The McCord Stewart Museum, with Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante, yesterday announced its planned new social history museum will double in size and remain on Sherbrooke Street in the heart of downtown Montreal.
The expanded social history museum will preserve the Percy Nobbs heritage building and the west facade of the current McCord Museum. Illustration: DMA.
The new building will house three recently merged museums — the McCord Museum, the Stewart Museum, and the Fashion Museum — under a single roof.
The project will cost about $180 million and will require funding from the provincial and federal governments.
The new establishment will expand the museum’s current site by building on Victoria Street, which runs along the west side of the museum, and the lot housing the former Caveau restaurant on President Kennedy Avenue.
For many years, the museum has been dealing with space issues that affect its potential for growth and development.
The current limited size and number of its exhibition halls means the museum is unable to display more than one percent of its collection.
Social history
Founded with one of the largest historical collections in North America — over 1.5 million artefacts documenting the social history of Montreal from pre-colonial times to today — the new museum will be a participatory museum that reflects the cultural diversity, creativity, and dynamism of Quebec’s largest city.
Suzanne Sauvage, president and CEO of the McCord Stewart Museum, said, “We want to give the city a major museum of social history, an inclusive and unifying museum, a museum open to the city and the world that celebrates the stories of all Montrealers, from Indigenous peoples to new immigrants.”
Major donation
The McCord Stewart Museum also announced that La Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso has pledged to donate $15 million towards the project. It is the largest single private monetary donation to a Quebec museum in more than 30 years.
In 1987, the J.W. McConnell Foundation donated $50 million to the McCord Museum for its expansion and the creation of an endowment to preserve its collection.
An architectural design competition will be launched, perhaps by late December, for the approximately 300,000 square-foot project.
Learn more about the expansion plans in the video, produced by the museum for the announcement.
I do hope to visit the McCord Museum some day when I visit the Eastern Townships. Are you familiar with Portrait of a Scandal about Robert Notman, William’s younger brother? Robert and Margaret’s baby was buried in the cemetery in a South Stukely where I spent my teen years. It is such a bizarre and tragic story.
Note that the museum expects to be closed for a couple of years during construction.
Thanks for reminding me about Portrait of a Scandal. I enjoyed it immensely and I had hoped for a mention in it about my ancestors who worked for Notman, but I was out of luck.