The unremarkable brick building that may help save Montreal's creative soul

Squat and unmemorable, the brick building on Marconi Street near Jean-Talon may not look like much, but for some it represents a key piece of Montreal's artistic future.

It's at the heart of a deal between the developer who owns the site and a not-for-profit arts organization, enabled by the Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie borough and designed to counter the problem of artists being driven from the borough by economic change.

"That's an area that has been seeing rapid conversion and rapid price increases whereby artists have been basically chased out," said Christine Gosselin, the city councillor for Vieux-Rosemont and the president of the borough's urban planning consultative committee.

"It's a type of commercial gentrification whereby the artists can't afford the spaces and they leave," she said. "And their presence in those areas is very beneficial in the economic ecosystem."

The arrangement, enabled by a 2019 bylaw change, is as follows: the developer, Rosdev, will replace the existing building with a commercial development of six floors, instead of the four zoning rules permit. 

And Ateliers créatifs Montréal, a not-for-profit that exists to create and preserve affordable artists' spaces, will get 6,300 square feet of space on the ground floor for artists' workshops.

The two parties came up with the Marconi development proposal themselves, in a months-long negotiation process that didn't involve the borough.

The proposal satisfied the borough, drew no objections from the public and passed its third and final reading at a council meeting in early February. It still needs final approval of architectural plans before demolition and construction — not a pure formality, but not a risky part of the process, either. 

Building mixed cities

The arrangement is of a kind increasingly used in forward-thinking cities around the world, in which variances or zoning changes are granted in exchange for the inclusion of common-good elements like creative spaces, green spaces or social housing. 

Ensuring that there are spaces for creative expression within neighbourhoods is crucial for a city's "richness, its international clout, its street credibility," Gosselin said.

"We're trying to find ways to have a mixed city," said Gilles Renaud, the executive director of Ateliers créatifs Montréal. "That kind of deal is a very good way to do it. We can keep the artists next to companies that can afford expensive rents." 

Ateliers créatifs Montréal has been involved in similar efforts, but this is the first time they will take ownership of artists' workshops that are purpose-built in a new space. The organization will rent the studios to artists at rates that cover operating costs, not at market value. 

Renaud says this agreement is "huge" in a city where artists have already been forced to move from old industrial spaces downtown and along the river, and have in recent years begun to abandon areas like Mile End and Rosemont. 

"Now they're all moving farther and farther from the central district," Renaud said. "There is huge development and taxes are going up, plus rents are going up. The artists move a bit farther to areas that need revitalization."

Building owners with empty spaces are happy to give deals to artists, Renaud said. But once an area turns a corner and demand for residential and commercial spaces grows, the artists "are no longer needed." 

Resisting an artist exodus

"There's a concern within the arts community about getting pushed around into other neighbourhoods, for this gentrification process to repeat over and over again," said Harley Smart of Anteism Books, a producer and publisher of artists' books.

He said artists he knows have shifted to Chabanel, the city's garment district north of the Metropolitan Expressway, but they fear that even those industrial spaces will eventually turn over. 

Anteism is run out of a space in the Bovril building on Parc Avenue in Mile End, on one of three floors Ateliers créatifs Montréal operates through a long-term lease. 

The 30-year lease on those floors — totalling 15,000 square feet — was part of an arrangement made with the Hasidic organization that purchased the building in 2011 to use as a school. 

The 1920s art-deco construction had become a hive of creative activity, full of artists attracted to the industrial spaces and cheap rent. The Plateau Mont-Royal borough agreed to rezone the building for educational use in exchange for ensuring that the top floors were reserved for artists.

"I really don't think we'd still be working in the neighbourhood" without that arrangement, Smart said. Much of their work is on a small scale and not done for commercial purposes, he said, so "having these massive commercial rents for something that is inherently non-commercial just doesn't make sense."

Blueprint for the future

Coming up with the Marconi proposal took several months because it was new territory for both parties, Renaud said. But he thinks future projects should come together faster, as other developers see the example that has been set. 

"This project lets them know, if RosDev is doing it, we can do it as well," Renaud said.

The project also "shows the boroughs have some power to make incentives," Renaud said, and that affordable housing, and affordable studio space "should be part of their concern." 

To Gosselin, the Marconi project amounts to "planting new forest rather than conserving the existing ones," and the city should be making efforts to both conserve and create artists' spaces.

"You can't have commercial monoculture," she said. "You can't just have office staff and tech companies, for instance, in a sector. You need diversity. This is something that nobody questions. But how are you going to do it?

"So many of these buildings are up for reconstruction, conversion, transformation, in all of Montreal's industrial sectors, and this is a precedent they can turn to, and say, 'look, this can work. This is part of the solution.'"