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Vegas Catholicism MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2003 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF MONTREAL, 25.09.03 : ST. JOSEPH'S ORATORY, CÔTE-DES-NEIGES MONTREAL, 25.09.03 : "RESERVED FOR PILGRIMS" MONTREAL, 25.09.03 : ST. JOSEPH'S ORATORY STEPS MONTREAL, 25.09.03 : ST. JOSEPH'S ORATORY, ON MOUNT ROYAL MONTREAL, 25.09.03 : VIEW FROM THE ORATORY'S TERRACE MONTREAL, 25.09.03 : QUEEN MARY ROAD, SNOWDON MONTREAL, 27.09.03 : VAN HORNE AT PARC AVENUE, MILE END MONTREAL, 25.09.03 : CHEMIN DE LA CÔTE-DES-NEIGES MONTREAL, 27.09.03 : LOST GIRL, LOST CAT ON MT-ROYAL AVENUE MONTREAL, 27.09.03 : DÉPANNEUR, MARIE-ANNE AT BRÉBEUF This week, as a little end-of-the-month respite from my oh so strenuous editorial duties, I'm handing things over to our contributor Kristen Keerma. Kristen, whom you may remember from her essay on Vancouver, recently left her hometown of Toronto for the greasy pleasures of Montreal. Here are some of her first impressions. I came here for a jading. That’s it, essentially. I came here to be whipped into a cliché, just another precocious should-be who wanted her soul to get hooked on decay and trashed daily on egregious banalities and that daily surrendering to the ashes. But this city doesn’t call itself Phoenix. Its name has as much grace as a slur – the casual-desperate blending of two words; it called itself a mountain once. So the lady liberty of this town got caught with her skirt flipped over her head grunting and slapping a concrete wall. So her tribute is Vegas Catholicism at its blasphemous best. The only virgin left standing is the one in the Old Port and she’s only a proxy for the angel of death who’s too busy dealing flush in a tin can roulette to scrape the syphilis off another hull. And the cabs line up like hookers, salivating over the best street corner. This is my beat. To think I was looking for a fire to walk through, and all I found was a line-up like a black eye on a catalogue model or a mouthful of missing teeth. But... de Paris … du progrès, du développement! Don’t tell me about all those bastards of the post modern century. They have no art to die for. There are more churches here than religions. The directions hiss at each other and parade their obtuse monuments, their one moment under a floodlight sun. The heroes hole up on the eastside. It’s their legacy to rise up and glower, to flex their glory against the day. Mounted like blue glazed trophy sharks, the vampires are sipping at eternity just a hair past West and stroking the papered remains of said day with their fangs akimbo and billfolds spreading. All the Saints went South one winter. Now they’re neon and pulsing with orangeade sex, G-Stringing up those once heavenly bodies with their innate faith and super-shadow gaze. I won’t talk about the North where the pilgrims are; dull visitors from other places. What’s a century when you have millennia to contend with? But that’s just how convicts are, and those freedom finders. They always hit an island and don’t realize it until they hear news from the mainland. Pilgrims. Hah. Complacent with their balcony topiaries and wrought iron towers – they know that the meek will inherit and the faithful will be rewarded. They’re in it for the long haul. But I came here for jading not praying. Where’s the patron saint for that? Discuss this post on our discussion forum Head over to the archives for last month's posts Car free (for a day) TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2003 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF MONTREAL, 22.09.03 : STE-CATHERINE STREET ON CAR FREE DAY MONTREAL, 22.09.03 : STE-CATHERINE AT PEEL MONTREAL, 22.09.03 : KIDS ON A CAR FREE STE-CATHERINE MONTREAL, 22.09.03 : STE-CATHERINE AT DRUMMOND MONTREAL, 22.09.03 : ENVIROFRIENDLY CARS ON STE-CATHERINE MONTREAL, 22.09.03 : ELECTRIC BICYCLE ON STE-CATHERINE MONTREAL, 22.09.03 : CAR FREE STE-CATHERINE, NEAR MCGILL Yesterday was Car Free Day, celebrated in over 1000 cities around the world, from little towns in Ireland to giants like Taipei. Parts of each celebrating city were closed to cars; in Montreal, ten blocks in the heart of downtown were closed, the only real closure in North America. In Paris, though, where the movement began in 1999, four entire arrondissements were closed to cars. Free bikes were lent out in front of City Hall. Was it a success? It's hard to quantify something that aims to raise awareness about the effect of cars on our cities and environment, but if Montreal was any indication, the answer is yes. According to various news reports, ridership on Montreal's metro yesterday shot 10 percent up from normal, an additional 16,000 riders. Overall vehicular traffic in the downtown core was lighter than usual, something painfully obvious when bottlenecks were back to normal this morning. The event was so successful, in fact, the Agence métropolitaine de transport, the agency that oversees Montreal's roads and rails, is planning to stage another, possibly bigger, celebration next year. You may