Jersey City Omigod!

Sam Imberman, our in-house New Jerseyite-turned-Montrealer- turned-temporary Parisian, might be surprised to hear that New York City’s next hot neighbourhood isn’t in New York at all: it’s in New Jersey. Jersey City, to be precise, that humble municipality of 250,000 across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Actually, I should say it’s the last hot neighbourhood of New York, since that’s what New York magazine has proclaimed it to be in its latest issue.

In “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Cool By Now,” Adam Sternbergh has penned what might be termed an ironic “next hot neighbourhood” article, because it suggests the absurdity of such glib proclamations. Sternbergh’s thesis is that the gentrification or “coolification” of New York neighbourhoods has become such a widespread and all-consuming process that it no longer has any distinct stages. As a cute chart in New York demonstrates, SoHo was “cool” for more than fifteen years; Chelsea was on the cutting edge for a decade. But Dumbo, the Meatpacking District and Red Hook were the darlings of New York’s cultural elite for no more than a few years. Now? Everything’s happening all at once: the luxury condos follow the first artists and the first “edgy” bistros precede the first Whole Foods by mere months.

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Monday 8pm

Melbourne Mondays, dreaded by most, but not when the sun’s shining.

A City Beyond Borders

On Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui, I wander past a proud squat mosque and into the hot, crowded blocks leading to the harbour. Around me is a whirl of humanity. African women in flamboyantly coloured dresses struggle to pull suitcases through the crowd. Black men rest languorously against the fences that guard the sidewalk from speeding buses, surveying the scene. Slick-suited Indian men rush along, yelling into their mobile phones, while other more tackily dressed hawkers accost passersby with cries of “Tailor suit!” and “Copy watch!” Outside the subway entrance a gaggle of Hindu women, saris wrapped carefully around their plump figures, watch a bearded Muslim man walk by on his way to prayer.

I can imagine what the uninformed tourist thinks when emerging from one of Tsim Sha Tsui’s many corporate hotels: “Isn’t Hong Kong supposed to be, you know, Chinese?” And, for the most part, it is—it is estimated that 90 percent of Hong Kongers are ethnic Chinese—but that hardly does justice to just how cosmopolitan this place really is; it is a city that operates beyond the scope of nationality, on a distinctly global level.

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View From a Forgotten Street

On an evening of urban exploration with Kate McDonnell (Urbanphoto contributor and la bloggeuse from Montreal City Weblog), we approached Notre-Dame by way of more southerly side streets, where Griffintown and the Cité Multimédia meet up under the elevated portion of the Bonaventure expressway, aka University.

Of interest is the CCUM building at the bottom of Nazareth Street; I expect many people taking the Via trains or the expressway wonder what it is, and I was surprised to discover that it’s a gas-fired district heating plant. It provides steamy goodness to Central Station and the CN building, Place Ville Marie, 1000 de la Gauchetière, the Queen Elizabeth hotel and the Sun Life Building among others.

Just about 180 degrees to the left of the shot above is an interesting collection of older greystones intermingled with what appear to be houses, as well as one of the oldest blacksmiths in the city (now closed and/or turned into a museum). Sadly most of these back laneways are becoming access ramps for surface parking lots, but there’s still a lot to see down there.

If you’re walking along Duke Street, pay attention to the lampposts; some artist in the 1990s banded several of them with metal straps imprinted with lines of poetry, that otherwise look like the normal straps that would hold municipal signage in place. There’s also, all around the Duke Street Investments building, several illuminated billboards with an ever-changing array of surreal photo art.

Australia is Drying Up

Australia is suffering from its worst drought in years. Meanwhile, smoke from bushfires in eastern Victoria has blanketed Melbourne in a thick, toxic haze.

O-Train Follies

Recently-elected Ottawa mayor Larry O’Brien and his new council narrowly decided in a vote at City Hall yesterday to alter the city’s proposed North-South light rail line. In a move to “fix, not nix” the LRT project, O’Brien and company decided to keep most of the proposed route intact, but discard the downtown stretch. As was the original plan for the old proposal, construction on the new route will begin immediately. O’Brien recommended that an Environmental Assessment begin for a rapid transit tunnel underneath the downtown core; a process that could take up to three years to complete.

