Fun city

It was the first week of June, and a new downtown Montreal was rising from the old. These few square blocks running east of Bleury Street and north of Ste. Catherine Street used to be the heart of Canada’s shmatte trade, an assortment of 10-storey brick buildings where seamstresses worked row on row, making fashion affordable to the masses. But that was nearly a century ago.

Now there were construction crews everywhere, working double shifts to get the first phase of Montreal’s downtown renaissance ready in time for the Montreal International Jazz Festival. On Jeanne-Mance Street across from Place des Arts, one crew paved a public square the length of a city block while a second installed a row of gargantuan lighting towers across the street. Around the corner still another crew was building a cozy concert bistro from scratch inside one of the old rag-trade buildings.

Faded letters on the brick exterior proclaimed the building’s former vocation: “GOOD CLOTHES ‘Nothing Else’ Blumenthal and Sons Canada’s Greatest Clothes Shop.” But inside, the Blumenthal building was transforming into the Maison du Festival, the permanent headquarters of the jazz festival with an elegant concert space on the ground floor, a public relations office upstairs, an art gallery on the next floor and multi-media arts library on top of that. In turn, the Maison du Festival will serve as a kind of cornerstone for the Quartier des Spectacles, a square kilometre of concert and theatre spaces, public plazas, cafés and condos designed to turn Montreal’s creativity and conviviality—its fabled joie de vivre—into the main motor of its economic activity.

Jacques Primeau, a wiry veteran concert producer and rock-band manager who heads the Quartier des Spectacles project, rattled off the numbers for me as we prowled the project’s various sites. The quartier will be home to 30 performance spaces with a total of 28,000 seats. Together the federal, provincial and municipal governments are paying $120 million in taxpayer money to fund the project. That’s on top of the $266 million the Quebec government is paying to build a new concert hall within the Quartier des Spectacles for the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. The activity that taxpayer money will enable is already attracting $1 billion in private investment.

That’s serious money. It will transform Montreal profoundly. The city’s young creative types used to have a joke you’d hear during long beer-soaked afternoons on one sunny térasse or another: people in Toronto had jobs, whereas Montrealers had lifestyles. With the Quartier des Spectacles, Montreal is betting that lifestyles can bring jobs.

But Montreal is hardly the only Canadian city making that bet. Winnipeg’s Exchange District was one of the precursors to more recent projects such as Toronto’s Distillery District, located at the old Gooderham and Worts distillery, which has become a colony of galleries, boutiques and the headquarters of the Soulpepper Theatre Company. In Quebec City, the St. Roch neighbourhood in the once-benighted Lower Town is becoming a haven for live music, good food and condo lofts. And in Calgary, a team of private developers and public sector administrators aims to turn the decrepit East Village into a showcase for museums, shops and pedestrian living. East Village developers like to say they’re going to provide the “there there” that has long been missing in Calgary’s centre as the city sprawled in every direction.

Each of these projects is different, but they share common themes. They aim to revitalize the traditional heart of a city’s downtown as an antidote to suburban sprawl. They are mixed-use, often hectic and jumbled, and built on a scale pedestrians can handle, in contrast to the single-purpose behemoths that used to mark downtown development, like Montreal’s Place Ville Marie office tower or Toronto’s big arts museums. They combine private entrepreneurship and public sector seed money and planning capacity. So in almost every case, asking “Who’s in charge here?” is likely to get you a long answer.

But above all, these new downtown developments bet big money on the most ephemeral of experiences: a night out, a blue note, a soliloquy, a comic’s punchline. “We’re developing a new primary material,” said Réal Lestage, the project architect for the Quartier des Spectacles. “We’re making creation the motor of economic activity.”