Montreal Arches

(Guest post by Charles Akben-Marchand of Images of Centretown)

This past Saturday, I went on a trip to Montreal to check out transit, cycling, and other features there that we can learn from in Ottawa (both in terms of what to do and what not to do). We also swung by Montreal's Chinatown to check out their arches.

This arch is one of two on Boul. Saint-Laurent, and faces South-East. The other one is a few blocks up. It spans four lanes of traffic, and like ours has two lions at the entrance.

This third one is at the start of a pedestrian zone perpendicular to Saint-Laurent, which Google Maps says is Boul. de la Gauchetière Est. It's noticeably smaller. Unfortunately, the white streaks are not runny paint, but pigeon poop.

While it was raining when I took this shot, you can see that pigeon netting covers the entire decorative roof tiles of the arch, which takes a lot away from it. It also looks like pigeon poop is clumping up under the pigeon net on top of the decorative element on top of the roof (which might be a dragon head, but it's obscured).

Hopefully the sculpted dragons on Ottawa's Royal Arch will scare away the pigeons. Or maybe they can include an owl design...