remember that, a few weeks ago, I penned an entry about urban erosion that pretty much dismissed Montreal's celebration of Car Free Day as something of a joke. Well, I take that back. Far from being a ridiculously small event -- although, to be sure, its midday timing and scale were wimpy -- it has actually spawned an impressive amount of discussion in the local papers. The Gazette, for one, is running a series entitled, hyperbolically enough, Anarchy in the Streets. Despite the overblown name, it offers a surprisingly progressive look at the state of transportation in Montreal. Today, a particularly good piece by Michelle Lalonde echoes what I said three weeks ago, right down to a quote from Jane Jacobs' Death and Life chapter on erosion and attrition. Examining congestion in cities like Houston, which constantly expand their road network but never escape traffic, the article comes to the conclusion that a carrot-and-stick system is needed. Drivers need to be given good alternatives to the car, like improved transit (the carrot) and no new roads should be built or widened (the stick). Officials, however, are doing just the opposite: "Billion-dollar projects to expand existing roadways are in the works on and around the island," writes Lalonde, citing vast improvements to the Metropolitan expressway and suburban highways. Transit agencies, meanwhile, are being stiffed by the provincial government. In the end, most criticism towards Car Free Day celebrations came, understandably, from motorists. Some merchants seemed to be fine with the street closures, despite a few choice words from the director of the downtown business association, who complained that the event was "holding the downtown hostage." The whole point, however, is to shock people out of their daily routine, to make them step back and consider the way they get around their city. Hopefully, its popularity with both the people and the press will send a signal to politicians that they need to take our cities seriously. Montreal's mayor, for one, seemed convinced. He waxed sentimental about car freedom: "I dream of things that never were and say why not," he declared to the Globe and Mail, presumably wiping a happy tear from the corner of his eye. "You can make all the nice speeches you want about the Kyoto accord and sustainable development. In Montreal, we said: We're going to change things." The mayor even left his car at home and took the metro to work. Imagine that. ――― What to do with a big, rusting elevated railway that runs through the west side of Manhattan? Well, for starters, you could turn it into a park. Or you could demolish it. The structure in question is New York City's High Line, a 76 year old rail viaduct that winds its way above Manhattan's industrial west side. Built in the 1930s to eliminate deadly rail crossings on busy Tenth Avenue, it is now a semi-abandoned trail of weeds that hasn't been used since 1980. Technically, however, it isn't abandoned, so property owners along the High Line, who feel that it is a dangerous eyesore, can't demolish it. Instead, they want the city to tear it down and originally, that's exactly what the municipal government intended to do. When Michael Bloomberg became mayor two years ago, though, it changed its mind. Now the city is siding with the Friends of the High Line, a group that wants the railway transformed into a big linear park. The Friends have an enticing precedent: in Paris' 12 arrondissement, an abandoned rail viaduct was transformed into the Promenade Plantée, a long garden in the sky, which has been a boon to the surrounding neighbourhood. Also known as the Viaduc des Arts, it boasts shops and ateliers in the viaduct's ground-level arches. As for the High Line, the City of New York will be making a presentation of its proposal for the railway next Thursday. Discuss this post on our discussion forum Head over to the archives for last month's posts City spontaneous WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2003 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF MONTREAL, 09.07.03 : SCATTERED PINEAPPLES ON MONT-ROYAL MONTREAL, 13.09.03 : ESPLANADE STREET, MILE END MONTREAL, 13.09.03 : HASIDIC FAMILY ON ST-VIATEUR MONTREAL, 11.09.03 : CLARK STREET ON THE PLATEAU MONTREAL, 13.09.03 : TAXICAB ON ST-VIATEUR STREET MONTREAL, 11.09.03 : SCHOOLKIDS ON MARIE-ANNE AT BERRI MONTREAL, 11.09.03 : ST-LAURENT BLVD. NEAR MARIE-ANNE MONTREAL, 13.09.03 : BICYCLE ON PARC AVENUE, MILE END MONTREAL, 14.09.03 : CORNER OF GRAND-PRÉ AND VILLENEUVE MONTREAL, 18.08.03 : PIERCE STREET, DOWNTOWN Zhong Wen Jiang, a cobbler who works on the sidewalks of New York's Chinatown, fixes shoes for $15 a pop. According to the New York Times, he has no store, only a box in which he keeps his tools. At the end of every day, he drops off his box at a friend's apartment and heads home to Brooklyn, where he knows which subway stop to get off at by the station's first two letters, "Cr." The Times goes on to describe the new workspace of many New York immigrants: the street. More and more new arrivals, put off by sky-high rents, are operating workshops and businesses from the sidewalks. Of course, this isn't a groundbreaking trend, since immigrants back in the early 20th century were just as apt to sell their skills and ply their wares wherever they could get a spot. I've always had a soft spot for stories about this sort of spontaneous, do-it-yourself phenomena that exists only in cities. When you're living in the midst of thousands of other people, it's easy to do your own thing. Cities are grassroots environments, where things start from the ground up, eventually breaking into the mainstream. Outside of the cities, there just isn't a big enough mass of people for nascent ideas to take hold and spread.  