A first look at the restored art deco 9th floor of the Montreal Eaton Centre
A memorable dining hall modelled after a French oceanliner has been revived
The ninth floor of the Montreal Eaton Centre may have been frozen in time after it was shuttered in 1999, but this year it's being plunged back to 1931, revived to its former glory.
At a time of economic trouble in the 1930s, the Île-de-France restaurant was a destination, a place for people to float above their woes, leave them on the street down below. Those people, from all walks of life, dressed to the nines to dine — French, English, rich, poor. Prices were accessible and the food, delectable.
Lady Flora Eaton, whose family owned Eaton's, the old Eaton Centre, had commissioned architect Jacques Carlu to recreate the dining room he built on the Île-de-France transatlantic oceanliner.
"It was something completely new for Montrealers, kind of a new sense of modernity and luxury that didn't exist here," said Georges Drolet, the architect who spearheaded the space's restoration with his team at EVOQ, a firm specializing in heritage sites.
"People would come here and kind of live their best life in a way."
But by the time it closed in 1999, shortly after Eaton's filed for bankruptcy, the 500-seat restaurant had lost some of its old glamour. It had become a buffet and the walls were a 1980s palette of peach and light yellow.
Twenty-five years later, the hidden gem is being reopened to the public next month. And in a colour palette of light grey and beige as close to the original as possible, said Drolet, who could tell from old black-and-white photographs that the walls were lighter at the beginning.
The space is in fact as close to its original state as Drolet could get it. As one of the few sites in Quebec whose heritage status focuses on its interior, nearly every aspect is expected to be maintained.
"For the most part, everything was preserved," said the project's head manager Jimmy Lévesque. A wallpaper company revived a defunct line of production to create the fabric covering parts of the dining hall walls, which double as acoustic controls.
"They had a violinist come and play for a test and the sound was just incredible," Lévesque said.
Even the 500 chairs, which are not stackable and therefore too inconvenient to use, have to be kept. The vertical frescos at both ends, painted by Carlu's wife Natacha Carlu, are still there. The former linoleum flooring is intact in many places, save for the middle of the room, where it was recovered by a similar material bearing the same pattern. The redone herringbone wood floors surrounding the cocktail bar are indistinguishable from a small patch of the original.
Marble adorning columns and various surfaces was simply polished. The old sinks in the bathrooms, with their tubular porcelain pipe covers, were reinstalled.
In two smaller rooms on either side of the dining hall, the silver-plated wallpaper has been recovered with the same material.
The doors, trimmings, air vents and light fixtures made of the historic metal alloy Monel are all still in place with their funky geometric designs despite new ventilation and electrical systems.
To Drolet, the restaurant, known as Le 9e, has had not nine, but three lives. There was its opening and then the time before it closed, "as a kind of familiar place," when it was a lunch spot for office workers and shoppers, including many of the women who'd experienced it in its prime, perhaps powdering their faces in the elegant bathrooms offering views of the city.
And then there's now, its new life, he said.
The owner of the building, Ivanhoé Cambridge, the real estate arm of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the province's pension fund, had kept the ninth floor mostly as it was and stored its artifacts but said it wasn't ready to reopen it for all those years without an operator to run the show.
A group of entrepreneurs, Jeff Baikowitz, Marco Gucciardi, Andy Nulman, Madeleine Kojakian and the 7 Doigts creative collective, stepped in and enlisted Derek Damman as culinary director and Liam Hopkins as chef.
The dining room, too large to operate as a modern restaurant, will be available to rent as a private event space and a cocktail bar and smaller restaurant will occupy the large hallway next to it. A similar event space exists in Toronto, built by the same architect, reopened in 2003 and called Le Carlu.
Andrew Whibley, owner of Cloakroom Bar and Dominion, is designing cocktails inspired by 1930s recipe books with simple ingredients such as pineapple, plum and eau-de-vie spirits. Dominique Jacques, the owner of Melk, is on the coffee service, planning old-fashioned cafés-au-lait in large cups. Jacques is also opening a café downstairs, which will hold regular hours and be open to passersby.
Drolet, who was also involved in restoring Hotel Gault in Old Montreal and Rideau Hall in Ottawa, was tapped for the project as early as 2001, but real talks didn't start until 2016 and then construction began a year and a half ago, according to Lévesque.
During the in-between years, heritage and conservation advocates decried its closed state and Heritage Montreal designated it "under observation" in 2014, signalling worries the once-famous ninth floor would remain a memory.
France Vanlaethem, professor emeritus the Université du Québec à Montréal's design school and the founder of Docomomo Québec, a group dedicated to the protection of modern architecture, published an open letter in 2018 calling for Le 9e to be reopened.
When she heard Drolet would be going ahead with the project, though, Vanlaethem said she was reassured.
"It was done according to the rules and as far as restorations go, it was really well done," she said, noting it was executed with a mix of tradition and modernity in the same way that the space itself appealed to the crossroads of clientele that illustrate Quebec's population.
"There are things we just can't redo today so it's important to conserve them. It plays on our relation to the past and to memory," Vanlaethem said.
A city should be a "palimpsest of time periods," she said — not frozen but working together, their layers intermingling.
"All those layers have to be present and places like the 9th are exceptional works. We can't lose them."
The Eaton Centre's Le 9e officially reopens on Friday, May 17.
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