On its 40th anniversary, the “Big Owe” is slowly turning into a source of pride.
For decades, Montreal’s Olympic Stadium has been the city’s architectural calling card, the postcard image known around the world. But to locals, the swoopy concrete saucer that dominates the city’s east end has also been a bitter reminder of the debt, corruption, and construction delays that almost cost the city its 1976 games.
... as the city celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Montreal Olympics, there’s an unlikely sense of possibility in the air around the Big O, the most prominent civic keepsake of its ‘76 games. A renovation campaign led by the park’s management agency has injected $7 million into a revamped esplanade outside the stadium, and $5 million into the tower, which now has state-of-the-art outdoor lighting and a spruced-up observatory. Since that work kicked off in 2012, the park has hosted hundreds of events each summer, including one-off baseball and soccer games, outdoor concerts, food truck gatherings, and extreme sports festivals. Officials estimate that about 570,000 people passed through le Stade Olympique in 2015—more than double the visitor count in 2011.
That this relic of a stadium has survived for two decades without any pro franchise as a primary tenant is impressive on its own. That it could now somehow thrive is extraordinary. As a result, Montrealers’ feelings seem to be changing.
“We’re getting proud of it,” Claude Lizotte, a 66-year-old Montreal native, told CityLab Wednesday night. Lizotte and his wife sat perched on folding chairs in a grassy stretch of the esplanade, among the estimated 30,000 people who gathered for a free outdoor concert celebrating the park’s anniversary. “Even though we’re not happy with the cost of it, with time, you kind of forget that,” he said.
....
The essential barrenness of the all-cement complex, designed by the French architect Roger Taillibert, remains a hurdle to welcoming visitors, too. Indeed, it’s a minor miracle that the Big O survives at all. Time can be harsh, to say the least, on former Olympic venues, and most of the big, concrete multipurpose complexes built in the 1970s have since been razed.
Yet Montreal has clung to its austere UFO. In 2011, a committee studying the future of the Olympic Park issued a report with a number of recommendations about what to do with the site. Far from promoting demolition, as other studies have, it found that Montrealers wanted to preserve and improve the site. A 2009 survey found that 95 percent of Quebecers opposed a tear-down (perhaps because they are acutely aware of how much they paid for it). And there is now fond nostalgia for the 1976 Olympics, which did bring Montreal international recognition. From an athletic perspective, with the likes of decathalon champion Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner and the perfect-10 Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, those games remain among the most memorable.
With that legacy in mind, the 2011 report suggested that the park’s managers do more to promote youth athletics, and attempt to attract more tourists with restaurants and possibly a hotel. It also proposed reinstalling the retractable roof, at a cost of $200 million. It may sound curious to invest that much in a sports complex that hosts no sports team—but that’s a quarter of the current estimate for demolition. (According to a study, the stadium would have to be deconstructed in pieces, at a staggering cost of $800 million, because imploding it would blanket the city in a cloud of toxic dust.) And in that 2009 survey, 81 percent were in favor of a new roof of some kind.
....