An open house will allow citizens to glimpse the painstaking and costly work that was required to restore the heritage building.
Article content
At the back corner on the ground floor of City Hall stands a vault, with a pair of glasses once worn by Jean Drapeau, the city’s longest-serving mayor and the father of the métro system and the 1976 Olympics.
Go up the stairs, and there’s another relic from the 1960s: a restored room now called Salon de la Francophonie leading to the balcony where French President Charles de Gaulle famously pronounced “Vive le Québec libre” during a public speech while on an official state visit in 1967 to mark the World’s Fair. The balcony access was blocked off by offices and a kitchenette for decades.
Advertisement 2
Article content
The glasses are part of a new permanent exhibition as is a view of the balcony — though its access is officially off-limits to the general public — at the newly restored City Hall. Reporters got a sneak peek of the building after its $211-million transformation and just ahead of its official inauguration Friday morning.
“This is the house of citizens,” Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante said.
City Hall is now open to the general public for the first time since it was closed for restoration and renovations in 2019 — the first major works since 1926 when the building was rebuilt after a 1922 fire. Citizens are invited for a tour during an open house on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Otherwise the building is open to the public on any weekday.
The ground floor exhibition shows a display of historical artifacts and well as a brief history of the city, including its merger and demerger episodes, and biographies of all the mayors. Gone are the painted official portraits of the mayors, replaced with digital versions that are part of the permanent exhibit.
Plante said she wanted City Hall to be more welcoming to citizens, and there are certainly more spaces now accessible to the public. Citizens can enter through Gosford St. or Place Vauquelin. While they must go through metal detectors and have purses and bags checked, that’s a necessary evil to allow people to have free rein of the building. On the ground floor, a new multi-use room will host public sessions of the city’s permanent committees. For the first time, those meetings don’t have to be held in the council chamber, so it allows for more than one public meeting to happen at the same time. There’s also a café that will shortly be installed and occupied by the public group Espace pour la vie, which manages the Biodome, Planetarium, Insectarium and Botanical Gardens.
Today’s One Read
Article content
Advertisement 3
Article content
On the building’s first floor, the public can see the Hall d’honneur, which often has a temporary art or historical exhibition, and get a glimpse of the council chambers. Towards the back is a terrace, which offers extraordinary views of Mount Royal and the downtown core. It too will be accessible to the public unless there is a private event.
On the second floor, citizens call also take in city council proceedings with a new gallery overlooking the hall that is newly available to the public and universally accessible.
First estimated at $30 million in 2015, the work required much more labour than originally thought. The COVID-19 pandemic also forced crews to halt work, which also added to the cost. A total of 750,000 hours of work were logged on the construction site. Specialized artisans like plaster workers, blacksmiths and marble restorers were required to do all of the delicate work.
“It was a colossal work site,” explained Menaud Lapointe, the chief architect of the City Hall restoration, standing in the newly restored Hall d’honneur, where official ceremonies usually take place. “It took three months of work just to do the ceiling here with plaster workers. You have to also understand that the work was done with special measures to prevent asbestos and lead contamination.”
The project also aims to make the building carbon neutral. Heating and cooling systems were all converted to electric power, with natural gas backup generators installed. The building is now 75 per cent more energy efficient.
City Hall renovations by the numbers:
- Built in 1878
- 105 wooden doors restored
- 169 wooden windows reinforced
- 80 new windows installed
- Five murals, 80 paintings and more than 5,0000 glassworks were restored;
- Part of the copper roof was restored
- Five stained glass windows restored in council chambers
Recommended from Editorial
Advertisement 4
Article content
Article content
