W. Fairmount Avenue
Lately I have become fascinated by street signs. Not only does their ubiquity place them at the centre of the city’s visual landscape, you can read a lot into the signs themselves. Their design, for instance, speaks to the image a city tries to project of itself. The content of the signs—names and language—sheds light the city’s history, politics and demographics. (Our contributor Donal Hanley wrote a bit about this in his December post, “What Language Does Your City Speak?“) Some cities even have many different types of street signs, depending on age and area, which gives them yet another layer of complexity.
A case in point is Montreal. All of the island’s municipalities and formerly independent boroughs have their own distinct street signs, including Westmount’s restrained and elegant pressed-metal signs, the Town of Mount Royal’s basic bilingual black signs and, of course, Outremont’s somewhat pompous oval-shaped signs. Within the old city of Montreal are three different types of signs. Old Montreal streets are marked by cloying faux-historic red signs, designed to appeal to tourists, while modern white signs bearing Montreal’s distinctive flower logo are found in the downtown area. To find my favourite Montreal street signs, however, you must venture into more out-of-the-way areas.
In neighbourhoods such as Mile End, Côte-des-Neiges and NDG, the most common street sign is a plain white relic from the 1960s. They are attractive in a very utilitarian way, but what makes them interesting is that so many are in English. Quebec’s provincial language laws, passed in the 1970s, mandate that all official signage be in French. (The only exceptions made are for a small number of municipalities that have majority-anglophone populations, most of them suburbs on Montreal Island; these places are allowed to have bilingual signage.) Since the cost of replacing thousands of street signs would have been enormous, however, Montreal city officials have opted to simply tape over many signs’ offending English elements.
Eventually, those old signs might be replaced by newer, French-only ones. But the ramshackle appearance of Montreal street signs isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon: tape has become a standard tool for Montreal’s blue collar workers. Quebec’s toponomy commission and the Office de la langue française are constantly fidgeting with the content of the province’s street signs. Recently, it was decided that the official name of Monkland Avenue in NDG should be “avenue de Monkland,” not “avenue Monkland.” The solution was to paste de onto the street’s signs. In downtown Montreal, “rue University” was changed to “rue Unversité” and now back to “rue University.”
In many neighbourhoods, the white tape used to cover English words and abbreviations is wearing thin. At the corner of Park and Fairmount avenues in Mile End, the signs now read “avenue du Parc” on one side and “W. Fairmount Avenue” on the other. Such is life in Babylon.
Montreal Apartments
Donal Hanley says:
Maybe it’s because I am only a partime time resident but I much prefer the Old Montreal signs to the Westmount ones - I guess it is a matter of taste. The Old Montreal ones are simple and regularly shaped, the odd shape of the Westmount is a bit twee for me.
January 29th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Christopher DeWolf says:
Sure, but doesn’t “twee” describe Westmount? It’s a nice place, but I sure wouldn’t want to live there. The Old Montreal signs are fussy and fake. The mentality behind them is the same one that keeps the neighbourhood segregated from the rest of the city like a precious museum exhibit.
January 29th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
The Angry Geographer says:
Street signs have always been one of my favorite pieces of urban design, and no place does them like Quebec. Distinctive street-sign designs are as much a part of Quebec culture as horizontal traffic signals with two red lights.
Both of you point to the “twee” nature of the Westmount street signs. What you leave out, however, is that Westmount street signs are exactly the same size, shape, and colour as City of Toronto street signs (until 2002, when the city switched to a larger, more visible version). Perhaps they reflect a cultural allegiance of Westmount residents to Big Smoke (after all, they do read the Globe and Mail).
My favourite street signs in the Montreal area are the oval ones found in Outremont, on the bright-green light poles. They definitely add to the almost otherworldly feeling of the place (like a very Europeanized neighborhood of central Chicago). I hope the city doesn’t go about replacing them with standard Montreal rectangles post-amalgamation.
