Hedley Junction

[sailormatlac]

Matt:
I was only in Quebec City once. Could you identify the buildings, possibly by the bits that stick up, for me? Thanks.

No problem! The picture is taken from Limoilou (former Hedleyville) and looks toward the south. St. Lawrence river is located behind the city.

From left (east) to right (west):

UPPER TOWN

1) Old University Laval: the large building with a central steeple, mansard roof and various frontons. The main campus was moved in the suburb, but the School of Architecture is still in the old 1664 original Seminary. I studied there from 2002 to 2007.

2) Post Office: the dome in the background.

3) Notre-Dame-de-Quebec Cathedral: Chuch with two differend steeples.

4) City Hall: The square tower with a peaked roof

5) Chateau Frontenac: most iconic feature of the City, self-explanatory, your typical Canadian Pacific railway hotel!

6) Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral: the dark steeple is in front of Chateau Frontenac's tower (right side)

7) Price Building: The Art Deco/Chateauesque "skyscrapper"

8) Business School a.k.a. Commercial Academy: The last dome right from Price Building. It moved in the 1960s and became a CEGEP (kind of lousy college system that only exist in Quebec and make you waste a lot of time before university), I went to that institution new campus in early 2000s.

9) Hotel-Dieu Hospital: Just under Chateau Frontenac, it's a chateauesque structure, on its left you can see a white long building, that's the original build (monastery) built in 1690.

LOWER TOWN

10) Palace Station: CPR terminal located under Hotel-Dieu and behind the string of boxcars. At lright you can see the baggage building and the furnace.

As you can see, no wonder the typical canadian Chateauesque style, popular from the 1870s to the late 1930s, originated in Quebec City! Lord Dufferin started this fashion when he salvaged the fortications and rebuilt the gates in a european romantic fashion.

The scenery changed a lot on the lower town. Now there's a highway and an ugly and large government building behind Palace Station. Snapping this shot in 2013 would be worthless because the office building would hide most of the scenery. The Chateauesque part of Hotel-Dieu disappeared in 1954 to make room for a new tower (that prompted officials to protect Old Quebec from this mistake). Business school's dome was toppled in early 1960s to cut maintenance cost when government acquired it . Except that, most old upper town didn't change a lot over the last half-century. The part not shown on the picture at right however suffered a lot of urban renewal in the 1960s, only the Parlement buidling survived in this area.

Matt