No-Name Deps

The old axiom “built it and they will come” certainly applies to dépanneurs. You don’t need an attractive façade, windows or even a sign — as long as people know that it’s a dep, and that they can purchase there the holy trinity of Montreal needs (beer, lotto and cigarettes), they will come. The city is full of no-name deps (a figurative term, since many do have names — sometimes two or three — but nobody actually knows or cares) that manage to eke by with only the most minimal of investments.

Following My Father

My father was born in 1919 in a town near Manchester. His parents were both of Irish background, part of a wave of people who had migrated there to find work in the Lancashire mines and mills. He was an only child. By the time he was ten years old his mother had died and his father, for reasons that remain unknown, brought him to Canada and left him with a relative of his wife’s, Margaret Ryan, and her daughter May. They hadn’t been in Canada long before my father joined their household, where he stayed until he married my mother in the late 1950s. Thomas McDonnell returned to England and never saw his son again.

When I found out that the Bibliothèque nationale had digitized Lovell’s street directories, a catalogue of Montreal residents and businesses from 1842 to 1999, I spent a few hours tracing where the Ryan household had lived in Montreal long before I was born. The directories functioned for many years much like a phone book: look up someone’s name and it gives you their occupation and a street address, although not a phone number.

I knew that the Ryans had lived in various rented premises over the years and recalled mentions of the street names and parishes. The directories made it easy to find out the exact addresses where my father had lived: 1720 Nicolet, from 1931 to 33; 4354 Fullum, in 1934; 4324 Messier, from 1935-41; 5973 Waverly, from 1942 to 50; and 5352 Park Avenue, from 1951 to 57. So I went to have a look.

More

“To the Glory of God”

Chinese United Church, Second Avenue SW, Calgary

Not Montreal’s Smallest Park, But Close

“It’s not much of a park,” said Jocelyne, a middle-aged woman sitting on a bench in St. Henri, gesturing to the small green space behind her.

“It’s okay, but you can’t call it a park because it really isn’t one. There’s no place to wander, nowhere for kids to play. It’s just two benches and a bus stop.”

Nonetheless, the small parcel of land at the corner of Notre Dame and Rose de Lima Sts. is indeed a park, and one whose name — the Parc du Bonheur d’occasion — carries far more heft than its 263-square-metre area. With a handful of trees, an attractive stone path, two benches and a bus shelter, this tiny park is one of the smallest in Montreal.

“It came into being on Nov. 30, 1994, as part of an operation by the city that gave names to a lot of other small parks in the area,” explained Dominic Duford, an urban planner for the city. “Thirteen parks were named in St. Henri on the same day, like the Parc des Hommes Forts or the Parc des Cordonniers. They’re all names that reflect the history of the area.”

Bonheur d’occasion, known as the Tin Flute in English, is the title of Gabrielle Roy’s groundbreaking 1945 novel about working-class life in St. Henri. Its stark yet compassionate realism was a revelation in a city that had long overlooked the dire conditions in which many of its citizens lived. Some even claim that Roy’s book helped inspire the social reforms of 1960s Quiet Revolution.

For such an important work, the Parc du Bonheur d’occasion might seem a somewhat underwhelming tribute. In fact, until two years ago, the park stood adjacent to a vacant lot, and the position of its sign gave the impression that the park was actually the weedy, trash-strewn terrain next door. Eventually, however, a a three-storey building with retail shops and apartments was built on the lot, giving the city the opportunity to rebuild the park.

More

Postwar Ugly or Postwar Chic?

Calgary has a lot of squat apartment buildings built in the 1950s and 60s. Unlike their counterparts in Vancouver, which tend towards a breezy, pastel-coloured Art Moderne kind of style, these are typically clad in frumpy brown brick. They look cheap and outdated, but I’ve noticed a handful of such buildings that have undergone renovations that exploit their clean lines and simple appearance while discarding some of their more tasteless elements, like dumpy vinyl siding and hideous doors and windows. Is it possible that these postwar apartment houses, usually dismissed as forgettable, will one day be stylish places to live?