Only three weeks into his new job as Mayor, multimillionaire O’Brien and the City were under legal pressure by the LRT contractors of Siemens/PCL/Dufferin to begin construction on the route. The City would have faced a minimum $60-million lawsuit had construction on the project not begun by December 15th. O’Brien said that he would use the estimated $70-million in savings from the discarded downtown alignment to improve rapid transit in other areas of the city and to move forward with the proposed East-West light rail line.

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A Father’s Public Grief

Photo by André Pichette of La Presse

Last month, while wandering around, I kept passing a peculiar sign. Actually, it wasn’t just one sign, but many: dozens of them affixed to lampposts throughout the east end of downtown Montreal. Their message was cryptic, with a photo of a smiling young boy and the declaration, “Mettez vos culottes — n’attendez pas d’être victime d’erreur gouvernementale” (”Put on your underwear — don’t wait to become a victim of governmental error”). The boy, according to an inscription below his portrait, is named Alexandre. The posters did not seem to serve any obvious purpose. No phone number, no internet address, nothing to explain what they were for.

Today, an article in La Presse sheds light on their origins. The boy in question is Alexandre Livernoche, a thirteen year old who was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death six years ago by a man released from jail due to an administrative error. Since last spring, Alexandre’s father, André, has travelled Quebec in a van bearing his son’s image, tying two thousand posters to lampposts in every part of the province. His objective, according to La Presse, is to “denounce the error that cost his son his life and the ‘insufficient’ financial compensation offered by the government.” But, as the article goes on to point out, the posters, with their obscure message and lack of contact information, are not particularly effective as a rallying cry.

The question, then, is: why? Why dedicate your life to a quixotic trip around Quebec to cover the province in posters that leave the people who see them nonplussed?

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Los Angeles vs. Orange County

When they think of Los Angeles, people outside Southern California probably think of urban sprawl and freeways. In fact, although historically low rise in its built form, Los Angeles is quite densely populated. Nevertheless, when I moved to Los Angeles from central Tokyo in 1999, my first impression of life here was that Los Angeles conformed to the stereotype: vast, suburban and not very cosmopolitan.

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Mapping the City — But Whose?

Navigating urban worlds, New York

According to British novelist Will Self, “people don’t know where they are anymore.” The “student of psycho-geography” was recently chronicled walking from JFK Airport in Queens to his hotel in Lower Manhattan, an apparently perilous journey involving the traversing of a sidewalk-less overpass at night and being tailed by a suspicious black SUV in a rather desolate portion of the outer boroughs. What is Self after? “In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left,” he claims. “Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”

I once heard a professor of physics claim that one could not really experience travel unless one’s feet literally hit the pavement and one could stop and observe every little oddity passed or occurrence transpired along the way. For reasons I can’t seem to remember, he also claimed that, setting out from New York, the average pedestrian could get no further than New Haven walking continuously. This, he noted, was the greatest distance within which humans could truly embrace the true nature of the terrain they passed through; longer distances, and swifter conveyances, would ultimately distort one’s impression of passing towns and fields to some degree. Relativity results in blurred and refracted images of passed-through places; their topography cannot be internalised. Self refers to this problem as one of “windscreen-based virtuality.”

Along with Self and the discipline of physics, it has been a number of French thinkers, particularly the existentialists, who have attempted to define what such internalisation means. Michel de Certeau famously wrote of subjective self-impression’s capacity to “appropriate” the city’s terrain for oneself even in the face of the most totalitarian attempts at planning. Memories, he writes, create a sort of personal geography which can be grafted atop the sort Corbusian rationalising schemes imposed from city leaders on high. In this sense, appropriation, and by extension internalisation, becomes a template for personal freedom and agency.

Appropriation, however, holds an inherent double meaning. Where there are no demigods dwelling in the clouds of the city planning office, such rhetoric implies less of an insurgency and necessitates more consideration of its diametric consequence: loss.

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Au bord de l’eau

Picnic on the banks of the Seine, Paris

On the banks of the Canal St-Martin, Paris

Gardens in the Sky

I really, really wish I could get onto my roof. Alas, with no staircase and nowhere to prop up a ladder, I won’t be able to climb up anytime soon unless I want to risk a broken neck. Still, it’s not hard to imagine what the view would be like from four storeys up. The broad shoulders of Mount Royal would loom to the southwest; garment factories, church towers and office buildings would poke above the horizon to the east and north; and in between, an endless ocean of flat, grey roofs.