Virtually all the important intellectual and artistic movements since the Renaissance have been fostered in cities, not to mention more recent trends like graffiti and hip hop. One small example can be seen in Montreal, where one of the city's most interesting weekly events, the tam-tams, arose in the same fashion. The tam-tams, of course, are hardly groundbreaking, but they couldn't have popped up without Montreal's decidedly animated and urban civic culture. The tam-tams are a weekly drum circle at the Sir-George-Étienne-Cartier monument at the foot of Mount Royal, the hill that rises out of the middle of the city like the hairy hunchback of a plumber. Every Sunday, drummers, dancers, vendors and picnickers head to the monument for a round of fun, a few hours free from the restrictions of day-to-day life. A large group of drummers sit at the base of the monument while other smaller groups are scattered around the plaza. Most of the drums used are of the djembé or darbourka variety, both native to Africa, but countless other musicians bring along their guitars, saxophones and tambourines. One guy I met, who has a long grey beard and a smooth, narrow face, has played sax at the tam-tams for 12 years, although he sometimes totes around a big drum he made from a plastic chemical container. The tam-tams were founded quite inadvertantly. Back in 1978, the Senegalese drummer David Thiaw, who now lives in Calgary, and Godfried Toussaint, now a computer science professor at McGill, held a weekly drum workshop at a jazz bar in Montreal's Latin Quarter. During the summer, they decided to drum in the great outdoors, next to the Cartier monument on Parc Avenue. Soon, a handful of dancers and spectators joined them each Sunday and by the late 1980s, "all of a sudden," thousands of people began showing up. "Most of them came to watch, hundreds to dance and dozens along with their instruments to join in the frenzy of drumming," recalls Toussaint on his website. "It is still quite an impressive event and I have not seen its equivalent anywhere in the world." By the mid-90s, the quality of the music had deteriorated to the point of "unbearable noise," according to Toussaint. The tam-tams turned into something of a free-for-all, too: a 1993 article from the Montreal Gazette reports vendors selling everything "from German sausages to Jamaican patties," not to mention what one vendor described to me as "mountains" of beer. A 1999 Montreal Mirror column complained about the dollar-store junk being sold at the tam-tams, too. Today, the City of Montreal has made itself increasingly visible by regulating the vending process. (Pot dealers, of course, still do brisk business, something that hasn't changed.) According to one vendor, the police wanted to shut the tam-tams down completely, but considering the city was advertising them in one of its tourist brochures, that would be rather self-defeating. Instead, the city now prohibits food vendors, except for city-operated water and ice cream stalls, and only artisans can ply their wares each Sunday. Some private vendors are disgruntled, but for the most part everyone seems happy with the way things are -- and, according to Toussaint, the quality of the drumming has steadily increased over the past few years. There's a lesson to be learned here: grassroots phenomenon like the tam-tams and sidewalk repairmen should be embraced. It seems the first impulse of city governments and even ordinary citizens is to crack down and eliminate, but that just strips a city of an intriguing addition to its vitality. Instead, a considerate regulation, like in the case of the tam-tams, is the way to go. Discuss this post on our discussion forum Head over to the archives for last month's posts Balconies SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2003 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF MONTREAL, 24.08.03 : STE-CATHERINE NEAR ST-LAURENT MONTREAL, 24.08.03 : STRIP CLUB ON STE-CATHERINE EAST MONTREAL, 06.09.03 : DEPANNEUR ON BERNARD STREET, MILE END MONTREAL, 03.09.03 : BACK TO SCHOOL AT MCGILL UNIVERSITY MONTREAL, 24.08.03 : ST-VIATEUR STREET, MILE END MONTREAL, 06.09.03 : TUPPER STREET, DOWNTOWN MONTREAL, 18.08.03 : WESTMOUNT STOP SIGN MONTREAL, 25.08.03 : SANTROPOL STREET SALE, DULUTH STREET MONTREAL, 25.08.03 : SANTROPOL STREET SALE, DULUTH STREET MONTREAL, 06.09.03 : BALCONY ON WAVERLY STREET, MILE END I wish I