Articles tagged with: Cleopatra & Angus
If the Mayor won’t listen, maybe the Prince will
They also showed up to deliver him the message in person when he visited the Black Watch yesterday. They weren’t the only ones, though. Quebec separatists and anti-monarchists were there to tell the prince that he wasn’t welcome in Quebec and the Montreal Police riot squad were there to tell the crowd to move down to de Maisonneuve just west of Bleury.
Montreal elections: the glass half-empty
Despite eight years in power with not much to show for it except a trail of corruption, Gerald Tremblay will remain the mayor of Montreal. This means that projects he has given the green light to will most likely continue, including former petty thief and fraudster, now thug developer Christian Yaccarini’s Quadrilatere St-Laurent.
The company we keep
In the 1980s, Christian Yaccarini was on the administration council of the Association générale des étudiants de l’UQAM when he was found guilty of stealing the contents of a caisse étudiant (student-run bank). The same decade, he was convicted of defrauding the librairie Caron where he worked of $11 604. He was also found guilty of shoplifting thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from Audio d’occasion.
The Big Show part 2
If the mayor and his administration thought delaying the voting portions of Monday’s City Council meeting to the next morning would silence debate on the appropriation of the land where Café Cleopatra and the Montreal Pool Room now sit, they were wrong. Yes, items 20.39 and 20.50 on the meeting’s agenda did pass, but it wasn’t without a fight.
The Big Show, part 1
It took over an hour for the Café Cleopatra / Angus Development situation to be mentioned, but it wasn’t by a member of the public, but rather by Tremlay’s minister of culture Catherine Sévigny hinting at it while jumping in on a question about tourism. Eventually, some of the members of the Save The Main coalition got their chance to speak.
Friends ’till the end?
Ramming a controversial project through and making executive decisions that go against the ruling of a public consultation body aren’t new in politics. Generally, though, they’re the sort of things politicians do when they have a few years left in their mandate or when they’re almost out of office and can’t return (like how US presidents pardon their friends at the end of their second term). It’s not the sort of thing they do just before an election campaign.
Against the current to save the arts
Contre-Courant isn’t a theatre show in the purest sense, or for that matter any sense. In fact, it’s the Fetish Film Festival, part of the 2009 Montreal Fetish Weekend, celebrating its fifth anniversary. There were films by Anthony Teoli, Dominic Vincent, Matthew Saliba, Patricia Chica and others. Some were long, some were short, all were quite good quality and Fetish-themed. Some had little or no dialogue while all had stunning visuals.
Just in time for the party: Angus to re-think its plans for the lower Main
The Angus Development Corporation stated Tuesday that it would be rethinking its plan to erect an office tower on the west side of St-Laurent Boulevard between Ste-Catherine and Rene-Levesque. This comes over a month after the Office de Consultation Publique de Montreal (OCPM) released its report urging more reflection and a better plan for redevelopment of the area.
Not so fast: OCPM report on the Angus plan
After hearing from from over 300 people at meetings last June and reading 32 briefs, the Office de Consultation Publique de Montreal released its report on the proposed Quadrilatère project slated to begin construction on the Lower Main next January. In brief, the report argues that the Angus Development Corporation is acting too hastily to push this project through and more reflection and a better plan are needed.
Behind closed doors: Yaccarini’s e-mail reveals the developer’s true attitude
At a recent press conference, Christian Yaccarini, the president of the Société de développement Angus, defended his plans to replace venues on the lower Main with an office tower by promising that he would try and relocate the artists currently performing at Café Cleopatre. However an e-mail from Yaccarini to supporters obtained by Forget The Box raises doubt as to whether the developer considers the performers he is trying to evict to be artists at all.
Angus Press Conference
This morning at 10:00 Societe de Development ANGUS (SDA) held a press conference at the Angus Yards. The press conference comes after 9 public consultation meetings, the tones of which were identifiably in contrast with the development plans for the area. To recap: Local business owners, artists and citizens alike criticized Angus’s plans to level half a block of historic Montreal buildings in order to erect an office tower dedicated to Hydro Quebec.
To recap: Local business owners, artists and citizens alike criticized Angus’s plans to level half a block of historic Montreal buildings in order to erect an office tower dedicated to Hydro Quebec. Plans for the development include keeping the facades of the existing buildings while replacing and remodeling ground floor lots to house restaurants, bars and boutiques. What has many Montrealers and citizens confused however is the logic behind removing current venues in the area: Café Cleopatre, Saints Show Bar, Club Opera, the Montreal Pool Room, and the Katacombes, and replacing them with an office tower.
Underground arts or quartier des bureaux?
If you had “a vision of development based on the enhancement of cultural activities” as the Quartier des Spectacles project does, would you want to evict artists by replacing their popular performance space with an office tower that nobody asked for? That is exactly what the Angus Development Corporation wants to do on the lower Main in the name of the QDS.