I’m also fascinated by places where street signs have become somewhat iconic for the city. We wouldn’t expect the blue trapezoid anywhere but Los Angeles, the white rectangle with the “BH” on top defines Beverly Hills as much as palm-lined boulevards, and Toronto’s white “Sesame Street” signs add to the pleasant, harmonious mental picture that many people seem to have of the place. We also seem to know when a street sign is “not right” for a city–West Vancouver’s ugly grey rectangles and Miami Beach’s standard green signs (they really should have done something Art Deco) are prime examples.
January 29th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Donal Hanley says:
Maybe one of the reasons for the difference in views in addition to personal taste is politics - I know it’s a snore but….Angry Geographer touches on the issue of allegiance. I think he is right on the mark.
I must say that, even though attempts to translate streetnames can throw up some funny results, as Chris points out and as I alluded to in my earlier piece, I still support the idea of an active language policy in Quebec.
Left to the marketplace, English would soon dominate in Quebec signs, public or otherwise, and Gaelic would all but disappear from Irish ones.
The idea of having a liberal laissez-faire language policy is, to my mind, the equivalent of having a laissez-faire policy on architectural preservatio or ecological survival of animal or plants species.
In particular, in a heterogeneous city, there needs to be one language which is the dominant language used for intercommunication - the alternative, it seems to me, is urban ghettoisation.
That said, I would be against an attempt to enforce, say, English only in Los Angeles, since English is in no danger of dying out in Los Angeles, however spanglified it may become.
To take the matter further, in an urban environment prone to rapid population shifts, what should the role of government, if any, be in seeing the linguistic and and social heritage of a city as a socio-ecological issue?
For example, I read this week that property prices in the old Jewish quarter in Rome are so high now that most Jews have no economic choice but to accept the prices being offered to move away. And yet the quarter is apparently more Jewish than ever during the day, with kosher restaurants etc. thriving.
That is an example of a success of the free market.
But let us take another example: seven cities just east of Los Angeles now have Chinese majoirty populations. I love going there and seeing the colorful array of Chinese commercial signs mixed in with som Korean, Spanish, Vietnamese and (even) English ones. But what if the cities decided to switch the streetsigns to Chinese, saying that we should adapt to the new linguistic reality? Or if council meetins were switched?
I do not pretend to have the answers here. There are good arguments on each side. But I do sympathise with what the city of Montreal is trying to do.
January 29th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Sam Imberman says:
Not to change the subject (too much), but I note that in the picture marked restrained and elegant metal signs above, that Montreal seems to be doing two things:
a) changing the street signs’ font from what looks like a demi-weight Univers to what looks like either some kind of Helvetica, some Helvetica clone or maybe even Azkidenz Grotesk (like New York’s MTA signage); and
b) changing the street’s actual name from “The Boulevard” to “Le Boulevard.”
Regarding (a): does anyone have any information on this switch? I quite like the signs in Univers, and Helvetica (Arial?!) is a font that seems to be used often in error, so it’s possible nothing’s going on here. But if they have shifted the design, however subtly, would anyone know where I might look for more details?
and (b): It would seem pretty insidious to rename “The Boulevard” to “Le Boulevard” without doing any of the normal taxonomy steps like hearings, Xing out out old signs, et cetera. This picture is labelled early July, but I was on the Montreal portion of The Boulevard quite frequently as recently as late April, and never noticed such a sign. Even if this change would have been eclipsed by the whole ave du Parc tiff, there must have been some public statement?
February 1st, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
According to the toponomy commission’s database, “Le Boulevard” is the street’s official name and has been since 1996. My guess is that Westmount considers “The Boulevard” to be the street’s full name, whereas the toponomy commission considers the name to be “Boulevard” with “the/le” as a generic. By law, only the French version of a generic is official in Quebec.
I think the currently policy on matters like this is that generics are fair game but proper names cannot be translated… hence “rue City Councillors” and “chemin Queen Mary.”
Incidentally, Canada Post accepts both the French or English generic, so it is perfectly valid to write your address as either Sherbrooke Street West or rue Sherbrooke Ouest, for instance.
February 1st, 2007 at 6:08 pm
The Angry Geographer says:
The red flower logo signs are Montreal’s new standard, and are replacing the old black-on-white signs as they become worn out. The use of Helvetica or one of its variants on the “Le Boulevard” sign is anomalous; Montreal, for the most part, uses Univers. Same goes for Outremont.
