During the street fair on the Main, last month, I got a good clear view of the building on the South-West corner of Sherbrooke.
It's being renovated now and every night, sometime in the not too distant future, will house several tonnes of mopey, beautiful people bathed in vaseline and their golden Tim Horton donut-ad porno halos.
The building will dream of red velvet but, like most other boutique hotels, will probably only get industrial grey carpet stapled to gyprock. I don't think any one is really upset by the project (although I for one am mortified at the depth of the pit that's been dug beside the building.) The site sat barely maintained, if that, for twenty years. The most anyone ever did was to clear away the remains of the burnt out church adjacent to it. (Had it already been destroyed by the time I came to Montréal? I can't remember.) And if someone is going to fix it up the consensus seems to be : better the guy behind the Anxiety Building than some half-assed developer who'll turn the place in to a discount shoe store in three years. But I wanted a picture to remember it by. Something to look at when I walk past and see the people eating at the dinner table that sits on the exact spot in the ruins of the old church where a friend told me he had sex on a Friday night in the 80's. Something to show people when I tell them Grim Skunk used to jam there and I like to pretend that on stormy nights you can hear the chorus to
mange d'la mardeechoing through the ventilation shafts.