had a balcony. It's not like I don't enjoy my cute little apartment, all three hundred square feet of it, but looking out the window only to see a brick wall ten feet away can be a little dispiriting. Then again, it might just be a case of balcony envy, so to speak: Montreal is full of them, big ones and small ones, wide ones and narrow ones. It's hard not to turn a little green when, on a warm summer evening, you walk down a street full of people enjoying the night in little outdoor living rooms, gazing upon the street and sipping beer. And they're everywhere: I attempted to count the number of balconies on one block in the Plateau and I gave up somewhere around two dozen. Montreal is lucky enough to have a its own, very unique architectural vernacular. People familiar with the city always remember the rows of triplexes with elaborate cornices, multitudes of doors and, especially, the snake-like outdoor staircases. This is fodder for the popular imagination, the kind of distinctive imagery that gives a city its identity; for those who know the city, Montreal's triplexes rank up there with New York's tenements and San Francisco's wooden Victorians as urban icons. The balconies are an essential part of this vernacular, but, strangely enough, they're probably the most overlooked element. The staircases get all the attention, but it's the balconies that have the most impact. Readers of Maisonneuve might remember that, last March, I asked the same question: why does Montreal, a city with one of the most extreme and inhospitable climates in the world -- brutal winters and humid summers -- have so many balconies? Here is a big city that has the highest annual snowfall in North America, with the exception of maybe Buffalo, yet it is resplendent with some of the loveliest balconies this side of Barcelona. The answer lies in the late 19th century, when Montreal entered a long period of booming prosperity. More an aesthetic device than anything else, elaborately-carved wooden balconies emerged on many of the latest houses. The wrought-iron balconies that soon followed were simpler and cheaper, and they were put to good use. Some buildings built after 1930 forwent wrought-iron altogether and built really to-the-point balconies with absolutely no embellishments whatsoever. There are some odd, localised examples, too, like the recessed balconies that line the commercial streets of Verdun. Even more interesting than the architectural history of the balcony is its cultural impact. Montrealers cherish their summers and, accordingly, cherish their balconies. During the warm months -- especially when it's so muggy that sleeping is impossible -- they linger outdoors, watching the street, reading or conversing well into the night. In 1980, the playwright David Fennario wrote Balconville, a story of several anglophones and francophones in the depressed Point St. Charles neighbourhood of Montreal. Their interactions -- indeed, the interactions of the entire neighbourhood, if not the entire city -- revolved around their balconies. Balconies are Montreal's answer to the stoop; I can't think of a better example of Jane Jacobs' eyes on the street in practise. ――― Escape to New York, a new photoessay by guest photorapher Matthew Loos, is online. Matt visited New York last May and came back with a slew of fantastic photos. Go check it out, since it's definitely worth your while. Discuss this post on our discussion forum Head over to the archives for last month's posts Eroding Montreal WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2003 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF MONTREAL, 23.08.03 : AT THE ST-LAURENT STREET FAIR MONTREAL, 23.08.03 : BUILDINGS ON PLACE D'ARMES MONTREAL, 23.08.03 : THE OLD STOCK EXCHANGE, OLD PORT MONTREAL, 23.08.03 : WOMEN AT THE POINTE-À-CALLIÈRE MARKET MONTREAL, 23.08.03 : ON WAVERLY STREET, MILE END MONTREAL, 23.08.03 : ST-VIATEUR STREET, MILE END MONTREAL, 24.08.03 : FOOD AT THE ST-LAURENT STREET FAIR MONTREAL, 24.08.03 : DANCER AT THE WEEKLY TAM-TAMS MONTREAL, 25.08.03 : LAYING BRICKS ON ST-CHRISTOPHE MONTREAL, 25.08.03 : PRINCE ARTHUR AND DUROCHER September 22 is worldwide Car Free Day and it seems apt that it coincides, more or less, with a new study that reveals that suburbanites are fatter and less healthy than urbanites. Looking at more than 200,000 people from across the United States, researchers found suburban-dwellers to weigh, on average, six pounds more than their urban counterparts. Hardly a drastic difference, sure, but it helps to note that suburbanites still weighed more even if they exercised regularly. It seems the average suburbanite's reliance on cars really packs on the pounds. Car Free Day, which is celebrated across Europe and in some North American cities, is designed to make people rethink their dependency on automobiles. Montreal is one of those cities -- well, sort of. It was originally supposed to close its historic core off to cars, which would have been an obvious choice -- its narrow, winding streets don't lend themselves to cars -- but ultimately beside the point, since