Shaughnessy Village

Shaughnessy Village
Neighbourhood of Montreal
Apartment buildings in the Shaughnessy Village Apartment buildings in the Shaughnessy Village
Shaughnessy Village Location of Shaughnessy Village in Montreal
Coordinates:
Country	Canada
Province	Quebec
City	Montreal
Borough	Ville-Marie
Population (2006)
• Total	13,000 ( 2.2%)

Shaughnessy Village is a neighbourhood of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, located on the western side of the Ville-Marie borough. It is bounded by Guy Street to the east, Atwater Street to the west, Sherbrooke Street to the north, and René Lévesque Boulevard and the Ville-Marie Expressway to the south.

This neighbourhood is the most densely populated area of Quebec, due to the large number of high-rise apartment towers built in the 1960s and 1970s. The area is characterized by high-density residential housing and small-businesses, typically owned and operated by immigrants living in the neighbourhood, concentrated at its core, with stately Victorian grey-stone row houses and beaux-arts styled apartment blocks at the edges of the neighbourhood. It is a primarily institutional neighbourhood, with a university, junior college, seminary, hospital and architecture museum among many private schools, colleges and technical schools.

In 1981, local citizens named the neighourhood after Shaughnessy House, built in 1874 for Thomas Shaughnessy, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The house was declared a National Historic Site of Canada in 1974, and is now part of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Other notable landmarks in the area include the Montreal Forum and Montreal Children's Hospital on Atwater Avenue, Le Faubourg Sainte-Catherine shopping mall and Cabot Square.

History

The Canadian Centre for Architecture is located in Shaughnessy Village.

Prior to Expo '67 and the Olympics, this neighbourhood was considered the gay village (mostly for anglophones).

Urban Redevelopment

Sections of Shaughnessy Village are abandoned, though not to the same extent as the mid-late 1990s. There are several large apartment blocks that sit completely abandoned, in addition to a long row of commercial properties along Saint Catherine Street.

Petty crime is slightly above average in this part of town, and a higher than average level of homelessness given the number of abandoned buildings in which to squat. Public drunkenness and drug usage is one of the more bothersome social pathologies, though the area in which this activity takes place is somewhat limited.

The presence of ever-expanding Concordia University and Dawson College have had a generally positive impact on the quality of life in the area, which has arguably been steadily gentrifying in the last twenty years. The Montreal Children's Hospital will soon vacate its property south of Cabot Square, and several other heritage buildings in the area have had a difficult time weathering the recent economic troubles.

The city of Montreal released a comprehensive city beautification plan in March 2011, but has not acted on it so far. Property prices are relatively low given the proximity to the urban core, and so is somewhat perennially described as an 'up-and-coming neighbourhood'. Recent investments in the area, such as the new tourism institute to occupy the old Victoria Grammar School (1885) and the Seville Condo project may help maintain the momentum of redevelopment.

Demographics

It is thus one of the more cosmopolitan neighbourhoods in the city, as well as being generally more English-speaking than the rest of Montreal. There is a sizeable population of Chinese-Canadians living in the area, so much so that part of the informally named Concordia Ghetto is also sometimes referred to as New Chinatown. Much like Montreal's main Chinatown, it is pan-Asiatic, rather than uniquely Chinese.

The area is home to numerous small independently owned and operated restaurants, bars, bistros and cafés.

Public Transit

The neighbourhood is served by two Montreal Metro Green line stations. Guy-Concordia station in the east and Atwater station to the west. Georges Vanier station on the Orange line is just south of Shaughnessy Village in nearby Little Burgundy. The area is also well-served by numerous bus lines terminating at Atwater Station that connect Westmount, Cote-des-Neiges and much of the rest of the urban core. The Claire-Morissette bike path on De Maisonneuve Boulevard cuts through the centre of the neighbourhood and the area is well served by Bixi stations.

External links

• (French) Shaughnessy Village - City of Montreal
• Shaughnessy Village Association
• Montrealbits.com:Shaughnessy Village
• Shaughnessy Village, A Historical Perspective