Rescue helicopters were en route to the scene.
There is no word if any oil is leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, but a Coast Guard spokesman on CNN said the rig was not believed to have been producing oil.
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