Like New York, Chicago or Philadelphia, Montreal is a flat-roofed city, a city of row houses, triplexes and apartment buildings. Unlike those cities however, Montreal has never really taken advantage of its roofs. Soon that will change. Slowly but inevitably, Montreal’s roofs are going green.

While “green roof” might still be an unfamiliar term for some North Americans, most Europeans would know it very well. One of the first green roofs was built in Zurich in 1914, when a meadow was planted on top of a water-treatment plant’s filter tanks to keep the interior cool and bacteria-free. Since then, plant-filled roofs have been built on thousands of buildings across Europe—15 percent of all roofs in Germany are now green.

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The Romance of Detroit, Institutionalised

The most salient feature of the ruin’s enchantment, as Walter Benjamin would put it, is “aura,” the distance one feels temporally from art. The Acropolis, the Pyramids, the temples of pre-Mughal India — all these embodied some mythic conception of the past and its tragic downfall. In other words, the romance of the ruin was enabled by passing time; in an earlier age, the ruin would have been viewed for what it was, mere structural decay. Perhaps a portion of an aqueduct would be used to channel water somewhere, or a temple wall dismantled for new homes, but otherwise, the use-value of such crumbling structures was denigrated, and with it their worth. So it was until enough time had passed and a bard like Byron or Shelley sung (for whatever purpose) the long lost virtues of the time that had produced the forerunner of ruin.

Detroit is not yet of age. Its factories, stores, churches and homes have lain fallow a mere four decades while suburban Michigan prospers and progresses with precision linearity into cornfield after cornfield to escape the blight of urban detritus that a nomadic population, on the run from the past, has left behind. Put another way, Detroit’s ruins are still seen by many as the failure of use-value; its forlorn, forgotten ironworks and auto assembly plants not objets d’art but underutilised machinery. Its abandoned parks and graffiti strewn alleys are not the touristic fantasia that animates that paragon of ruin, Pompeii, but reminders of an insurmountable failure. Detroit has not yet commoditised its failure; it merely wallows in it.

It is at this moment that Andrew Zago has unveiled his new Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the embodiment of Detroit-as-Pompeii, the romanticisation of its still-ostensible wounds.

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Paris Gets Sassy

Dmitri, a small man with a Russian accent as thick as the three or four red sweatshirts he was wearing, led me out a door and into a walled-in courtyard. He gestured at four plastic drums, each one about the size of two ATMs back-to-back, each one coloured in a ridiculously peppy shade of recycling-bin green.

“This,” he said, “is where we collect rainwater to use for our toilets.”

I nodded slowly.

This was a new one. In my admittedly short life, I’ve seen quite a few apartments. Exactly zero of them had toilet systems based off vats of rainwater.

Dmitri gestured to somewhere behind me. “Now, if you like, I’ll show you your room,” he said.

I nodded vacantly; my brain was still on the rainwater toilets. The implications of that system started to wash over me. It isn’t that that fact would make a difference when actually using a toilet - but what did it say about Dmitri? Was he some kind of eco-freak? Or just conscientious?

Regardless of which of the two was the case, he was now looking at me rather oddly.

“Your room is behind you,” he said.

I turned quickly; Dmitri led me into the diffusely lit enclosure via a flap of thick translucent plastic. The room, if it could be called that, was small and spare. To the right was a white mattress on what looked like exactly one half of an Ikea bedframe. To the left was a white desk with a depressed old folding chair tucked underneath. A space heater sat dejected in the middle of the room. The ceiling was made of corrugated metal on wooden slats: the kind of construction most often seen in Discovery Channel documentaries about Kenya.

“So this would be your room,” he said. “This is what we like to call the Writers’ Studio.”

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Sneaking Up to the Roof

Last week, Owen Rose wrote about rooftop greening, which is an exciting opportunity for any city that has an overabundance of flat gravel roofs. Personally, though, when I think of “rooftop,” I can’t help but imagine something else: the views. Every city has a few well-known points of higher elevation. You’ll see them on postcards, in news reports, in tourist photos — eventually, they become clichéd vistas that are pleasant but entirely predicable.

What you see when you emerge onto some random, out-of-the-way rooftop, however, is entirely surprising. The city takes on a different form; you notice things you never noticed before. The problem is that the vast majority of a city’s rooftops are not accessible to the public, unless you risk climbing up rickety fire escapes. Luckily, there are a few rooftops here and there that are, for less adventurous types like myself, relatively easy to access.

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