A New York cottage village that became a neighbourhood of owners
Laval-Ouest did not grow the way the rest of Île Jésus grew. On April 23, 1926, the New York firm Warren & Arthur Smadbeck ltée — already behind the Long Island resorts of Mastic Beach and Amityville — bought farmland along the rivière des Mille Îles to lay out a summer village for Montrealers. It took the name Plage-Laval, became a town in 1932, was renamed ville de Laval-Ouest on January 1, 1951, raised to cité de Laval-Ouest on June 18, 1964, then dissolved into the Ville de Laval in 1965. The City sums up what happened in between better than we could: “Laval-Ouest does not see the kind of large residential development that various other municipalities of the Laval territory do, before their merger in 1965. Laval-Ouest therefore develops under the sign of stability.” In 1963 the count stood at 6,500 permanent residents, plus another 1,500 to 2,000 people each summer.
That family tree is still legible on the ground, and it decides how we deliver. The municipal planning study describes rectangular blocks running north-south, most often 50 to 60 m wide, a lot pattern it calls “greatly heterogeneous” and ties to the resort areas of the first half of the 20th century, and a built grain “rather small and medium in size” where the picturesque summer cottage, the bungalow and the neo-eclectic house sit side by side. Read that as a delivery instruction: two adjoining driveways are not the same width, and the report publishes no typical dimension for this neighbourhood — we will not invent one. In a fabric like this, the only measurement that counts is the one at your own address, and two or three questions on the phone are enough to take it.
One last figure, with its caveat attached. The CISSS de Laval breaks the 2021 census down by planning sector, and Laval-Ouest shares its own with Sainte-Dorothée, Laval-sur-le-Lac, the Îles-Laval and western Fabreville: none of those numbers describes Laval-Ouest by itself. At that scale, the west end of the island is the part of Laval where people most often own the roof over their heads — 79.1% of the stock is a house against 56.7% for Laval, 81.2% of households are owners against 66.6% — with a median household income of $102,000 in 2020 and a median dwelling value of $428,000. An older stock held by the people living in it is another way of saying renovation work.
laval.ca, municipal history page “Laval-Ouest”; Ville de Laval, typo-morphological study (March 2020), sheet LAO_01; CISSS de Laval, portrait of the 2021 census by planning sector (May 2023), from Statistics Canada — consulted August 17, 2026.
The Arthur-Sauvé and Dagenais corridor, and a south end that will not be built
Only one of the neighbourhood's three built ensembles leans toward business: LAO_02, “Boulevards Arthur-Sauvé et Dagenais,” which the planning study calls “mainly mixed with a commercial dominance,” developed from the 1960s onward along the old chemin du Grand-Bois, also known as the montée Cyr. That road became boulevard Arthur-Sauvé, “the second most important road in the municipality along with boulevard Sainte-Rose,” and it drew in the Laval-Ouest shopping centre and a post office. The UFO golf course, on Dagenais, anchors the whole ensemble.
This corridor stopped spreading close to half a century ago. The permanent agricultural zone created in 1979 takes in the part of the ensemble lying south of boulevard Dagenais Ouest; the 1990 revision reopened only a strip roughly 120 metres deep, immediately south of the boulevard. Further west, the Boisé Laval-Ouest was never built on, “mainly because of its location at the edge of the sanitary watershed”: a 1960 plan signed by the engineers Leroux & Rondeau set out a neighbourhood unit around a central park there, nothing ever came out of the ground, and the study now sees in it “one of the last natural areas of the former municipality of Laval-Ouest,” crossed by two streams, one of them the ruisseau Woodwork. For a contractor that reads as a market description: here the order book fills with renovation, extensions and partial demolition, not with new subdivisions.
The municipal route does not keep that pace. Laval's two drop-off sites open to a business only if the Laval resident it is working for comes along, ID and proof of address in hand, within a limit of 3 m³ per visit, dump trailers and dump trucks turned away, and nobody on hand to help unload. What is left is the 40-yard, scheduled swaps and, when demolition separates the materials, our single-material bins: soil-rocks-sod on one side, concrete, asphalt, bricks and mortar on the other. Each takes its own material and nothing else; one mixed load triggers sorting fees.
Ville de Laval, typo-morphological study (March 2020), sheets LAO_01, LAO_02 and LAO_03; laval.ca, “Écocentre” page — consulted August 17, 2026.
