The CBC tower, Montreal's most unjustifiable structure

I think we've done a lot of mourning of demolished neighbourhoods here but still, looking at the 1947-vs-nowaday maps can be a perplexing and sometimes upsetting experience.  
   One of the most inexplicable demolition events is the zapping of a rather large series of blocks - four hectares or so (whatever that is) - below Dorch just west of Papineau, for the CBC tower.
   The beauty of a skyscraper is that it concentrates stuff upwards and so you reduce the ratio of humans per footprint. That's why Le Corbusier championed building upwards - you could have lots of beautiful vegetation, forests parklands below if everybody lived in the sky.

The area south of Dorch and west of Papineau was almost entirely razed for no good reason

   But the CBC tower managed to swallow up a large number of blocks while the actual tower only used a tiny bit of the land below. How this happened is incomprehensible. That there had initially been discussion of building the tower on the virgin Nuns' Island but that fell through. I'd love to know how it was decided to build so little on such a big piece of land. No sign, by the way of any progress on the much-ballyhooed $1.6 billion development that would supposedly rebuild the housing on the site announced five years ago.