We’ve got a pretty thorough discussion of Montreal street-sign typology here, except that we’re leaving one out: what I would call an “interim” type. It is affixed to the pole with a metal bracket, but uses the Univers font and has a white flower logo in a red background on the left side. To me, they appear to date from around the time Bill 101 was passed. By now, I think most of them have been replaced with the current design.
While we’re on the subject of interesting street-sign designs, the only city I’ve ever seen use a color code is Minneapolis. Blue designates snow emergency routes (that is, the ones that get plowed first). Secondary north-south streets are dark green, secondary east-west streets are brown. Parkways are a different color green. I wonder how many native Minneapolis residents actually figure this system out.
February 1st, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Sam Imberman says:
Ah yes. I meant toponomy. I don’t know what I was thinking.
Thanks for all the clarification nevertheless!
February 1st, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
Ah yes, I had completely forgotten about the white-on-red flower logo signs. I haven’t seen one for years, although I am sure there are still some left here and there.
Speaking of Outremont’s signs, it’s interesting to note that St. Laurent uses the exact same design, except with a slightly different colour and a different municipal crest. Verdun’s signs bear a vague resemblance to the current standard Montreal ones, except with Verdun’s crest where the Montreal flower would normally be.
Many West Island municipalities seem to have extremely utilitarian signs.
February 2nd, 2007 at 2:08 pm
The Angry Geographer says:
Doesn’t Verdun use a different font (a Helvetica variant) than Montréal? I’ve also seen Verdun signs that exclude the crest.
TMR (or VMR) does a much better job with bilingual signs than Ottawa, where the design is kind of awkward. But what’s this I hear about new signs in Laval (http://www.flickr.com/photos/caribb/344935233/) with a downright modern-European look? Love the font (probably Clearview, which is SO much more aesthetically pleasing than standard North American highway font), the blue reflective background, and the shape. Very distinctive without being flashy. Cities in Quebec also possess one more method of “branding” that American cities do not: stylized billboards. Most American highway billboards are owned by advertising/media companies rather than the cities where they are located, so they have a pretty standard design. Of course, cities put their logo and slogan all over the billboards, so that when you’re travelling on Autoroute 15 you can measure your progress by “La Prairie fait ton nid,” “Montréal c’est toi MA ville,” “Boisbriand au rythme de nos vies,” and “Saint-Jérôme capitale régionale.”
February 4th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
Those Laval signs are very nice.
I can’t believe I forgot to mention the experimental street signs at the corner of University of René-Lévesque. They are much larger than normal and are meant to mark big, important intersections. Two of them have the standard Montreal black-on-white colour scheme while the other two are white-on-green. The fond appears to be Trebuchet or something similar.
The green ones are no good, but I really like the white ones. I’ll try to find a photo somewhere.
February 4th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Justin Bur says:
Late to the party, but here’s some additional information.
Montreal:
The signs that Christopher DeWolf likes were used until about 1975. My guess is that they came into use in the 1950s, but I haven’t done the historical photo research to be sure. Their lettering is standardized but apparently based on a hand-drawn model. The same design was also used in Quebec City though with somewhat different lettering.
New, French-only signs were posted for the 1976 summer Olympics. These are notable for their bubble below containing the direction (”EST” or “OUEST”) if required, and for having rounded corners. Their type is one of the 19th-century American gothics. On some signs (e.g., Côte-des-Neiges), it is severely compressed.
After the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) of 1977, street signs across Quebec had to be in French only. I don’t know when cities were required to make the change; my recollection was that as late as 1982, nothing much had changed in Montreal. However, by 1985, white tape had been applied all over neighborhoods with anglo generics. The white tape, a “temporary” measure, is now more than 20 years old: hence its decreasing opacity.
The white-on-red flower logo signs (Univers type) are from ca. 1985-7.
