The soap maker who bent the Jacques-Cartier Bridge

The Jacques-Cartier Bridge ain't straight. It has this distinctive curve on the city side, the one that swings the roadway northward just before you hit De Lorimier Avenue. That bend has been baked into the muscle memory of commuters crossing from the South Shore for nearly a century.

The reason for this lies below the bend, a hulking brick factory at 1600 De Lorimier: the Familex building. Largely felt-yet-forgotten as a lot of infrastructure is below the bridge's foundations, this structure landed in headlines on the night of January 20, 2026 after a fire tore through the vacant structure. This forced the bridge's closure and mobilized over 120 firefighters. By morning, one of Montreal's most quietly significant industrial landmarks was gutted.