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Part One of a seven-part series

Almost from the time that farmer Jean-Baptiste Pépin built a homestead and raised seven children on the edge of the river in the eastern extremity of Montreal Island in the early 19th century, the Rivière-des-Prairies district’s vast uninhabited land has stoked many imaginations.

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It has also fattened many wallets.

But within this real estate Klondike, one property owner has managed to lose millions of dollarsmultiple times on a single piece of land over the last four decades:the city of Montreal.

Like the ebb and flow of the nearby river, the city has more than once given up and taken back parts of an immense rectangle that lies on either side of a street named after the late Quebec painter Marc-Aurèle Fortin starting in 1981, the year that the city first decided to expropriate it.

If Montreal’s Olympic Stadium stands as the city’s biggest blunder in terms of construction projects, the Marc-Aurèle Fortin site should hold up as the marker of city mismanagement of the public’s real estate.