The current red-on-white flower logo design (also Univers type) was first used in November 1987 for the newly renamed Boulevard René-Lévesque and has been used for all new signs in the old city of Montreal since then. These were the first Montreal signs to be supported by a bracket on the short edge, instead of being suspended along the top edge.
As of 2002 when the old city was broken into 9 boroughs, I believe it is the boroughs that are responsible for making the street signs. So the aberrant Helvetica “Le Boulevard” would be the doing of the borough of CdN-NDG.
There have been lots of errors posted in recent years. “Rue Université” was not an official change, just a mistake (as far as I know). There are many cases of “ouest” and “est” being omitted or even switched around. I’ve seen other problems but haven’t noted them.
The new white-on-blue Laval signs are indeed set in Clearview. My impression was that the experimental signs at University and René-Lévesque are also in Clearview. Toronto has adopted Clearview for all of its new street signs and highway signage.
Verdun:
The new Verdun signs (early 2000s) are in Gill Sans. The next older ones (1980s) were in all-caps Helvetica. Can’t remember what the really old ones look like any more.
Saint-Laurent:
The former city of Saint-Laurent deliberately chose to copy Outremont’s design when they replaced all of their (ugly, ancient) street signs sometime in the mid-1990s. However, Saint-Laurent used Helvetica, whereas Outremont chose Univers.
Toronto/Westmount:
I wonder if the Westmount design (seen also in Toronto, with lettering variants in Dorval and Pointe-Claire, and formerly in Town of Mount Royal and (?) Hampstead) was an off-the-shelf commercial product. That’s quite a few towns using it.
Montreal boroughs:
The boroughs outside the pre-2002 city of Montreal (including Verdun and Saint-Laurent) have retained their individual street sign designs. Some former municipalities even made a point of adopting new, distinctive signs just before they became part of Montreal.
April 1st, 2007 at 6:21 pm
D says:
FYI, I added some photos on Flickr of Montreal-area streets signs from many of the West Island cities and towns.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/montrealstreetsigns/sets/
April 9th, 2007 at 12:31 am
D says:
If you were going to design new street signs, which would you choose? What city in North America does it best?
April 10th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
I really have no idea. I have to admit that I have a thing for London’s square street signs (at least the ones in the City of Westminster). I also like the illustrated tile signs you see in some parts of Madrid:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherdewolf/423764525/
April 11th, 2007 at 12:01 am
D says:
I’ve identified five distinct types of City of Montreal street signs that are still in active use. Most people are familiar with the old black on white signs (all caps) and the new black on white signs (mixed case and city logo).
Follow the link…
April 22nd, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
Thanks, D. There are also some other types lurking around here and there. I came across some unusual black-on-white ones in Snowdon and Kate M. at the MTL City blog found some strange white-on-blue signs on Bienville St. on the Plateau.
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:16 am
Justin Bur says:
I was recently in London and did quite a bit of walking around the old (pre-1965) boroughs of Islington, Shoreditch, Hackney, and Bethnal Green. Surprise: the old street signs in these boroughs use exactly the same weird lettering as the old Montreal signs of the same time. I’ll put some examples up on Flickr one of these days.
A sign of changing influences: when the 1987 design was adopted, the City of Montreal bought sign-making machines from France (according to an article that I remember reading in one of the papers, probably La Presse, at the time). The Univers typeface on these signs is common in France, though I haven’t seen any French street signs identical to Montreal’s.
The strange signs (Bienville in the previous comment) are even older than the oldest black-on-white signs. You see them in old photos and in other cities, too, such as Toronto. They can be read only if you’re moving slowly: not so effective in the post-WW2 automobile city.
April 26th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Pat Hibrn says:
Anyone know what becomes of old street signs in Montreal. I am trying to find Montée du Zouave (today Terrasse Saint-Denis). Any theories on why the name change? To English maybe?
June 20th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Moiz says:
does anyone know where to buy Montreal street sign replicas… My friend’s bday is coming up and I would like to get him a replica St. Denis street sign (his name is Denis!) If anyone has any info, could you please contact me? Im hoping to get the replica made with the city emblem.
Thanks,
moiz
baig3@gmail.com
July 31st, 2007 at 9:23 pm