Late baseball great Gary Carter gets a street, park named after him in Montreal

MONTREAL – Montreal will name a street and a park after Gary Carter, the Hall of Fame catcher who defined the golden era of a once-beloved franchise.

Carter died in February of cancer at age 57.

On Wednesday, the city announced the details of its tribute to the player who starred with the now-defunct Expos for more than half of his career.

The street borders Jarry Park, where the Expos played for most of their first decade and where Carter made his big-league debut.

There will also be a park in the north-end Ahuntsic district named after him.

The changes will be enacted by the city council in February, a year after Carter’s death.

City officials say they also might eventually honour him at the site of the Olympic Stadium, where Carter played for the majority of his Expos career.

Close to 2,000 proposals were submitted to the city after the call for ideas was launched Feb. 27. Carter delighted Montreal fans with his skills and enthusiasm from 1974-84, when he was traded to New York, and he returned in 1992 for his farewell season. He was the first Expos player to be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Carter’s death triggered an outpouring of Expos nostalgia in a city that boasts few lingering traces of baseball. Aside from the Expos banner hanging at the Bell Centre hockey arena, and the usually vacant Olympic Stadium, there is little evidence in Montreal that the city hosted, and was sometimes impassioned for, a major league team over 36 years from 1969-2004.

The California-born star athlete entrenched himself in Quebec life during his time there, calling it a second home and learning some French.