A Winter’s Day on Victoria Avenue

It was a cold winter night during the holiday season. We were sitting alone in a cavernous, dimly-lit and poorly-heated Indian restaurant. Suddenly, as we were eating, a band of boisterous South Asian men dressed in scarlet Santa Claus uniforms burst into the restaurant, banging drums. They marched towards the restaurant owners, chattering excitedly, brandishing pamphlets. After speaking to the owners for a second, they caught sight of us sitting meekly in the corner, munching quietly on naan and aloo gobi. We stared at them. They stared back. After conferring quietly amongst themselves for a minute, one of the men, holding a pamphlet, came towards us and shyly deposited it on our table. He smiled, turned away and the group left the restaurant just as they entered, shouting and thumping their drums.

We opened the pamphlet: it was written entirely in Tamil.

Such is life on Victoria Avenue, a street on the western edge of Côte-des-Neiges whose inhabitants are, for the most part, immigrants from any number of countries. The most recent figures, drawn from the 2001 census, show that the largest groups come from the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Morocco, but together they account for only a quarter of Victoria Avenue’s residents. This is a neighbourhood of midcentury apartment blocks, duplexes and redbrick housing projects, a quintessential jumping-off point for new immigrants. Eventually, most of them depart for other parts of Montreal, but while they are here, they all share Victoria Avenue, a homely street where Tamil fishmongers sidle up to Jewish bookstores in a procession of kitschy 1950s commercial architecture.

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Forget the Avenue, How About a Square?

The new Pine/Park intersection nearing completion
Photo from Midnight Poutine

Those hoping for a resolution to the Park Avenue affair will have to wait a bit longer. On Tuesday, Quebec’s provincial toponomy commission met to decide whether or not to approve the Montreal city council’s plan to rename Park Avenue and Bleury Street after former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa. (For background on the issue, check out our Park Avenue section.) As expected, the commission, faced with hundreds of letters in support of Park Avenue and a legal team headed by civil rights lawyer Julius Grey and Chinese community activist and Mile End resident May Chiu, decided to delay their decision until they had a chance to consider all of the input they received. A number of commentators have pointed out that, if it follows its own highly-publicized criteria, the commission will have no choice but to reject the renaming, reasons being that it has caused enormous controversy, the public was not adequately consulted and the name Park Avenue has not lost its cultural and historical relevance.

Today, however, news outlets are reporting that the commission might in fact avoid approving or rejecting the renaming by instead proposing a compromise. No word on what that compromise might be, but an editorial in Tuesday’s Le Devoir offers an elegantly simple solution: name the newly-rebuilt Park/Pine intersection after Robert Bourassa.

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Metatourism in Alexandria

I stumbled upon these unloved old tourism paintings on a neglected building in the back streets of Alexandria, Egypt. Somehow they fed my enthusiasm about Egypt, yet newer promotional material would have had the opposite effect. How long does it take for marketing to become heritage?

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The Sprawling City

Most Canadians are aware of Calgary’s status. For those who are not, it is quite simply booming in every sense of the word. Booming may even be an understatement, as very rarely has the city seen expansion at such epic proportions. The population grew by almost 36,000 in the past year, a number only surpassed during the 1980s boom years, and the city has been growing almost as rapidly for over a decade. The boom has brought both many positive and negative changes to the urban and social fabric of the city, including labour shortages, expanded cultural institutions, a growing homeless problem, large reinvestment in the inner city and countless other examples. What is most obvious, however, is the sprawl.

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The Motorcycles of the Pearl River Delta

The fast ferry between Hong Kong and Macau is disorienting. It is, essentially, a floating airline cabin, with neat rows of preassigned seats in which you are expected to remain for the duration of the trip. Roving attendants offer drinks and sandwiches. There is no outside deck on which you can stand and taste the salt air, or feel the wind on your face as you move inexorably towards your destination. Instead, you sit down, take a nap and then, one hour later, emerge into a city that in theory shares a language and culture with Hong Kong but in practice is so much more exuberantly Latin.

