Built in the early twentieth century, the former Canada Malting plant has a dozen gigantic silos of 37 meters high. The oldest was built in 1905. Hundreds of employees worked there after the Second World War, until the closure of the factory at...
The plant itself is definitively not as great at we saw in other places. Located in the heart of Pointe-Saint-Charles neighborhood of Montreal, this two storey building has no longer the cachet of its heyday. While neighboring buildings are gradually revamped to accommodate them new condo owners, nothing seems to have changed over here. Nature has reasserted itself in the courtyard with all these trees, aged of dozen years old.
This factory was creating billboards of any kind (for sale, do not enter, etc). By entering, we find on the floor an old mattress surrounded by waste. As we approach a bit, we discover that beyond the old Doritos and Ruffles bags, there was syringes and condoms. Junkie's shelter probably.
A junkie poet, I must specify. On the walls, we discover parts of William Blake's poems, an English painter and poet of the nineteenth century. Jim Morrison of the Doors, has also chosen the name of his band by refering to a quotation from Blake's poem "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite".
On the ground floor, it is rather a verse from a song by Keny Arkana adorning the wall to the right of the entrance: "We want billions who are trying to turn the wheel in the opposite direction. (On est des milliards à vouloir faire tourner la roue dans l'autre sens)"
Also here are some other verses (in french) who can be found on the walls here and there:
Built in the early twentieth century, the former Canada Malting plant has a dozen gigantic silos of 37 meters high. The oldest was built in 1905. Hundreds of employees worked there after the Second World War, until the closure of the factory at...
Built in 1954, the Dickson incinerator was, at the time, the most modern one in North America. It was built to replace these old incinerators where horses were used for harvesting waste.
In the 1920s, the city of Montreal was struggling...
Located on the banks of the Canal Lachine, the old Cie de recyclage de papier de Montréal inc. factory have been destroyed in part since 2009. Today, there are only the old building located behind the front store who is still there.
When...
Its architecture reminds of the old ramparts of Quebec instead the image to which one is accustomed to power plants.
Yet it is part of this canadian architectural style of the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. One of the...