Monument or Blot on the Landscape?
Eileen Manion
“Those elevators crushed the old city with their mass, depriving it of any view or access to the river which was once upon a time its raison d’etre and the charm of its site.”
Jean-Claude Marsan, Montreal in Evolution
Two or three times a week during the pandemic, I’ve taken a walk around Montreal’s Old Port with a friend. We have the same conversation every time.
“What’s that?” she asks pointing to a huge, rusting, derelict structure we always see as we walk west along Pointe du Moulin.
“Old grain elevator — not used anymore.”
“What are they going to do with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“They should tear it down. It’s blocking the view of the river.”
“Well, it’s historic,” I assert lamely, wincing at the cliché used to justify maintaining statues of Civil War generals and slaveholders in the United States.
Monument or eyesore? Which is it?
I’m surprised Silo 5 is still there, unused, taking up a big chunk of prime real estate when all the other early 20th century grain elevators have been demolished to make way for the development of the port as a tourist hub.
Could Silo #5 be turned into some sort of museum or tourist attraction? Completed in four stages from 1906 to 1959, then abandoned in 1994, it would require a tremendous investment of money and imagination to transform it.
Now it looks like a vestige of another era when we were supposed to be impressed by large scale industrial projects that asserted human control over nature.
But the novel corona virus has destroyed any comfortable belief that we can control nature. Or even ourselves. A tiny bit of RNA we can’t even see without a powerful microscope has already killed hundreds of thousands. And provoked a few fatalities in disputes over mask-wearing.
Looking at those miles of grain elevators that blocked the view of the river for the first half of the 20th century must have reminded Montreal residents where their food came from, how it was transported, and delivered.
Now many of us in cities tend to feel anxious about how very far we are from the production of what we need, as we learn how many of the things we take for granted come from China or southeast Asia.
Pre-pandemic, we unthinkingly walked into a supermarket, expecting to find whatever we wanted. But now the pandemic has led to survivalist-mode hoarding as the production and transportation of goods has become more mysterious to city dwellers.
During the pandemic, we have seen expressions of gratitude and admiration for doctors, nurses, and other hospital employees who are directly involved in coping with Covid-19.
Cashiers who work in grocery stores and pharmacies, as well as delivery persons, have also been congratulated for doing jobs that nobody noticed
very much before and are still badly paid.
But the work of others in farming and manufacturing is still invisible to us unless it makes the news by threatening to interrupt our supply
of hamburgers or chicken nuggets.
Instead of tearing down Silo #5 to make way for more condos or turning it into a Disneyland of 20th century industrialization, maybe we should keep it as the eyesore it is, giving us the opportunity to meditate on our systems of production, transportation, and the value of the work done by those we in cities tend to ignore until we feel deprived of something we think we need.
