The Starbucksization of Montreal

This is gonna be a 3-piece, uh, piece written over three days. Being truly a native son of this beloved city, having both been born here and living most of my life here, including all of my formative coming-of-age years, Montreal a fairly personal subject. So prepare for long-winded, full-of-digression prose (including long-winded introductions and amusing anecdotes). But hey, if you read this blog, you're used to all that shit.

Including curt, droll segues.

Anyway.

1st part

This past May, once up-and-coming underground concert venue Black Dot, located on Rue St-Laurent, was shut down by the cops. Police officials and the venue's organizers declared that a fatal mix of complaints, lack of regulation and failure to meet irrelevant safety standards had conspired to bring about the demise of Black Dot.

Here is just one of a hundred stories that have been written in Montreal over the past five years. I chose this one because it strikes specifically at the issues and ideas that are imposing themselves on the city like a straightjacket on a mental patient. Black Dot was representative of a certain kind of lifestyle and subculture that thrives in Montreal. It was a symbol of the city's punk, metal, bohemian and Do-It-Yourself communities. While hardly the only venue for such kinds of music, it was unique in its unpretentious, all-ages-allowed way of business. It's this subculture that is under direct attack.

The closing of Black Dot illustrates the ongoing and time-tested conflict between a city's underground counterculture and its authourity figures. This is a battle that's been going on since the 1960s, when the shit really started. It, inevitably, will continue for the foreseeable future.

You can trace a direct link from the closing of Black Dot to the more abstract but just as relevant issue of gentrification. Black Dot wasn't one of the countless designer, brand-name, big-box and entirely corporate storefronts opening along the Main and other boulevards in the city. Therefore it had to go. The kinds of people who shop and solicit those kinds of establishments (naming names, Second Cup, H&M, Pizza Pizza) don't feel that public transit is something that meshes well with their socio-economic status. They'd rather drive cars.

This brings us to the the massive amounts of costly and mostly futile road construction plugging up the major thoroughfares throughout the island. Sure, blame winter all you want on our third-world, Cambodian countryside quality roads, but last I checked, winter is not a new phenomenon in Montreal. What is new though are the tens of thousands of new people moving to the city, having kids, and yes, adding their automobiles to the roads. The infrastructure we rely on today was meant for a different era with a different size population: the 1960s.

The other obvious side effect of more cars: less gas. Supply and demand decides that prices go up. People pay more. Disposable income goes down. And people are a lot more pissed off than usual. The energy and big oil companies know that we don't have another option. They know that the people will take being sodomized at the pump everyday, and ask for seconds because what are people going to do, stop driving? Yeeeahh.

Oh, global warming too. Another side effect.

Road construction is not the only kind of construction happening around town. All those Ontarians, MBAs, entry-level programmers, career chasers and leased-car, good-credit, white shirt young professionals need a place to live. They can't possibly be expected to take up a modestly-priced flat with hardwood floors and the kind of wonderful charm that a dwelling built in the 1950s has. No, they need condominiums.

All these issues and problems the city is facing offer insight into the deeper and more uniquely Montreal-specific war going on right this minute. What we're seeing is the direct consequence of the failure of the 60s counterculture movement against the forces of urban redevelopment, capitalist plutocracy, gentrification and yuppeism, red tape and bureaucracy, sinister marketing and advertising and the overall rise of the money-fueled culture. These forces have united into a single anomalous movement:

Starbucksization.

It's real, it's happening. And it has the power to kill Montreal. To kill the city we live in and that most of us grew up in.

We as citizens of this city are in the thick of this wave and therefore unable to really grasp the grand picture of what is going on. But make no mistake, we are most certainly in it and it is changing the way we live.

In the coming series of posts, I'll talk about Griffintown and its impending razing and destruction, the disgraceful roads, hospitals, police services and xenophobic/ethnically fractured culture that plague Montreal. I'll try and offer explanations, or at least some of the root causes of all the wack things around town, and offer two opposing visions for the city in say, ten years.

Stay tuned, fookpoppers.

=//Turnquest