Artworks

The view of Peel Street at Dorchester, circa 1959, now René Lévesque, features prominently one of Montreal’s legendary landmark structures, now gone, The Windsor Hotel, a grand hotel of the day and Windsor Station looming in the background.

Little commemorated these areas as buildings were razed to make way exclusively for office towers and expressways in order that business people could efficiently drive in from the developing suburbs and return there after 5pm. As we wrote in the only authorized publication about the artist, he was concerned that people could no longer live in the city centre and that these areas after 5pm became bleak, void of people and after dark may be dangerous for pedestrians. We should not forget that just to the east of Windsor Station, on Osborne Street “in the day” at the Alberta Lounge Oscar Peterson was at the piano. This was a very dynamic area in the evenings with clubs and bars and restaurants. Osborne Street was eradicated and the area replaced by the Château Champlain and Bonaventure Hotels accompanied by the cold concrete of Place Bonaventure.

The Guardian, in the March 12 edition, wrote about Toronto and that it is scrapping the Sidewalk Labs project and looking for plans “for a people - centred vision”, one focused on “affordability, low carbon design and an emphasis on local and minority owned businesses.” John Little had observed almost two generations ago, that the emphasis on suburbanization and the city core being populated by office towers, all the small retail and service businesses that had existed on the streets were sacrificed as computers shopped at their highway side shopping centre on their way from or returning to home in the suburbs. The remaining, surviving or new generation of small retail or service businesses were relocated to basements or sub-basements below the towers.