Montreal, of course, has been a show business town for a long time, but never at this level of organization and coordination. This summer marks the 30th anniversary of the Montreal International Jazz Festival, which began as a weekend of open-air concerts at the old Expo ’67 site. It soon moved into the downtown core, but for many years split its free outdoor component between Place des Arts and the St. Denis Street corridor a few blocks east, which meant festival-goers had to navigate a decrepit no-man’s land of strip clubs and hot-dog joints in between. By the early 1990s the festival had consolidated its activity around Place des Arts, ceding the St. Denis corridor to jazz’s only real summertime competition, the Just for Laughs comedy festival. Other festivals like the Francofolies, a celebration of French-language pop music, soon filled out the summer schedule.
The jazz festival became Canada’s largest annual tourism event without ever needing to establish a permanent footprint, said Alain Simard, its founding president, because Montreal was such an economic wreck. “We were squatting on vacant lots.” And it’s true: when he told me that, the condo development we were walking past used to be a weedy field of gravel that would host salsa bands for 10 days every July.
But Montreal’s economy finally picked up after 2000; suddenly, vacant lots where Simard could toss up an outdoor stage were turning into condos. The festival needed to become a permanent part of the city’s urban geography. “We know what land was left and we know what real estate projects are on the way,” Simard said. “There weren’t 36 solutions to this. It was either bye-bye—we have a city like a doughnut hole, with no more residences downtown, no more neighbourhood life, we build office towers and we rake in the tax revenue for the city. Or we create public spaces. It costs money but it’s a long-term investment in the city’s image and its personality.”
Getting the city, province and country to make that investment required that a lot of business rivals work closely together. Simard and Gilbert Rozon, the guru of Just For Laughs, have egos to match their talents and budgets, and they have not always been on speaking terms. But along with the administrators of more than a dozen other organizations, they put rivalry aside to coordinate. The resulting development plan stretches over the next half-decade. The first big pieces of the new quartier have now been inaugurated: L’Astral, a gorgeous 350-seat concert bistro in the old Blumenthal building, and the Place du Quartier des Spectacles, a 7,500-sq.-m plaza that held the bulk of the 200,000 people who came out on June 30 to hear Stevie Wonder play a huge free concert. Because the Quartier des Spectacles is mixed in with buildings that don’t have a performing-arts mandate, the ones that do will be identified at night with an elaborate lighting signature: red light pouring out of upstairs windows and red spotlights on the sidewalk in front. You’ll be able to spot a cultural venue from blocks away. The choice of colour is conscious, Primeau says. For half a century this neighbourhood contained Montreal’s red-light district. Only the meaning has changed.
Not everyone is an unabashed fan of this sort of choreographed public-private bohemianism. On the face of them, these neighbourhoods are designed to be yuppie playgrounds. Christian Poirier teaches at INRS-Urbanisation, Montreal’s urban studies university, and he has mixed feelings about the Quartier des Spectacles and its rough equivalents in other cities. “It’s really going to depend what type of [arts] projects get promoted,” he said. “Very often these projects come from big promoters with big machines. What I hear a lot is that more independent artists are asking whether this will really enrich the community.”
The quartier’s promoters say they had little choice but to band together and think big. If they hadn’t, the summer festivals might eventually have been pushed out of the core. The exodus of money, people and creative energy from Montreal’s centre to its periphery would have accelerated. The competition is fierce. In 2006, developers opened Le Quartier Dix30, a $150-million, 140,000-sq.-m “lifestyle centre” in the South Shore suburb of Brossard. The Dix30 is mammoth, with luxury shopping, a boutique hotel, and the Montreal Canadiens’ training arena. Against this aggressive challenge from sport-utility-vehicle culture, Montreal had to strengthen its appeal to pedestrian culture.
That raises a question: if a half-dozen of Canada’s large cities are making smart investments in downtown culture, can the cities that aren’t—cities like, say, Ottawa—long afford to stay asleep at the switch?
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