Landmarks (Selfies before Selfies)

I was there…where were you?

1st Batch





So one day I walked up Drummond as far it goes towards the Mountain and it dawned on me when I was at the foot of the McIntyre Medical Sciences Building (which I long thought was called the Drummond Medical Building, which is located back down below de Maisonneuve) that I had never been there before. This is one of Montreal’s most well known “unknown” buildings in the sense that countless thousands of us have seen the building dominate the foreground of the view downtown from Mount Royal, let alone the gabillions of photographs it must be in. But how many of them could identify the building?

(for the story behind this picture please go here.

2nd Batch

Where are you now?



The building in the second photograph is 780 Saint Remi in Village des Tanneries in the west end of Saint Henri and the last building before you are heading into Turcot Yards. Under the current Turcot plan it would be demolished along with the housing along the north side of Cazelais. There are some pretty cool homemade lofts in there. The windows that look like floor to ceiling are actually about two storys high and some people have built two story lofts inside. Really cool place.
The owner of the building, the enigmatic and mysterious Mr. Fattal, does not necessarily want to hand the place over to the MTQ for demolition and a few options have been discussed such as only demolishing the corner of the building closest to the interchange. Mr Fattal has been known to show up at public consultations placing fake dollar bills on the floor and getting a big kick out of it when people reach to grab the money. But no one calls him a fool. There is a delightful cast of characters in this whole Turcot story. That’s the way life should be.

3rd Batch


Turcot is fenced off and security regularly patrols and they have painted over all the grafitti. It was a very interesting place and my only regret is that I was not a biologist who could have identified all the things that grew in there. But I did see a fox. That was worth it.

4th Batch

There is kitsch and there is more kitsch, fancy kitsch. I stopped hanging around Bora Bora after my sister died. There was no one there I wanted to see, nothing much to say. Years later I sometimes just drop in and have something to eat or just a coffee. And I do it because I can and there is nothing to hide or anything to feel bad about.

5th Batch

So I was at work and saw “Genealogist Society” on a call list and somehow that occurred to me as a title for a post, reminding me off some of the headlines in “Ulysses” and the Irish penchant for lawsuits. And the rest is the road my grandfather took. I was about 7 when he died.