Calgary Scrambles

I’m in Calgary at the moment. This is a fast-growing, fast-changing city, and there are a couple of interesting changes that I noticed while I was here. One of them is the introduction of two new scramble crossings in the Eau Claire neighbourhood of the city’s downtown area.

Often associated with Tokyo’s famous Shibuya Crossing, scramble crossings are in fact a North American invention, originating in Kansas City and Vancouver in the 1940s. Basically, the term refers to an exclusive pedestrian crossing phase at an intersection controlled by traffic lights; all cars come to a stop and pedestrians are allowed to cross in all directions. For the most part, it’s a safe and efficient way of governing traffic flow, as long as pedestrians have ample time to cross.

Scramble crossings disappeared in North America for several decades, victims of the postwar dominance of the automobile. Attitudes have changed, though, and the crossings are making a comeback. In 2003, Montreal installed them without much fanfare in the Quartier international, at such corners as McGill and St. Jacques and Viger and St. Urbain; they can also be found at several other intersections, like Monkland and Girouard in NDG. There is nothing to indicate that pedestrians are allowed to cross in all directions — some figure it out but others seem hesitant to cross diagonally.

In Calgary, by contrast, the city has made a big deal of its new pedestrian scrambles, accompanying their installation with plenty of instructional signage. Painted lines in the intersection let pedestrians know that it’s okay to cross diagonally. Based on what I’ve seen, it doesn’t take long for people to grasp the concept, and with each light cycle there are people who cross in all directions. Prominent signs prohibit drivers from making right turns on red.

More

No Poor People Here

Every summer, Prince’s Island — a beautiful island park in the Bow River, right next to downtown Calgary — plays host to a number of large festivals, including the always-interesting folk music festival, which took place last week with some big headliners and great enthusiasm. These festivals are an asset to the cultural life of Calgary, but there’s just one problem: they’re not free. Each festival surrounds itself with fences and restricts access by charging an entry fee. Sometimes the fee is relatively small, but in the case of the folk fest, it was as much as $50 for a single-day ticket. I’m torn between wanting to support a cultural initiative like this and decrying the way it occupies and privatizes an important public space.

Somebody else was less ambivalent in their opinion. This weekend, while making my way to the festival site, I came across this message drawn into the path with chalk: “Welcome to Fantasy Island. No poor people here.” It’s an apt statement, since there really weren’t any poor people at the folk fest, simply they couldn’t possibly afford to attend. Lately, whenever I visit Calgary I detect a growing undercurrent of anger and indignation, something potentially explosive that lurks among the city’s legions of working poor and homeless, many of them victims of the economic boom that has brought great prosperity to Calgary, but also a soaring cost of living. I suspect that, in the future, we’ll see more messages like the one I saw on Prince’s Island.

Mount Royal at Night

For years, I ignored the brooding hulk of Mount Royal at night, pausing only occasionally to contemplate the shape of its silhouette or the glow of the cross atop it. It was only recently that I actually began to venture onto the mountain after dark, well after most park-goers head home, and when the woods become especially dark and spooky. Sometimes I would head up to its lower reaches, alone or with friends, to lie on the grass, drink some beer and look out over the city. On a couple of occasions, I biked all the way up to the top.

Cycling up the mountain at night is a sensual experience: the sound of gravel under my tires; the strange, damp coolness that descends upon my skin as we head deeper into the woods and higher up the hill; the darkness of the path in front of me, marked against the red glow of the city sky. My friends and I always start at the Cartier monument, taking Olmstead’s broad path, which twists its way up the mountain on a gentle slope and a series of switchbacks. It isn’t long before the darkness overwhelms our vision and we rely on sound and instinct to avoid plunging down some rocky escarpment. It’s a completely disorienting experience, travelling along the path at night, and I enjoy the unique sensation of being guided forward without actually knowing where I’m going. Except for a brief moment when the back of the Royal Victoria Hospital is visible, I never really know where we are, and the increase in ambient noise from the city is the only indication that we have come around the front of the mountain and are biking above downtown. Soon, and always rather unexpectedly, we arrive at Beaver Lake.

