Everyone has a different “memory map” of the Main depending on where they were / are in life. In 1992 the city of Montreal was VERY different. Arguably you could say we were at our lowest point, economically, since the boom times of the Roaring 20s, Expo, and the Olympics; there was a real recession on, and many people only survived on 99 cent pizza… The city was awash in violent crime, drugs and gangs that were active in the downtown core and Sud-Ouest… Ste-Catherine Street was a sea of A LOUER signs from one end to the other… and yeah, there was lots of cool underground artist lofty stuff happening in the spaces upstairs on the Main and there was the last wave of old family retail on the ground floor.

What’s really happened since then? The successful artists had their run, got their TV shows, got fat, got lazy, surviving in a subsidized, vertical-media-market bubble, or they became “The Man,” replacing IBM with a host of other software companies that are apparently less fun to work for by the accounts I’ve heard. The loft spaces are now condos, the families sold up and moved on, and new people are having a kick at the can selling different things to a different neighborhood.

Maybe it’s not better, but it’s quantifiably more active and alive than it was in 1992; I know, because I was there, working in community radio, going to school, going out on the Main (as it was — which was basically a choice between the Copa, Bobards and the Bifteck). Like Sainte-Catherine street there were many closed storefronts, many mysterious fires, it was dangerous for women to walk around at night (or you certainly ran the risk of being harassed)

So your definition of “worse” — ill-defined in your original article — is at best highly subjective.

I don’t want it turned into any sort of suburban shopping mall either, but if an independent clothing retailer dares to put a spiffy sign up and use nice merchandising, is that somehow “inauthentic?” Authentic what, anyway? Ghetto cred? Please. People have to make money or go out of business so why shouldn’t their stores look modern, clean, and attractive?

The Main has changed because the demographics of the surrounding neighborhoods have changed! Take the area bounded by Sherbrooke, Esplanade, Laurier, and Laval — who lives there? Aside from some longstanding communities (the Hasidim, the Portuguese and Spanish), the “new” residents are not poor immigrants from the old country any more. They’re established Canadians, educated, creative, professional, and if not Summit Circle rich, then not exactly Pointe St-Charles poor either. Their tastes are more varied, their needs are more complex, their ability to research more sophisticated, and they have credit and buying power. If the stores on the Main weren’t offering something people wanted, they’d be out of business. To nostalgize the period when the Main was at its most decrepit, rather than celebrate its renaisssance, seems just…odd to me.