Canadian Urban Canyons

[Martin Mtl]

Originally Posted by shappy

The warehouse area of Yaletown is a great part of Vancouver. I imagine Vancouver's LES is also a former warehouse area. And then of course, Winnipeg's Exchange, Halifax's Historic Properties and Old Montreal's warehouse sections are also notable in Canada. Any others?
.

All along the Lachine canal. Many old industrial buildings (converted into condos, offices etc.)

[WhipperSnapper]

I haven't thought about these huge industrial high rises in a while! I wanted to know everything about them when I first bumped into these districts.

[shappy]

Originally Posted by Martin Mtl

All along the Lachine canal. Many old industrial buildings (converted into condos, offices etc.)

Ok sure, I meant any other cities but perhaps this is not the thread.

[Kilgore Trout]

Originally Posted by esquire

There is nothing like those tall postwar-era sewing factories... definitely gives a sense of the huge scale of that industry in Montreal. Almost Hong Kong like... that is the city I most associate with tall, vertical industrial buildings.

They're very similar to the big industrial buildings in Hong Kong, partly because they were built at exactly the same time (1960s-70s). It's crazy to think that just as Hong Kong's garment industry was booming, so was Montreal's.

I can't think of any other city in North America that has such dense postwar industrial buildings.

[Kilgore Trout]

Originally Posted by Rico Rommheim

What's interesting is that the garment buildings hub in the Mile-End hub isn't even the biggest one in the city. 5km north there's the Chabanel district. It's scale is so out of whack with the surrounding neighbourhood and the buildings' floorplates themselves are so huge that it's proving difficult to re-adapt into the urban fabric. It doesn't help that it is located at the north-end of the city, far away (for now) from the hispter hive of the mile-end, the downtown core or even a metro station, for that matter.

I think you'll be surprised by how quickly it can change. There's already a new brewery and coffee roaster, and many companies that have been kicked out of Mile Ex due to the incoming AI firms are relocating there. Eastern Bloc, a big art space in Mile Ex, was planning to move to Chabanel right before the pandemic. And of course there's the pop-up Green Haüs bar/event space that is run by the same people as Aire commune in Mile End.

Of course who knows how things will play out post-Covid...

[Kilgore Trout]

Originally Posted by esquire

Fascinating stuff, I wonder how that all ended up there? It's such an unusual location for such a big collection of fairly modern giant light industrial buildings, especially ones that are cheek by jowl with residential streets.

It will be interesting to see how that area evolves given the circumstances that you mentioned.

It's located along two railways so it was a natural place for industry to develop as space became more expensive in older industrial areas. There was also a WWII-era armaments factory which probably helped draw other businesses. Then the opening of the Metropolitan expressway helped things along too.

Chabanel is the biggest and most imposing industrial district in the north end, but there are other clusters of postwar factories and warehouses all along the railways up there.

[Martin Mtl]

André Turpin's feature film Endorphine, a strange and fascinating movie, was shot in Chabanel and takes great advantage of the unique look of the place, including some canyons. The urban form of the place plays a dramatic role in the dreamy aesthetic of the film

[esquire]

^ That is such a mesmerizing view. I would love to walk down that street.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by Martin Mtl

André Turpin's feature film Endorphine, a strange and fascinating movie, was shot in Chabanel and takes great advantage of the unique look of the place, including some canyons. The urban form of the place plays a dramatic role in the dreamy aesthetic of the film

just these shots makes me want to see this movie. I have wandered the streets and alleys of Chabanel (including way back in the 80s when it was going downhill as the clothing mills were moving overseas. Weirdest urban fabric in Montreal.

From 1964 to 1985 and running from Saint-Laurent Boulevard in the east to Meilleur Avenue in the west, eight large multi-storey buildings were built along Chabanel. The first address is 99 Chabanel (500,000 sq. ft.), followed by 111, 125, 225, 333, 433 and 555 Chabanel followed. The largest of the buildings is 333 Chabanel (approximately one million square feet) which boasts the second largest floorplate on the island of Montreal (110,000 sq. ft.) after Place Bonaventure. The total square footage of the buildings along Chabanel is estimated at five million. The street is still considered the centre of the fashion industry in Canada, with several hundred companies and thousands of employees operating from Chabanel addresses. However, in recent years with manufacturing moving offshore due to the G-8 policy of "trade-not-aid" for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) Market Access Initiative,[2] contraction in the industry and vacancy rates increasing, there has been a move to promote the area to other industries, and one of the buildings (125 Chabanel) has been slated to be redeveloped as a residential condominium project

wookiepedia

[Rico Rommheim]

Originally Posted by esquire

^ That is such a mesmerizing view. I would love to walk down that street.

Except I couldn't find it anywhere on google earth and street view. I'm not convinced it's entirely real.

[niwell]

I'm trying to think of other places that have massive modernist warehouses like this. KT mentioned Hong Kong, and I imagine they exist in places that have/had large garment industries. If anyone has any examples please post them!

There are quite a few I've seen in person in Johannesburg, mostly in the City and Suburban area just East of the CBD. Most are now being converted to apartments or artist space as part of the Maboneng Arts Precinct, but quite a few still operate as commercial/industrial establishments. Or are squatted residential space. Recently the former gold and diamond jewelry hub (Jewel City) that had a number of them in a walled off 4 block area underwent a massive redevelopment into modern residential and commercial space.

