Old Molson brewery to be transformed into neighbourhood with 5,000 homes

The plans to transform Montreal’s iconic old Molson brewery into a bustling new neighbourhood on the banks of the Saint Lawrence have become a little clearer.

Developers unveiled more details Wednesday on the redevelopment project for the “Quartier Molson” waterfront site that extends more than half a kilometre — between the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, to the east, and Old Montreal, to the west.

Some 5,000 residential units will be built, including social, affordable, family housing “suitable for current needs.” The project will retain features of the landmark brewery.

“We want to bring housing into the development, bring Montrealers home to this element that was an industrial site for a long time,” said Leonard Verrilli, the director of development for major projects at Groupe Montoni.

“We don’t have spaces in our downtown core where we can live on the waterfront. And this is one of our amazing opportunities right now that we can do,” said architect Benoit Lagacé, the director of urban design at Sid Lee Architecture.

Developers at Groupe Montoni say the construction will favour green, energy-efficient technology, including a potential energy loop. They say it will be a “model for sustainable real estate redevelopment.”

There will be a hotel, office towers, shops, restaurants and a vast public park – the Sohmer Park – over 150,000 square feet.

“The whole Molson Brewery, the historic buildings we were preserving and transforming, we’re adding the Sohmer Park which is going to be an amazing 150,000 square feet park that’s going to have a waterfront view for Montrealers,” said Lagacé.

“We wanted to make it such that it seems like it was always there,” added Verrilli. “It’s not something that we’re doing this completely new. We want to almost give it the feel that it’s something that grew organically out of the site.”

The original Molson brewery was founded in 1786, and much of the site will be preserved as part of the architecture for the new project.

“We worked really hard with some historians, some architects, to kind of look at the story of the Molson Brewery, how it evolved throughout time,” Lagacé said.

“Here we could really kind of highlight these amazing parts of Montreal history, which are kind of the red brick buildings, the gray stone buildings of the Molson brewery. So on the historic part, about a third of all the buildings were preserved and are being transformed right now. The Molson tower is being preserved and extended upwards.”

Construction is expected to begin in 2025 after necessary permits are secured.

The developers have also announced that they will commit to the City of Montreal’s bylaw to include 20 per cent social housing, 20 per cent affordable housing and 20 per cent family housing in the project.

“It’s obviously a good thing that they want to follow the 20-20-20 bylaw by including on-site development of social housing, but obviously for us it’s definitely not enough to answer the most urgent need in the neighbourhoods that is Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and Ville-Marie,” said Catherine Lussier, a coordinator at FRAPRU. “When you look at the population that are paying already more than 30 per cent of their income, just in Ville-Marie, there are more than 17,000.”

The Quartier Molson project is estimated to cost $2.5 billion and will likely take seven to 10 years to be fully developed, with the first phase of residential units projected to be completed in 2027.

“We’re not going to be building as we typically do dense neighbourhoods that don’t have character,” Lagacé said. “Here we have the chance to really use the Molson brewery, the bones of the old industrial site to create really something that is going to be unique that’s really going to have a character.”

The plan for the site will be presented to citizens during meetings Thursday (noon-2 p.m. and 6-8 p.m.) and Friday (10 a.m. to noon) on the former brewery site at 1555 Notre-Dame East.

This project is being developed by Groupe Montoni and the Fonds immobilier de solidarité FTQ.