Wasn't that a party... I was 10 in the fall and we had season's passports.. (little sister 8) The Catholic schools were so crowed that we went in shifts... luckily we got the morning.. so each afternoon we buss from the burbs to the furthest north metro station and right the width of the island, under the river and appear on Man and his World Expo 67... We saw everything at least once...
thestar.com
Expo 67 left a stunning legacy
Called Montreal's finest hour
Event successful but deficit huge
Oct. 31, 2006. 05:44 AM
SEAN GORDON
QUEBEC BUREAU CHIEF
MONTREAL—Look around and you'll see them everywhere; Expo 67's traces on Montreal's urban landscape are indelible.
Thanks largely to legacies like the city's subway system, the towers of Place Ville Marie or the Ile Notre Dame — built with the rubble from the Metro tunnels — the hugely successful fair is remembered as the city's finest hour, even four decades on.
Speak to those who were there — and considering the fair attracted more than 50 million visitors, that means pretty well every Montrealer over 40 — and they will proffer misty recollections of a happening, a shining moment in time the likes of which has never been repeated.
"It marked Canada's arrival into modernity, and it introduced the world to Montreal," said former Montreal mayor Pierre Bourque, who was a municipal bureaucrat at the time.
Bourque was only 23 when iconic mayor Jean Drapeau — whose well-known obsession with mega-projects led his beloved city to both glory and financial ruin — tabbed him to lead a team of 700 city workers involved in completing the installations.
"It was the culmination of a period that changed the face of the city and of Quebec, it changed the way people think, the way they eat, the way they live their everyday life," said Bourque, who retired from active politics after losing last year's municipal election.
When all the tickets were counted, Expo 67 set an attendance record, and the fair also involved more countries than any other to that point.
"A success like that isn't easily replicated; that's probably one reason no one here's ever thought of trying," Bourque said.
The years leading up to Expo — which organizers considered holding in Toronto after Moscow, the original bidder, dropped out — were a period of unprecedented social, cultural and architectural effervescence that inspired projects like Habitat 67, the boxy, instantly recognizable housing development in the city's revitalized old port.
It also gave a shot in the arm to a city and a province emerging from what is known in Quebec as "la grande noirceur" — the great darkness — of the Duplessis era.
"It's not complicated: Expo transformed the city," said Pierre de Bellefeuille, who was involved in attracting participants to the Expo, and who later became a Parti Québécois MNA.
"Expo created a link with the world ... it left behind a tremendous legacy, and happened during a time that transformed Quebec and Canada socially and politically," de Bellefeuille said.
Despite the popularity of Expo 67, organizers were left with a deficit pegged by fair experts at $200 million — although the final figure is a matter of considerable debate — and few installations on the fair's site remain.
It's a point the exhibition's few critics keep making: though the ancillary benefits to the city are indisputable, the actual site itself bears little resemblance to 1967.
The Quebec and France pavilions have been transformed into Loto-Quebec's flagship casino, while the most spectacular building — a 20-storey Buckminster Fuller-designed latticed dome that hosted the U.S. pavilion — stands in diminished form after its plastic panels burned in 1976. Today it houses the Biosphere, a permanent science exhibit.
The islands in the St. Lawrence have been transformed into parks — one of them named after Drapeau — and contain a rowing basin, amusement park and the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, a Formula 1 racing track.
If Expo 67 was Montreal's best ever party, the Olympic Games that followed nine years later was the crippling hangover.
The Expo deficits are a mere memory, but the mostly empty and increasingly dilapidated Olympic Stadium stands as a daily reminder of the billions spent by the city and province to pay the most expensive mortgage in Quebec's history.
For all the caveats and cautionary tales, de Bellefeuille said he hopes the Toronto 2015 bid comes together.
"My experience would tell me that Toronto should go for it. There will be detractors and critics who will say it's too expensive or that it can't be done, but they should try, and if it's done right, the public will get on board," he said. |