The area seems to have been converted to industrial post-war and I have tried to figure out why so many were built in that area to no avail - I do know it emptied out and became largely vacant in the 70s/80s when Apartheid era planning policy forced manufacturing into modern industrial parks.

Some streetviews, still not quite as imposing as Chabanel:

https://goo.gl/maps/qhuMwEttZ4oKCU2G7
https://goo.gl/maps/e8n9sAoxfQPWM4LB6
https://goo.gl/maps/vGGhPc2t89wrzw19A
https://goo.gl/maps/HfFU8HyeFpRL7YVcA

This view is completely different now with the Jewel City redevelopment, newer pic below: https://goo.gl/maps/EZYdi6RyExQqP3TJA
https://goo.gl/maps/Xu3Bck9JptFAk1qr9

[Rico Rommheim]

Chabanel will have to be very creative, because you certainly can't turn the biggest of these boxes into residential without gutting them almost entirely to allow for windows for every dwelling. This would demand gutting the centre of each of these factories, including removing their cores and elevator shafts. It would be a colossal work that would not be economically viable, Their industrial / commercial uses will have to be maintained. But in a post-covid and post-retail and work-at-home world, I'm really struggling to find ideas.

[Martin Mtl]

Originally Posted by Rico Rommheim

Chabanel will have to be very creative, because you certainly can't turn the biggest of these boxes into residential without gutting them almost entirely to allow for windows for every dwelling. This would demand gutting the centre of each of these factories, including removing their cores and elevator shafts. It would be a colossal work that would not be economically viable, Their industrial / commercial uses will have to be maintained. But in a post-covid and post-retail and work-at-home world, I'm really struggling to find ideas.

Let’s not forget...

https://csga.ca/canada-goose-opens-n...anel-district/

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by Rico Rommheim

Part I of the Rene-Levesque Boulevard post showed you the business district / condo-land western section of the terminal.

The generous width always made me think of it as an amazing opportunity for a separated LRT median. From my observation, the most common scenarios are that either a city has an overly-wide corridor that's perfect for LRTs but is very auto-friendly (which is why it has such corridors) and doesn't want to take any space from cars, or a city is dense and transit friendly, but doesn't have any suitable corridors so it has to built everything underground. In this case, the corridor literally already has space dedicated (mostly) to transit in the form of the peak period bus/taxi lanes.

[Rico Rommheim]

Rene-Levesque is begging for a BRT. A connection from Atwater to somewhere in the east-end (Frontenac maybe?, A straight connection to the eventual Pie-IX BRT?) There are rumblings of one on the agoramtl site, but that's it.

[Nouvellecosse]

Makes me wonder if a surface corridor wouldn't be a good route for an eastern REM, kind of like the Saarbrücken or Karlsruhe tram-trains. Not as sexy as a downtown tunnel and might lose a little speed but the cost difference would be overwhelming. It could roll right thru downtown and enter the western rail corridor around Fort and Saint Marc streets making for a single high speed suburban LRT line from Repentigny to Lachine with service every 5-7 min peak and 10-15 off-peak.

[Martin Mtl]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Makes me wonder if a surface corridor wouldn't be a good route for an eastern REM, kind of like the Saarbrücken or Karlsruhe tram-trains. Not as sexy as a downtown tunnel and might lose a little speed but the cost difference would be overwhelming. It could roll right thru downtown and enter the western rail corridor around Fort and Saint Marc streets making for a single high speed suburban LRT line from Repentigny to Lachine with service every 5-7 min peak and 10-15 off-peak.

I think it would be very sexy actually.

[Rico Rommheim]

I do agree that a surface transit corridor would add much needed visual stimuli to the overall landscape of R-L. A surface corridor would also feed immediate pedestrian activity, something a subterranean corridor surely wouldn't.

[Martin Mtl]

Originally Posted by Rico Rommheim

I do agree that a surface transit corridor would add much needed visual stimuli to the overall landscape of R-L. A surface corridor would also feed immediate pedestrian activity, something a subterranean corridor surely wouldn't.

Good point. There are so many pedestrians in downtown Montreal in the underground city that I always found that it took away from the vibrancy of the streets. Sometimes I even wish there was no underground city in Montreal. I surely hope that it won't get any bigger.

[Rico Rommheim]

Originally Posted by Martin Mtl

Good point. There are so many pedestrians in downtown Montreal in the underground city that I always found that it took away from the vibrancy of the streets. Sometimes I even wish there was no underground city in Montreal. I surely hope that it won't get any bigger.

I'm totally with you on this one. I've never been a fan of the underground city. First of all, let's be real: this "city" is only a collection of interconnected foodcourts and hallways leading to cheap gimmicky stores and massive shopping complexes.

It's layout works poorly as a direct path to any particular destination and doesn't actually connect the two ends of downtown.

Sure, it'll take you from Bonaventure metro to Peel metro quickly enough if you know the way, but who how useful is this actually?

So if the underground city isn't really all that big or as useful as it's claimed (by tourist brochures and city boosters mostly), let's keep it this way and nvest on making the outside walking experience more enjoyable.