Renamed Frédéric Back Park in 2016 the former Miron limestone and cement quarry in Montreal’s St Michel neighbourhood, later Ville de Montréal dump and landfill site, is a study in transformative and symbolic appropriations, which buttress ongoing processes of extraction and consumption of urban land, materials, labour and communities.
The photograph was taken with limited knowledge of the site’s specific role in the city’s history. Nevertheless, it has had the capacity to evoke all that was buried in the fabric of the city, the construction, destruction, upheaval and rebuilding, concealed in the fragments of overgrown brick walls.
“Waste is a monument to all that we once wanted and now do not want, once valued and no longer value. Waste is an ironic testimony to a desire to forget. Landfills, in other words, make their appearance on and in the landscape as a material enactment of forgetting.” – Myra Hird, 2013.
By Alison Creba. As I approach my destination, the industrial typology mixes with this attention to raw materials. Buildings themselves seem to look inwards onto that which they contain: used-cars dealers morph into scrap metal lots. Spacious yards reveal collections of building materials, rawly stacked and overgrown with purple Buddleia.
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In 2014 most of the Sir John Carling Building, former headquarters of Agriculture Canada, was demolished. The SJCB was a FHBRO designated ‘recognized’ heritage building located on the Central Experimental Farm, a National Historic Site of Canada, one of the most treasured places within Ottawa’s historic urban landscape.
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WASTE HERITAGE RESEARCH: deconstruction, salvage & re-use 