Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
Interesting about the Decarie. I had no idea it was a road before it was a freeway. I had always assumed it was just built from scratch as a freeway.
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It was a huge expropriation. Our relatives lived on the east side of Addington Ave, typical prewar NDG duplex with large rooms, fireplace, high ceilings, and French doors. Gone. So I experienced some of it second hand.
The story I keep hearing is how, maybe a bit more than a year before, all the municipal property evaluations in the area were raised drastically, raising tax bills. Local property owners raised hell, protested, petitioned, got press time, and eventually succeeded in getting them getting them lowered to levels below what they were before the big increase.
The collective ego was fluffed for about a year. Then the city expropriated and compensated based on the lower evaluations.
I was very young when the Decarie Expressway was built and my only memories of the time prior were of the northern part, what they called "the sunset strip" - mostly restaurants built in the 50s. At that age I was expecting more of a tunnel until my father explained it would be more like a trench.
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