And On the Sixth Day…

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An Art Fair, Lousy Weather and Lots of Beer

Here I was gadding through the Westport Art Fair in Kansas City in mid-September. KC’s frequent art fairs and gallery crawls make it easy to get streetlife photos with relative regularity.

In September we had both the Westport Art Fair and the Plaza Art Fair, with the Plaza fair drawing national artists, and the Westport one retaining a more localized draw.

Here, the smoke from the meat grilling blends in well with the gray sky. I wouldn’t consume that cooking meat though, as I don’t care for foods that also look like phalluses.

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Rotaries, For Fun and Profit

Place Charles de Gaulle-Etoile, at 10:30 p.m. on a rainy Monday.

Exit 135 off New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway is not generally regarded as a very revolutionary structure. It’s a normal suburban freeway interchange, constructed near the middle of the twentieth century, which connects the Parkway to various nearby towns through roads that point outward like the lines in a peace sign. If raw function were the only criteria for judging a road structure, exit 135 would hardly deserve any more notice than, say, yet another pothole on the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel.

But Exit 135 is unique for one reason alone: unlike most interchanges on North America, Exit 135 is a rotary. A roundabout. A circus. Whatever you prefer to call it, it’s a roadway structure almost never seen in North America, and yet central to urban forms elsewhere in the world.

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Rue de Rivoli, 17h57

Early one evening, outside Saint Paul metro in Paris…

Morning Coffee: Caffè Beano

Morning Coffee is a new series that will focus on cafés around the world.

Caffè Beano in late December, Calgary

Date muffins. I am craving date muffins, because there are few places in this world that make date muffins as good as those at Caffè Beano. But Caffè Beano is 4,090 kilometres from my front door. Google Maps tells me it will take 50 hours of driving to get there. I can’t even imagine how long that would take to walk.

I live in Montreal, you see, but Caffè Beano is in Calgary, tucked away between an ice cream parlour and a barber’s shop near 17th Avenue. I grew up in Calgary and, whenever I go back to visit family, I make a daily pilgrimmage to this small coffee shop with its awkward layout and black-and-white tiled floors. Its prices are reasonable ($2.50 for a café au lait; $1.75 for those date muffins) but that isn’t what compels me to visit. It isn’t the ambiance, either, the warm, convivial atmosphere that spills onto the sidewalk outside. No, the real reason I go to Caffè Beano is nostalgia.

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Eyes on the Street

The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street.

– Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Woman at window above Portobello Road, London.

Man staring down towards Cloître de Notre-Dame, Paris.

Bleak, Whimsical Reykjavik

Located on the edge of the arctic circle, Iceland’s capital has an undeniable intrigue. Populated by only 100,000 residents, Reykjavik feels as if it has the arts scene of a much larger city. Icelandic cinema, music and literature is brilliant and unique, treading the line between playful whimsy and apocalyptic bleakness. This is not unlike Reykjavik itself. “There is nothing to do in Iceland,” said a woman explaining her country to me, “so we make music or we have sex with each other all the time.”

Reykjavik’s urban layout and architecture is similar to other Scandinavian cities, with a twist. The Norwegian fisherman’s hut is reproduced everywhere, but here it’s clad with sheets of corrugated metal. This building material, usually seen in third-world shantytowns, is painted with bright colours and given a chic spin through clever use of Scandinavian design. A streetscape of such houses is quaint, but there always seems to be an austere Stalinist building at the end to provide a crushing perspective on the quaintness. Take a tour and see for yourself.

Crunchy Leaves

It is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.

– page 35, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, translation by William Weaver, 1972.

Autumn five years ago: I was finishing my master’s thesis in architecture at McGill University. It marked an important stage in the evolution of my ideas about architecture, urbanism, culture, and the environment. Although I was born in Vancouver, I chose to live in Montréal and over the past ten years I have become very implicated in the workings and non-workings of this city. As Calvino points out, it is not a question of happy or unhappy Montréal; rather, my implication in the city is about contributing to its evolution in a way that inspires us and connects us to our surrounding life-world. This is the basis of my ongoing definition of “ecosensual” and I’m planning to use the pages of Urbanphoto to further explore this theme.

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Sparks Street Blues

To Ottawans, the ongoing saga of Sparks Street is somewhat of a tragicomedy. The street, which runs parallel to Wellington Street just one block south of Parliament Hill, exists mostly as a pedestrian mall, with vehicular access limited from Kent Street in the West to Elgin Street in the East. During its prime from the 1880s to the mid-twentieth century, Sparks Street was the commercial hub of the nation’s capital. Several of the nation’s top banks established central branches along the street to serve the city’s booming business class, and the street was home to local department stores who competed with others across the Canal in Lowertown. Sparks Street is endowed with over thirty buildings of historical significance – perhaps the highest concentration of such landmarks in Ottawa, and a reminder of the city’s heyday.

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Signs of the Times

Farine Five Roses sign, Montreal

It sits at the base of Montreal’s skyline and it’s hard to miss: “Farine Five Roses,” it reads in red neon, blinking languorously through the night.

For more than half a century this sign has greeted Montrealers driving over the Champlain Bridge, walking through the Old Port or Little Burgundy, or descending from Mount Royal, but perhaps for not much longer. In July, the sign went dark, its owners having decided to do away with it. As one of Montreal’s most distinctive and beloved landmarks faces extinction, a question is raised: do we care enough—or even know enough—about our sign heritage?

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Nuit Blanche 2006, Toronto

A whole night of street art comes to Toronto.