Just an update on the Mill West apartments, which are being developed in the giant old mill building on the West Side just south of Notre Dame Bridge:
From
NHPR:
The image is from the NHPR website, looking at Mill West and where the Notre-Dame neighborhood used to be from downtown. It gives a good perspective of how enormous the building is (I remember when it had batting cages in it in the 1990s, among other things). You can also see the low, long, white building across the street, which now houses a Rite-Aid, state liquor store, and formerly a Vista Foods. This should be a prime redevelopment site. Along with most of CMC (to the left) and the Pariseau High-rise (beige building to the right), this shopping center sits on what was once a vibrant, dense neighborhood. Now a half-empty plaza with huge parking lots on either side of McGregor Street, it should hopefully one day see a mixed-use redevelopment to restore it to some sort of neighborhood. Hopefully the Mill West apartments will help provide the mass of people needed for something like this; surely people living in that building would rather have coffee shops and restaurants across the street than a Rite-Aid parking lot.
edit: Here's a better image of the Rite-Aid plaza, along with recent CMC buildings and expansions that create the beginnings of a strong street wall there. In the top you can see a corner of Lafayette Park, a beautiful spot n front of St. Marie's with great views of downtown that is just begging to have a dense, mixed-use neighborhood/development at its foot instead of the back of a bad, 1960s shopping mall: