Goodbye graffiti
MONDAY,
MARCH 22, 2004 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF
MONTREAL, 12.03.04 : STRIP CLUB AND
MATERNITY STORE
MONTREAL, 07.03.04 : PORTUGUESE TILE
IN MILE END
MONTREAL, 12.03.04 : BARBERSHOP ON
AMHERST STREET
MONTREAL, 13.02.04 : QUEBEC FLAG ON
RUE ST-CHRISTOPHE
MONTREAL, 21.02.04 : DÉPANNEUR IN THE
PETITE PATRIE
MONTREAL, 16.02.04 : STREET CLOSED,
ST-DENIS AT ST-JOSEPH
MONTREAL, 25.02.04 : VIEW FROM
HIGHLIGHTS FESTIVAL TOWER
MONTREAL, 12.03.04 : LADIES ON
STE-CATHERINE STREET
MONTREAL, 16.03.04 : SQUEEGEE KID,
STE-CATHERINE AT PAPINEAU
MONTREAL, 27.02.04 : FEBRUARY HOCKEY
IN JEANNE-MANCE PARK
MONTREAL, 20.03.04 : SPRING SNOWSTORM
IN MILE END
I love graffiti. You can
probably tell by the overrepresentation of murals and tags
there are in my photoessays, although it helps that Montreal
has a lot of graffiti to begin with. Unfortunately for casual
graffiti enthusiasts like myself
– and even more unfortunate for the people who actually make
the stuff – graffiti is technically vandalism, a violation of
somebody's private property, and goddamnit, if anything's holy
in North America, it's private property. Graffiti is one
example of what earnest, early-to-bed-early-to-rise
policymakers like to call "quality of life crimes." Montreal,
as usual, is fashionable late to the party; only last month
the
police announced, quite ominously, that it would target
"anti-social behavior" such as spitting, illegal postering, "the
disturbing presence of vagrants or beggars," squeegeeing,
being homeless, ugly or non-conformist, etc.
It's nothing new. Former New
York mayor Rudolph Giuliani was the first to target these
kinds of minor infractions.
Remember the campaigns to get the strip clubs out and Disney
in, to stop graffiti and, mostly implausibly, to stop New
Yorkers from jaywalking? The justification was that these
kinds of petty crimes led to more heinous ones – you know, the
old slippery slope theory: if you don't finish your asparagus
and be a good little boy you'll end up a TV-stealing drug
addict that nobody loves. Or something like that. On the
surface, it kind of makes sense: if you allow people to
jaywalk at will, cover walls with graffiti and spit with
abandon, you end up encouraging a culture of disrespect for
authority. But perhaps there is a deeper motive behind getting
rid of such nuisances. In announcing their attack on the
people that don't quite fit in (sorry, anti-social behavior),
the Montreal police noted that their research concluded that
quality of life infractions were Montrealers' number one crime
concern. Getting rid of beggars and painting over tags
produces an instantly visible effect, giving the appearance of
doing something concrete to address citizens' concerns.
Solving real crime, on the other hand, takes time and doesn't
produce immediate results.
Even if attacking quality
of life crimes makes the average person more comfortable, it
doesn't actually make the city a safer place. In fact, it
probably causes more damage than it's worth. Think of all the
social tension that would result if police actively tried to
push the homeless out of sight, as they did in New York,
without making an effort to combat poverty. Other quality of
life "crimes" might actually be beneficial for a city. A
healthy scepticism of authority has got to make for a more
interesting place. Graffiti, for its part, humanizes the city
by turning blank walls into images that interact with
passers-by. Ugly and ubiqutous tags
– those hastily scrawled street names you see everywhere – are
annoying, but in exchange for tolerating them you get some
absolutely stunning works of art. It makes the city so much
more dynamic, so much more lively. Isn't that what quality of
life is all about?
―――
My friend Leonard Machler
recently took a trip to London and did some wandering,
photographing and very expensive eating. You can read his
thoughts on the city at his
funny and
well-written blog. You can also see some of the
atmospheric and nicely layered photos he took two galleries (one
and
two). Speaking of photos, this is as good a time as any to
remind you of what will be appearing on Urbanphoto in the
coming months. I'm currently working on Colin Kent's Havana
photoessay, Dos días en La Habana, which will be online
in April, as well as two collections of great Philadelphia
photos that will appear later in the spring.
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Head over to the archives for
last month's posts
The Main
TUESDAY,
MARCH 9, 2004 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF
MONTREAL, 27.02.04 : CAFÉ ROMOLO,
BERNARD STREET
MONTREAL, 25.02.04 : RUE DES ÉRABLES
ON THE PLATEAU
MONTREAL, 28.02.04 : FIRST SIGNS OF
SPRING ON ST-VIATEUR ST.
MONTREAL, 25.02.04 : MARCHÉ WONG,
MONT-ROYAL AVENUE
MONTREAL, 08.03.04 : PLAYING THE
KEYBOARD, PARC AVENUE
MONTREAL, 24.02.04 : ALLEY IN OLD
MONTREAL
MONTREAL, 24.02.04 : BILLBOARDS,
ST-URBAIN STREET
MONTREAL, 24.02.04 : SIGNAGE ON MCGILL
STREET
MONTREAL, 24.02.04 : ST-PAUL STREET
FROM MCGILL
MONTREAL, 26.02.04 : QUEEN MARY AT THE
DÉCARIE, SNOWDON
MONTREAL, 27.02.04 : CAFÉ ON BERNARD
STREET
MONTREAL, 08.03.04 : READING ON THE
BALCONY, MILE END
Last week, poking through the shelves of the Mile End Library,
I picked up a copy of Edward Hillel’s The Main: Portrait of
a Neighbourhood (Key Porter Books, 1987). Inside, dozens
of black-and-white photographs, most dating from the late
1970s and early 80s, document the neighbourhood around
St-Laurent Boulevard, a street historically known as the Main.
It’s a fantastic book, the photographs interspersed with bits
of dialogue and interviews from the neighbourhood. What makes
it especially interesting for me is that the streets Hillel prowled
30 years ago,
camera in hand, are the same streets I walk and photograph
every day.
The polyglot character of the Main takes centre stage in
Hillel’s photos. In one instance, readers are introduced to
William “Chicki” Gardner, political organizer for Harry Blank,
once the Main’s representative in the Quebec National
Assembly. In the background, we see one of Blank’s campaign
posters, with the word “Vote” written in 11 languages.
Historically, in a city that was historically divided by
language, religion and ethnicity, the Main represented a sort
of middle ground, a haven for those who didn’t fit in to one
of the extremes: east or west, French or English, Catholic or
Protestant. It seems fitting, then, that the Main was the
epicentre of Montreal’s third solitude: the Jews.
The first Jewish immigrants arrived in cloistered little
Montreal shortly after the British conquest of 1760.
Montreal’s first Jewish congregation was established in 1768,
but the community remained tiny throughout the nineteenth
century. Change came with the great Eastern European migration
at the turn of the century. Forced out of the shtetl by
poverty and vicious pogroms, millions of Jews turned towards
North America. The United States was the choice for most
Jewish immigrants, but an increasing number settled for
Canada. As Mordecai Richler noted in The Street:
“Canada, from the beginning, was second-best. It made us
nearly Americans.”
At the time, Montreal’s Jewish neighbourhood was centred
around the corner of Dorchester (now René-Lévesque) and
St-Laurent, the site of present-day Chinatown. (A smaller
enclave of old-money Jews existed on Sherbrooke, University
and McGill College streets, too.) As the ghetto grew, it
climbed the Main towards Ontario, Prince-Arthur, Duluth,
Mont-Royal and beyond. In 1901, only 6975 Jews lived in
Montreal; by 1931, that number had rocketed to nearly 60,000.
Eventually, the ghetto encompassed just about the entire part
of the city around the Main, spreading westward into Outremont.
Its size – it represented half of all non-English, non-French
residents of Montreal – its geographic concentration and its
unique position between the “two solitudes” made Jewish
Montreal especially vibrant and tight-knit.
The strongest glue that bound the community together was the
fierce desire to protect Yiddish culture. During the first
half of the twentieth century, Montreal was easily the
second-most important centre for Yiddish culture in North
America (after, of course, New York). In 1907, Montreal’s
first Yiddish daily, the Kanader Odler (Canadian
Eagle), was launched by Hershel Wolofsky. It ended up
surprising everyone with its success. The Odler
provided Yiddish speakers with, for the first time, news about
Montreal and Canada. Most importantly, however, it proved to
be a sturdy backbone for Yiddish culture, supporting many
Jewish cultural institutions and offering a reliable forum for
Yiddish-language essayists, writers and poets. Montreal was a
hub of Yiddish theatre and vaudeville, too; just about every
major star graced the stage of the Monument National theatre
at one point or another.
Eventually, however, the ghetto declined. The postwar
generation spoke English, not Yiddish, and by the 1950s the
most upwardly mobile Jews in the ghetto were ditching
Outremont and Mile End for Snowdon, Côte St-Luc and the
suburbs. In the 1970s, the Main’s Jews were replaced by Greek,
Portuguese and Spanish immigrants. Later, Vietnamese refugees
added to the mix. Refugees of another kind sought solace on
the Main, too. In his 1988 novel, Des nouvelles d’Édouard,
Michel Tremblay writes about the children of the Plateau
Mont-Royal and their “progressive slide towards the Main…” Led
by the transsexual Édouard, known as la duchesse, they
drift inexorably towards the mushy middle ground of la
Main,
away from the more parochial parts of the city.
In a sense, though, the Main has now spread to all of
Montreal. Old barriers have disappeared or have been blurred
beyond recognition; the polyglot of cultures and languages can
now be found clear across the island, in enclaves and
neighbourhoods far from the cracked pavement of boulevard
St-Laurent. Despite the recent influx of students, yuppies, bohos
and South Americans, the Main doesn’t feel so much like Main Street anymore.
The immigrant stew documented in Hillel’s book is more easily
found in the streets of the Petite Patrie or Park Extension.
So, what’s become of St-Laurent? Is it just another urban
street, still interesting but not as central as it once was?
Has the Main lost its relevance?
―――
A quick sidenote for Montreal
readers: On Monday, March 16th, at 7pm, Memories of Mile End
will be hosting a presentation, in French, on the proposed
Parc Avenue tramway.
The talk will be held,
oddly enough, on the third floor of the Petro-Canada at Parc
and Mont-Royal (4505 Parc). Tickets are $5; for more
information, call 514 849 9543 or email
milendoise@hotmail.com.
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Ethnoburbia
TUESDAY,
MARCH 2, 2004 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF
MONTREAL, 17.02.04 : HASIDIC MEN
CONFERRING, OUTREMONT
MONTREAL, 18.02.04 : DÉPANNEUR ON DE
BULLION STREET
MONTREAL, 17.02.04 : HOCKEY KIDS ON AN
OUTREMONT STREET
MONTREAL, 18.02.04 : STE-CATHERINE AND
UNIVERSITY
MONTREAL, 18.02.04 : WAITING FOR THE
BUS ON GUY
MONTREAL, 09.02.04 : ESPLANADE STREET
NEAR ST-VIATEUR
MONTREAL, 09.02.04 : FAIRMOUNT STREET
NEAR PARC AVENUE
MONTREAL, 17.02.04 : HYDRO WORKER IN
OUTREMONT
MONTREAL, 18.02.04 : CLEANING THE
WINDOWS ON GUY
MONTREAL, 18.02.04 : DOWNTOWN
CONSTRUCTION WORKERS
MONTREAL, 20.02.04 : 1AM ON THE MAIN
The suburbs are fun to
bash. They're ugly, cultureless hellholes, isolating and
depressing. Dozens of films have been made lampooning the
cookie-cutter sterility of the 'burbs: think of The
Stepford Wives or Edward Scissorhands. However,
what might have once been true about suburbia
–
say, circa
1975
–
is not necessarily the case anymore. Tract homes and
strip malls still spread out from the city like rancid butter,
but take a closer look: in most big cities, those strip malls
are probably filled with karaoke bars and spice shops, the
tract homes occupied by Chinese and Indian families. Forget
suburbia
–
this is ethnoburbia.
Last week I mentioned Bing
Thom's intriguing new design for the Aberdeen Centre, a big
Asian mall in the heart of Richmond, just south of Vancouver.
Richmond, with its malls, cul-de-sacs and stubby stucco
midrises, is a particularly good example of what the
geographer Wei Li calls an "ethnoburb." Basically, an
ethnoburb is a hybrid of a traditional ethnic enclave and a
typical suburb. In a 1998 paper published the journal Urban
Studies, Li uses Los Angeles' San Gabriel Valley as a
model ethnoburb. While the dominant ethnic minority is
Chinese, the valley is still a diverse place, with other
Asians and Latinos. As in an enclave, people in the valley can
shop at Chinese supermarkets, buy Chinese newspapers and chat
with neighbours in their own dialect. Unlike an enclave,
however, most residents of the San Gabriel ethnoburb are
middle-class, white-collar homeowners.
At least two Canadian
suburbs fit Li's model perfectly: Richmond and Markham, north of Toronto. Together, they are among the first Canadian
municipalities to be majority non-white; both have large
Chinese communities but are still diverse places. Richmond has
significant South Asian, Filipino and Japanese communities,
while Markham's Chinese residents share the suburb with plenty
of blacks and South Asians. Looking back through census data,
it's easy to see the transformation of Richmond and Markham
into ethnoburbs. In 1991, only 14 of Markham and 16 percent of
Richmond was Chinese; today, those percentages have soared to
30 and 40 percent, respectively. A couple of years ago, there
was a lot of hoopla in the press when newly released census
data showed that Markham and Richmond were among the first
Canadian municipalities to be majority non-white (or majority
"visible minority," as Statistics Canada so delicately puts
it). Ethnoburbs don't have to be Chinese, either; the label
could probably be applied to Montreal's Ville Saint-Laurent,
which has a big Arab community and smaller communities of
Chinese, South Asians and blacks.
So what does this all mean?
For one, some of the traditional distinctions between city and
suburb are being erased. It used to be that immigrants first
settled in the city before working their way up the
socio-economic ladder and buying themselves a nice split-level
ranch in the suburbia. That's how it worked for Montreal's big
Eastern European Jewish community, for instance, which left
the old ghetto in the 1950s for newer neighbourhoods and
suburbs in the west of the city. Today, however, many new
immigrants move directly into the suburbs. As Li notes, they
exert the same word-of-mouth pull as traditional immigrant
enclaves. Interestingly, ethnoburbs might represent a barrier
in the American tradition of assimilation (and a boon to the
ostensible Canadian policy of multiculturalism): since
ethnoburbs are such insular yet affluent places, ethnic
minorities have far more freedom of choice when it comes to
assimilation.
―――
Quasi-academic musings aside,
the new month brings a new featured photoessay. Matthew Loos
once again graces us with some of his fabulous photos, turning
the lens on his adopted hometown in
Chicago in 38
Frames.
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last month's posts
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