3 August 2007
Station Can Find a New Vocation
Montreal Quebec - The writing has been on the wall for
Windsor Station for years now.
After more than a century of service, the station is an eloquent monument to the age of rail. But it is no longer a train station, and
has not been since the last commuter service was moved out in 1996, the same year the Canadian Pacific Railway moved its head office to
Calgary.
The challenge now - for the CPR as seller, for would-be buyers, and for federal officials who must approve the sale - is
to make sure that a profitable or useful vocation is found for the site while the building remains a testament to our history.
How many immigrants stepped hopefully into their futures in Montreal across the floors of Windsor Station? How many soldiers climbed
aboard there en route to the east coast and a ship to Vimy Ridge or the Falaise Gap? How many came back, injured or intact? How many
celebrities, such as John F. Kennedy and his bride in 1953, disembarked there?
Before the era of the private car, and long into it, Windsor Station was such an integral part of the fabric of Montreal that there was
no point in keeping a tally of such things. To destroy such a landmark now would be vandalism.
And yet the real estate is too valuable to continue to be underused. The Maoist invocation to "let the past serve the
present" has too often been a mere invitation to barbarism, but the opposite does not make sense either.
Windsor Station has forestalled the wreckers' ball before. In the early 1970s, the CPR proposed to demolish the place but, as our
reporter Mary Lamey noted yesterday, architect Michael Fish and others fought off that danger.
The complex now has the protection of the federal Heritage Railway Stations Protection Act, which took effect in 1990. Windsor Station
was the first one named for protection under it. That law says no railway company can "remove, destroy, or alter, or sell, assign,
transfer, or otherwise dispose of a heritage railway station owned by it or otherwise under its control; or... alter any of the
heritage features of a heritage railway station."
So what suitable use can be found for the building? The CPR, which still has offices and its impressive archives here, proposes to
remain as a long-term "anchor tenant" but beyond that, the building's new vocation will depend on what a buyer
can work out with Ottawa.
Most likely, we hope, is something involving both reconstruction and preservation. Montreal already has some good examples of this,
such as the World Trade Centre at the western edge of old Montreal and Maison Alcan on Sherbrooke St. W.
Some such solution ought to be be found for Windsor Station. The past and the present should be able to serve each
other.
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