Article content Five years ago Montreal’s iconic Rue St-Denis was widely diagnosed as being on life support, and the prognosis was grim. “I think this street is dead,” Lily Mlabenovich said at the time . The street’s slow demise was driving shoppers and entrepreneurs away, the owner of Café Mimi delicatessen said.
Years of road construction, rising rents and the growth of online shopping contributed to a vacancy rate that saw one in four storefronts and restaurants boarded up, defacing the street’s ornate grey-stone facade with a series of grafitti-strewn gaps, like decaying teeth in a once-bright smile. High-end boutiques and kitchenware shops that had lured shoppers for decades abandoned ship as customers opted for mega-malls with plentiful free parking. And then there was COVID.
The ensuing years have seen a partial rehabilitation, spurred in part by the installation of the REV express bike lanes in 2020 that brought 1.5 million cyclists streaming by in 2023 and reduced car traffic. The number of merchants on the shopping stretch is at a 10-year high.
But many feel the changes have failed to create a winning formula for the one-kilometre stretch of storefronts and restaurants north of Sherbrooke St. once considered among Montreal’s signature shopping attractions. Much more needs to be done, they say.
But resuscitating an ailing commercial thoroughfare is not a simple operation. “The greatest scourge for retailers is online shopping. You can no longer just o.