Historic building added to Quartier des Spectacles

A historic downtown building is being added to the list of cultural venues in Montreal's Quartier des Spectacles zone.

The Wilder Building on Bleury Street was built in 1918 but has sat mostly vacant for the last decade. The 11-storey neoclassical outfit will become home to three of Montreal's top dance organizations, including Les Grands Ballets.

Restoration work costing $80 million will begin in the fall. Currently the building, across from the Imperial Cinema, is in such bad shape that it's covered in black netting to prevent any pieces from falling on people below.

Constance Pathy, president of Les Grands Ballets, said the building will be an ideal home for the troupe.  

"As of now we're housed in an old garage. We're bursting out of it and it's a terrible building, and now we're going to be in a very prestigious spot. So we're very, very happy," she said.

The contemporary dance organization Tangente as well as LADMMI, a contemporary dance school, will move in when renovations are completed, targeted for 2014. It's great news for Tangente, artistic co-director Dena Davida said.

"We've come to the end of a 20-year lease that we had with the University of Quebec, and we are literally out in the streets. We have no place at all to present so we're actually in a crisis for space," she said. "We're a 30-years-old organization now and we present 50 dance companies every year, and so we will have a theatre and a creative laboratory."

The renovations will be paid for by the provincial and federal governments, with contributions of several million from the dance companies that will occupy the building.

Work on the Quartier des Spectacles, a two-square-kilometre swatch of downtown incorporating Place des Arts and other sites into a cultural zone, began in 2007 and is continuing. One of the highest-profile projects is the $270-million new Montreal Symphony Orchestra concert hall, which the philharmonic will officially inaugurate next month.