The present shows the great advance in growth of uptown structures.
That big buildings soon will be common uptown has been shown by the coming into being of three that have been erected almost simultaneously,—the Drummond, at the corner of Peel and St. Catherine streets; the Guarantee Building on the Beaver Hall Hill; and the Dandurand, the first ten storey building east of the Main Street and North of Craig, at the corner of St. Catherine Street and St. Denis Boulevard. Accommodation has been booked heavily in all three, and already there are projects for more to be erected in the course of the next year. The Scroggie Building, erected by the Peter Lyall Company, who have built most of the “big stuff” in Montreal, including the Transportation and Express on St. James Street, constitutes something of a record—ground was broken in December, 1912, and the place was occupied by November 1, 1913. The area covered by the structure is 127 feet by 345.
Another large structure, that has gone up quietly with little interference with traffic and public convenience, is the ten-storey addition to the Power Building on Craig Street—work was begun in June and already the lower storeys are occupied by some of the office staff. One of the more remarkable of the newer buildings is the Southam Press Building, the novel front of which attracts the eye of many a traveller in Bleury Street. Four stately female figures support the front, which is frescoed with small colored lizards and snakes.
The ground floor has an area of 4,525 square feet.
The new Montreal High School in University Street, which covers about five acres of ground, and which has been in construction for more than a year, will be vacated by the builders in about two months. The new Sun Life Building on Dominion Square, which, the Company claims will have cost when finished upward of one and a quarter million dollars, has already been fitted with its skeleton of steelwork, and will be nearly completed by the end of the summer. Another large building on which a great deal of work remains to be done is the new custom house building on McGill Street, which will not be finished for two years, the object being to allow of the proper “seasoning” of the main structure, and the settling of the foundations. Considering the extent of building operation in the city, there are comparatively few accidents, the death list being proportionately smaller than that of New York, where every skyscraper exacts its toll of several deaths before completion.
The growth of the city of recent years has been so rapid and great that it can be best gauged about 1913 by the testimony of a Montrealer, Mr. Donald McMaster, who had been absent for a few years:
“As I came up the river last night on the boat, I was astounded by what I saw in the way of industrial development in the East End of the city.
“Belching chimneys, great mills and factories, the glow of furnaces, the signs of an eager and aggressive industrialism. And then today when I went westward and saw what was being done there in the way of expansion in the building up of the environs of the city, in the multiplicity of machine and car shops, along the Lachine canal, I said to myself that such growth surpassed that of London or Paris proportionately to population.
“Why, you will have a million, not in a decade, but in a lustrum. You don’t see all this growth as a stranger sees it. I am not a stranger, of course; but I have been absent. I tell you I am amazed at what I see, and proud of old Montreal.”