A fixture at the corner of Ste. Catherine and Mountain Sts. for the past two decades is getting ready to hang up his spoons in the next few weeks.
Cyrille Esteve — aka Spoonman — says he's going to quit playing the spoons outside Ogilvy's at the end of October, apparently weary of years of attempts by the city to get him to move.
"I'm 65, I'll cash out my pension," Esteve told CTV Montreal.
Spoonman is one of the most beloved buskers in the city — but he isn't so beloved by city officials, and those who work in the neighborhood.
He has won court battles with the city in 1999 and in 2004 for the right to play his spoons, but he's been hampered by a couple of city regulations.
First came a regulation that buskers can't produce sound that's audible more than 25 meters away, and then came the backbreaker — a bylaw which forbade buskers from playing in the same spot for more than an hour.
It requires him to move his bike 60 metres down the street — which his how he transports a stool, stereo, and the spoons he sells to the public. "At 65 years old, to move a 200 kg bike every 60 minutes is just exhausting, so I just can't," he said.
The bylaw, incidentally, also forbids him from selling spoons.
It's been a bad week for music lovers at the Ogilvy's corner — earlier this week, Ogilvy's itself announced that it was ending its longstanding tradition of having bagpipers play in the store at lunchtime. The last performance was on Wednesday.
Holt Renfrew, Ogilvy's parent company, suggested in a statement that it was time for new traditions.
-With files from CTV Montreal