The Pink House on Saint-Ambroise: The Story of the Canada Malting Site

If you have driven west along rue Saint-Ambroise in Saint-Henri, you have seen it. A small pink cottage, complete with green shutters, curtains and flower boxes, perched impossibly on top of a crumbling industrial tower more than a hundred feet above the Lachine Canal. No one knows who put it there. Everyone knows what it means.

The building beneath it is the former Canada Malting Company plant at 5022–5060 rue Saint-Ambroise. It is the last vacant factory on the Saint-Henri side of the canal, the last large developable site in the neighbourhood, and the subject of a decade-long fight over what Montreal owes its industrial past and its low-income present.

What it was built to be

In 1905, the Canada Malting Company built a malt house on the north bank of the Lachine Canal. At the time, the corridor was the largest industrial district in the country. Every ship bound for the Great Lakes passed through the canal, which made this parcel close to perfect: barley came off the boats, was germinated and dried in the long brick buildings fronting Saint-Ambroise, and malt went out to distilleries and breweries across the city and the country. At its peak the plant turned out roughly 250,000 pounds of malt a year.

The complex was designed by architect David Jerome Spence. Its most remarkable feature is the row of nine violet silos on the west side, sheathed in treated clay tiles manufactured by the Barnett and Record Company of Minneapolis. They are the last terracotta-tiled silos of their kind anywhere in North America. Eighteen concrete silos were added on the east side in 1963, at what turned out to be the very end of the plant's good years.

What broke

The St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, and in 1970 the Lachine Canal closed to commercial navigation entirely. A plant designed around ships was suddenly a plant dependent on rail, and the transportation math stopped working. Canada Malting abandoned the Saint-Ambroise site around 1980, moving to a new facility at the Bickerdike Pier in the Port of Montreal. Héritage Montréal dates final operations at the address to 1985; other sources say 1980. The five-year discrepancy is itself a small artifact of how thinly this site has been documented.

Quonta Holding Ltd., a feed company associated with grain merchant Steven Quon, bought the complex — reportedly for around $500,000 — and used the silos to store soybean, corn and animal feed. When CN ended rail service along the canal in 1989, even that use collapsed. From then on, the site was simply abandoned.

The long middle

Thirty-five years of nothing. Boarded windows, spalling concrete, cracked terracotta, graffiti in geological layers. Urban explorers wore footpaths through the wild grass; official safety reports in the 2010s confirmed advanced decay of the brick façades and the silo shells. Water infiltration did structural damage that heritage advocates now describe in near-terminal terms.

Meanwhile, everything around it changed. Along the same stretch of canal, factory after factory was demolished or converted, almost always into condominiums. The Canada Malting stubbornly did not.

The turn

In 2013, a proposal for 700 luxury condominiums on the site collapsed under sustained citizen pressure. That failure became the founding fact of everything since. In February 2017, residents and community organizations backed by the CDC Solidarité Saint-Henri formed the collective À nous la Malting, demanding the land be set aside for a fully community-owned project.

Their plan, published in 2020, is a $45-million scheme with roughly 230 below-market housing units, a public daycare, a co-op café, a community kitchen, rooftop gardens, public access to the canal, and an on-site museum of the neighbourhood's industrial and working-class history. They budget a further $30 million for decontamination.

The stakes are demographic, not sentimental. The site sits in census tract 84, where the median after-tax income of $19,183 falls below the surrounding neighbourhood median, 76% of households are renters, and 36% of those renters are poorly housed.

Against that, Renwick Development, led by Noam Schnitzer, has proposed a mixed project variously described at 220 to 240 units with 28 to 30 percent social housing, family units, artist studios, commercial space and community facilities — a roughly $120-million development. The Sud-Ouest borough has signalled it wants something in this general shape: offices, local commerce and affordable housing.

The ownership saga

The reason nothing has been built is not architecture. It is title.

Renwick filed a $5.5-million purchase offer with Quonta in October 2015, conditional on inspections and other terms spread across four years. In June 2018, Les Placements Luc Poirier offered $7.7 million. Quonta accepted the higher bid, arguing Renwick had failed to satisfy its conditions. Renwick sued. On December 19, 2022, Superior Court Justice Gabrielle Brochu upheld the original agreement. Quonta appealed.

The sale finally closed on March 28, 2024, at the original $5.5 million — financed in part by a $1-million mortgage loan from Steven Quon himself. Within months, Quonta moved to call that loan, giving Renwick sixty days to repay in full or see the building returned to market.

As of early 2026, Renwick holds title, the litigation is unresolved, and no building permits have been issued. The land remains zoned industrial; any residential project requires a rezoning at the borough level that has never been granted.

What it is now

The site is roughly 12,400 square metres of contaminated, canal-front, heritage-significant land, zoned for an industry that left half a century ago. In 2025, the National Trust for Canada named the Canada Malting Ltd. site to its Top 10 Endangered Places list, citing both its historic value and the risk of demolition by neglect. Community leaders have formally asked the City to place a conservation reserve on the property.

And in October 2019, someone climbed the tower at night — the last forty feet on an exterior ladder, in Quon's own description, "unacceptable and dangerous" — and painted the old silo control cabin bright pink. Later came the shutters, the curtains, the flower boxes, a Christmas tree, a red companion cabin, and a giant gift box labelled À: Saint-Henri, De: Little Pink.

It is not a house. It never was. It is the control cabin of a dead machine, redecorated by people who refused to let the building be only a ruin. Below it sits the gap that defines the site: the distance between what the ground holds, what the rules allow, and what the neighbourhood is still asking for.

Sources: Héritage Montréal (Memento); Wikipedia (Canada Malting Silos, Montreal; Pink House (Montreal)); Le Devoir (2023, 2024); CBC News (2020, 2023); Journal Métro (2021); Cult MTL (2020); Quartier Libre (2020); À nous la Malting; National Trust for Canada / Historic Places Days; Atlas Obscura.