Macau is an disorderly but very intimate city, especially in the labyrinth of crowded streets and laneways that make up its oldest, most interesting and thankfully least-touristed section. The first thing you notice when you leave the ferry terminal and emerge into its streets is the abundance of motorcycles and scooters, giving Macau the feel of a grimy Mediterranean port that somehow washed up on the shores of the Pearl River Delta.

From a practical standpoint, scooters make sense in Macau because the city is so dense and compact. The Macau Peninsula, home to 390,000 people, covers just 8.5 square kilometres—in the Santo António parish, 104,200 people are squeezed into a single kilometre—so scooters are the fastest and most space-efficient way to move the population. In fact, scooters are so popular they outnumber cars 66,000 to 64,000. Something about the constant buzz of tiny motorcycles speeding down impossibly narrow streets and leafy boulevards gives Macau an unpredictable edge that even Hong Kong lacks.

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Capital Housing

Like many other cities across Canada, Ottawa experienced a boom during the 1880s and 1890s, which persisted well into the 1930s. Much of the housing that has become characteristic to the the nation’s capital was built during this period, and most of these homes still exist. As in Toronto and Montreal, the choice building material for Ottawa’s first permanent homes was brick. While Toronto and Montreal both had large quantities of apartment buildings, though, Ottawa’s housing stock was comprised mostly of relatively large single-family homes that were often later subdivided into apartments.

The photo above shows three 1910-era multi-family homes with typical Ottawa design features: the prominent front balcony, and in the case of the two houses on the right, “barn roof” detail. Such homes were usually built to house two families—one on the upper two floors and another on the bottom floor—but many have since been subdivided into three or four-apartment units.

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Polish Winter

Lodz is Poland’s second largest city. Not being the capital or having the dazzling charm and beauty of for example Krakow, the city isn’t that well known or visited by tourists. Lodz used to be an important centre for textile industry and lots of beautiful, old factory buildings remain in the city. Many of them have an uncertain future, while others are beeing redeveloped. These photos were taken in February 2004.

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Into the Heart of Trastevere

Almost every city has a part of town, on the other side of a river or train tracks, that is quite literally eccentric: idiosyncratic, out of the way and determinedly unique. In Rome, this area is Trastevere, which means “Across the Tiber.” Although its oldest section, just across the river from the city’s historic centre, is a popular destination for tourists and local scenesters, the newer, more outlying parts of this large and ambiguous district have an easy workaday feel, where the barely-contained chaos of Roman life somehow becomes more manageable.

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Subway Explorers

Lawrence West from David Topping’s 69 Days on the TTC

I’m a transit geek. I’m not a railfan—the mundane details of different train models and rail gauges doesn’t interest me—but I am fascinated by public transport. I pore over subway maps and admire ephemera such as old tickets or the unique, quietly confident typeface used in Toronto’s 1950s-era stations. I love how public transit—in the cities where it is a central part of life and not a marginal service for the poor—is a great social blender, bringing people from every different corner of the city together. In many ways, it is in the subway, not the streets, where the true face of a city is revealed.

That’s why I appreciate David Topping’s 69 Days on the TTC, an ambitious attempt to visit and photograph all sixty-nine of Toronto’s subway stations. Topping documents the subway’s details, captures its atmosphere and studies its users, revealing the breadth and complexity of Toronto’s urban landscape. “I’ve lived in Toronto’s west end since I was born,” he explains on Torontoist. “My Toronto—the part of the city that matters to me—has never extended further west than Kipling, further east than Yonge, or further north than St. Clair. I felt stuck.” By the end of his tour, he felt he had gained “a genuine curiosity for the city that I thought I knew everything about. There will always be more of Toronto to explore, always be more people to find and places to escape to.”

