The large lot - 40,000 square feet - at the corner once held many buildings but they were razed around 1958 when the south side of Dorchester was demolished to widen the narrow street to become a major boulevard.
For decades the vacant space served as a much-needed parking lot, during an era when parking lots were much appreciated and owners could make a solid profit from the passive venture.
But parking lots became the target of city officials around 2000 when city officials pressured owners to build on the lots by raising taxes and encouraging them to make deals to get something up on their land. Since the lot closed the land exists as a purposeless eyesore.
In the early 1900s the land was busy with structures that sat handily accrss from the old Montreal General Hospital across the street on its east side.
The most prominent of te lost buildings was the Hotel d’Italie, later renamed the Roncari in honour of the family that owned it and fended off various challenges, including Black Hand extortion attempts and an incident in 1930 when 24-year-old Prudencienne Daignault was found strangled to death in a with a towel in a room. Police arrested the German Albert Zimmerman but a court acquitted him after witnesses were grilled.
After the structure was demolished, the corner also had another vacant lot after authorities demolished the old St. Lawrence farmers market at the northeast corner, leaving two of the four corners long-term vacant wastelands of despair. About 20 years ago the Societe St. Jean Baptiste built a highrise student dorm on that corner, however, leaving the southeast corner alone as a vacant lot.
A branch of the city of Montreal, known as the development society, became owner of the property and sold it for about $6 million in a series of three transactions to the giant FTQ labour funds in 2005. The city stipulated that the new owner must build something there within one year or else resell it to the city for 10 percent less.
A year passed and the city declined to exercise its option to repurchase the land, noting that it would cost them about $800,000 to do so.
Passersby would occasionally notice sporadic signs on the site promising a future development and note the temporary presence of construction equipment but none of the hype ever amounted to anything and years passed without any progress.
The FTQ sold the empty land to Tony Accurso in 2010. Accurso has since become well-known as a developer known for bribing officials, a habit that earned him a couple of fraud convictions.
Accurso used the land as collateral for several major loans and in 2014 he put it on sale for $14 million.
The city of Montreal had reportedly been willing to allow a 39 meter building to be placed on the site - that equates to about 10 floors but later downgraded that to 23 meters, which is about six or seven.
So whoever owned the property, be it the FTQ, Accurso, or someone else who might purchase it, would consider the height limits too restrictive to be profitable.
If city officials greenlighted a taller structure, we might have something there on the land today.
Accurso, it should come as no surprise, no longer owns the land. The city of Montreal sued the embattled developer for $14 million while Laval also sued him for $29 million. Accurso settled with Montreal for $3.8 million earlier in 2022.
The FTQ fund once again owns the property as part of $17 billion in its assets. There’s no major likelihood of them building anything on the land.
The City of Montreal would be wise to exempt the property from the height limitations and allow them to build something much larger than they want, as it would increase their tax base and also provide much-needed homes in the downtown core. .
Some cynically suspect that the city doesn’t want a tall building at the site because it would block the view of the mountain from the mayor’s office.