Beaver Lake is an interesting place at night. On weekends, there are usually groups of people sitting near the water, chatting and drinking. People often set off fireworks near the pavilion, and in the distance, I sometimes hear street racing along Remembrance Road. On the hill overlooking the lake, my friends and I like to relive our childhood by rolling sideways down the grass slope, trying and failing to get up when we come to a stop, drunk on dizziness. It’s even more fun now than when I was a kid.

More

Hong Kong Doorways: Shuttered

Metal shutters are common in many cities; Hong Kong is no exception, especially since many of its shops lack doors altogether, making the shutter the only way to seal it up at night. Every so often, just after a store has closed or before it has opened, a small door is left open in the shutter for people to pass through. Peering inside, at a restaurant preparing for the evening or a lone person working late in a travel agency, feels a bit like spying.

Bière Froide

Chicoutimi, Quebec

Montreal East

Montreal East is a small separate city whose territory is mostly occupied by oil refineries and other industrial installations, some of which are objectively interesting as photographic subjects, whether by day or glittering with lights at night.

There’s always a tang of sulphur in the air from the hydrocarbon cracking. The streets are in poor shape and the sidewalks rudimentary: people mostly don’t walk here, they drive to and from work, and big tanker trucks chew up the roadbed. Even so, Wikipedia says 3,822 people lived here in 2006. There are still some overgrown lots, and plenty of wildflowers in nooks and crannies, and of course there are tracks for freight trains too.

Recent stats show that the refineries in east-end Montreal put out as much greenhouse gas as all its cars do, if not more. Some of it would be for heating oil, asphalt and other products, but most would be for diesel and gasoline.

Cops and Crowds

Police officers on Ste. Catherine Street, Montreal

La Belle Province

Ugly building on the main street of Saint Georges de Beauce

Many of Quebec’s smaller cities are grim, depressing places. Like most cities in North America, they witnessed a period of downtown decline during the suburban explosion of the fifties and sixties. People moved out, shops closed, and buildings were razed and replaced by parking lots. Many places reached their nadir of ugliness in the seventies and eighties with the proliferation of cheap corrugated cladding and other experimental building materials.

Since then, cities like Quebec, Montreal, and Trois-Rivières took stock of the situation and invested in revitalization. But many smaller cities have continued to deteriorate and look like decaying seventies urban ghettoes. They’re fascinating to walk through-I feel like I’ve entered a time-warp-but I can’t spend much time there as I become infuriated and ashamed at our cultural poverty.

In some cities, like Dolbeau-Mistassini on Lac Saint-Jean, the decay is the result of the general industrial decline in the area. Other cases are harder to explain, like Sherbrooke, Saint-Georges de Beauce, Alma, and Gatineau – growing regional cities with unemployment rates that are considerably lower than the provincial average. Why are they so ugly?

Main Street, Saint Georges de Beauce

More

Everywhere People

2005

2008

My life in Montreal is full of what my friends call “everywhere people,” strangers whom I see on a regular basis, walking down the street, sitting in a café, on the metro, in line for a movie. I don’t know them and I have no reason to talk to them, but they give me a sort of grounding in my daily life. In the 1970s, the social psyschologist Stanley Milgram termed these people “familiar strangers,” and he theorized that they are a natural aspect of urban life. In big, crowded cities, which can sometimes seem so alienating, they help to humanize and familiarize the cityscape.

For the most part, familiar strangers are found in your own neighbourhood, on public transit or somewhere that you frequent, like a café. What is odd and particularly surprising is when you visit another city for the second, third or fourth time and realize that, oddly enough, you have everywhere people there, too. I find myself in Vancouver about once a year and it is not unusual for me to spot, on the street or on the bus, sometime I recognize from an encounter during previous visits. This happened to me in March, too, when I spent a month in Hong Kong, my second trip to the city after first visiting in 2005. Much to my astonishment, I ended up crossing paths with a bicycle delivery man I had photographed three years earlier — and I even managed to snap another picture of him.

I arrive in Hong Kong, this time on a more permanent basis, one week from tomorrow. Will I see my everywhere man again?