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Tapping Into the City’s Unconscious

“The Toronto Flâneur,” from Spacing. Illustration by Marlena Zuber

You are standing on St. Laurent Boulevard in Montreal and a young guy named Lam-Thu tells you about the time a large banner advertising the film festival he works for was blown away by the wind, ripping brick out of the supporting wall and crushing a Volkswagen—the festival’s main sponsor—that was parked underneath. On Bloor Street in Toronto, a woman named Jaclyn describes to you her crush on the man who changed the letters on the Bloor Cinema’s marquee every night.

You don’t actually know Jaclyn or Lam-Thu. In fact, they’re just voices on your cell phone as you stand underneath a sign inscribed with a local telephone number and one cryptic word: [murmur]. An innovative initiative that aims to unearth the millions of personal stories and experiences that hide in the corners and crevices of our cities, [murmur] joins Toronto’s Spacing and Montreal’s Urbania as media projects taking a fresh, holistic look at our urban environment.

[murmur], which so far has a presence in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal (where it’s known as [murmure]), sprang from the fertile minds of James Roussel, Gabe Sawhney and Shawn Micallef, then students at Habitat, the Canadian Film Centre’s new-media lab in Toronto. “We wanted to create something that wasn’t on a computer screen, something related to the daily life of people in Toronto,” says Micallef. Armed with funding from terminus1525.ca (a Canadian Heritage/Canada Council pilot project), Micallef and friends turned their attention to Kensington Market, a tight-knit compact neighbourhood just west of downtown Toronto. Collecting audio clips was surprisingly difficult: “I thought it would be easy, but it totally wasn’t,” Micallef recollects. “People really undervalue their own stories.”

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One City, Two Faces: Roppongi Hills

The geography of Tokyo can be read into as a metaphor for its social stratification. There are the lowly pockets of Shitamachi, or the Low City, that lie on the literally low flood plains closer to the shore and the rivers. West of here are the few rarified districts of the Yamanote, a name that means “hand of the mountain” and aptly denotes the area’s hillier terrain. Away from here, the city stretches out in all directions in an unending sprawl of glass and concrete blandness, inhabited by the quiet, industrious, dignified, conformist, white-shirt -and-dark-suit-wearing Japanese middle class of lore—this is a city middle-class to its core.

One can find subtle signs (if he looks hard enough) as the train roars past Tsukiji, westwards and uphill. A platoon of well-dressed middle-aged men with indistinguishable faces get on at Hibiya station, epicentre of the central government bureaucracy; the ladies start to look more expensive, respectable, demure. Unmistakably, many of them are bound for Roppongi Hills.

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One City, Two Faces: Tsukiji Market

The hardest thing for me as a kid growing up in the vastness of suburban Tokyo was to imagine a place different from my own—I was merely one amongst the tens of millions who lived on lands far from the city centre and dominated by the postwar glass-and-concrete aesthetic, and who, via Tokyo’s impeccably efficient train system, poured into the city’s downtown (an unfamiliar and decidedly North American concept), itself a vague place to which the usual definition—anywhere within the famed Yamanote loop line—does no justice.

Life was and still is organized around single train lines: you take it to work, to shops, to the dentist’s etc. Patterns of life literally do not intersect, and one’s world at times becomes a partial reality, composed of the landscape along the morning train ride and people (often the same ones) you bump into on the train platforms and around the train stations.

Which explains why I’d been to many of the fabled sites of Tokyo for only so lamentably few times, and to some never at all; a fact, nevertheless, a sensible Japanese person would take as a matter of course. Take Tsukiji Market (so highly regarded by Lonely Planet) for example—why would a middle-class college-going kid travel to a place for fish mongers and restaurant buyers?

I went regardless, armed with a camera, an academic, collegiate curiosity, and a copy of Lonely Planet which simultaneously identified me as a gaijin and exempted me from Japanese sensibilities.

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四方城市 — City of Squares

Neon sign on Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong

Mailboxes outside a Macau apartment building

Montreal ‘87

Mike G. is an expat Montrealer now living in Ottawa. Recently, he has dipped into his photographic archives to create a fascinating set on Flickr, Montreal 1987.