the busiest part of Montreal is a few kilometres uptown, around Ste-Catherine and Peel streets. Luckily, the city reconsidered and decided to close streets in the main part of downtown. Hooray, right? Not exactly. As Montreal Gazette columnist Henry Aubin reports, only a few crosstown streets will be closed, while main arteries like Maisonneuve and Ste-Catherine will be untouched. To add insult to injury, the streets will only be closed from 10am to 4pm -- clearing the way for car-happy rush hour commuters eager to hit the bridges and tunnels. Of course, Montreal is far from an auto-dominated city, and we have a lot less to be worried about than, say, Houston. Some of the densest and liveliest urban neighbourhoods in North America are in Montreal and, unlike many rustbelt cities, virtually all neighbourhoods are healthy and functional. What has happened here over the past decade has been what arch-urbanist Jane Jacobs, in her indispensable book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, calls the "erosion of cities." Cars, writes Jacobs, aren't a problem in themselves. In fact, they're a big improvement over the days of horses and buggies, when streets were constantly jammed with filthy, noisy animals. Instead, the problem is too many cars: instead of replacing every five horses with a car, we've replaced every horse with five cars. This is where erosion comes into play. In a seemingly straightforward solution to automobile congestion, traffic engineers and city planners make more and more concessions to cars -- a widened roadbed here, a one-way street there. "The changes required or wrought by erosion always occur piecemeal -- so much so that we can almost call them insidious," writes Jacobs. The downfall is that, "the more space that is provided cars in cities, the greater becomes the need for use of cars, and hence for still more space for them." In other words, the more streets you widen and expressways you ram through downtowns, the less pedestrian- and transit-friendly the city becomes, making cars ever more necessary and ubiquitous than they ever were before. The opposite of erosion is attrition, which, to put it simply, reverses the effects of erosion through an equally piecemeal program. "Attrition of automobiles operates by making conditions less convenient for cars," explains Jacobs. Attrition as a "steady, gradual process," she conditions, would decrease the number of private automobiles in a city by reducing the need for their use. Where needed -- and that's the key, since not all streets need giant sidewalks or no parking -- eroded sidewalks are restored, traffic lights are reconfigured to favour buses, parking is reduced and so forth. For example, Jacobs notes, less parking is a boon to taxicabs. All of these bits and pieces of attrition make for greater diversity and a good pedestrian environment, with the happy side effect of frustrating private car traffic. In a sense, Montreal is suffering from a type of erosion. Sure, today's politicians, planners and citizens generally agree that cities need to be more sustainable. A movement to remove cars from a major neighbourhood main street, on which I wrote a few weeks back, has garnered lots of support, and none of today's planners would dare chop up a busy downtown street to accommodate more cars. Yet Montreal seems to fear offending the mighty traffic gods more than anything, and this overall ambivalence towards improving the city for pedestrians is just as insidious as the more conventional erosion Jacobs describes in her book. Just as Montreal has entered a prosperous period -- downtown parking lots are being ripped up for condominiums and thousands of people have moved back into the inner city -- the government, especially the provincial government, seems bent on perpetuating the hegemony of the private automobile. Aubin, in his Gazette piece, notes that, since 1994, Montreal's publically-funded transit provider, the STM, has been forced to cut back from 4.9 million hours of bus service to 4.2 million. Meanwhile, the number of cars in the downtown core has shot up 18 percent over the last decade. And, while municipal politicians are aiming to reduce the number of parking lots in downtown Montreal, new provincially-funded megaprojects like the Grande Bibliothèque and Quartier International feature huge amounts of underground parking, even though they're directly connected to busy metro stations. Streets that were massacred in the 1960s -- like the elegant Saint-Joseph Boulevard, which saw its trees and leafy median disappear to roaring traffic -- have seen few, if any, attempts to restore what was lost. The metro system was forced to raise fares twice this year to make up for a $20-million shortfall which the provincial Liberal government has refused to help cover. It isn't interested in raising the gas tax to help improve bus and metro service. What Montreal needs is a good program of attrition, or at least some serious pro-transit, pro-pedestrian thinking. Discuss this post on our discussion forum Head over to the archives for last month's posts