Lonely Afternoon

Toronto’s Innovative Infill

Laneway in Toronto. Photo by Jeremy K.

They are the spaces we ignore: Toronto’s alleyways and awkward corners, where the urban fabric droops like a gangly teenager’s ill-fitting shirt. Recently though, new ideas have emerged to deal with two of the city’s most overlooked spaces: its 300 kilometres of laneways and the underside of its infamous Gardiner Expressway.

When architects Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe were looking to build a house in the early 1990s, they wanted something modern but affordable. This combination, however, is virtually unheard of in Toronto, where high land values and restrictive architectural guidelines (essentially, new houses are required to look like their neighbours) make it hard to build unusual houses in established neighbourhoods. Their solution? Build something out of sight, in a back alley. After finding a piece of property in the city’s east end that was used mainly for storing abandoned cars, they applied to the Ontario Municipal Board for permission to build a laneway house. At first, neighbours were alarmed and some protested against the project. Despite the complaints, however, Shim and her husband got the go-ahead from the OMB, and their concrete-block house was completed in 1993. “Part of the design is that it really protected everyone’s privacy,” says Shim. “Everything is really unobtrusive.”

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Streetcorners in Alexandria

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Take Me Back to Griffintown

Griffintown is one of my favourite neighbourhoods to explore: the grime of history coats its buildings, past lives lurk in shadowy corners. Its quiet streets contain the treasures of industrial ruins and a community lost; they are the perfect place for a lonely nighttime stroll.

I’m not alone. Long-neglected Griffintown has become the darling of architecture students, historians and artists. Musicians discover new bands at Friendship Cove, an unmarked loft on Ottawa Street; artists have a new home in the Darling Foundry and its Quartier éphémère. The story of Griffintown’s displaced Irish community is now an essential part of Montreal’s folklore.

As much as I love it, though, I don’t feel quite qualified to talk about Griffintown. I feel obliged to defer to those who know more intimately its story.

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Fishing in the Seine

Not fish, actually—the guy caught an eel.

Eel is delicious, but I’m not sure if I would trust the cleanliness of a river that runs through the heart of Paris.

Carnaval at Pâtisserie Simon

I was explaining Montreal’s Wilensky’s Light Lunch to a friend in Quebec City last week. I think I used the phrase “wartime-food-shortage charm,” a charm that translates all the way down to the food itself. We all like the fact that Wilensky’s is there, but I’ve never met anyone who’s actually had one of their bologna sandwiches.

“I see,” she said, looking for some way to relate it to Quebec City, “so it’s a little like Pâtisserie Simon.”

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Montréal Architecture (No.2)

Sidewalk on rue St-Antoine

Stone, trees, bike racks, benches and specially designed streetlights in Montréal’s Quartier international.

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On the Bus, Somewhere in Macau

Lorne, Aylmer, Durocher, Hutchison

Any savvy Montrealer knows the best way to walk from downtown to the Plateau is to cut through McGill and head down Milton Street. This unassuming stretch of road is the heart of the McGill Ghetto, a lovely yet infamous neighbourhood that is home to a disproportionate number of McGill University students. Lovely because, modern intrusions aside, its streets are lined by flirtatious Victorian greystones and gentlemanly Edwardian apartment blocks. Infamous because, well, this is where you’ll find the kinds of students who are both monied and lazy enough to live within eyeshot of campus.

I digress—not all Ghetto residents are McGill Girls. In fact, Milton Street is where you can find all of the other McGill students who do not own Ugg boots or an SUV with New York plates. They trickle down the street all day long, counting the blocks from the Milton Gates to Park Avenue—Lorne, Aylmer, Durocher, Hutchison—after which they disperse into the city beyond. Every hour or so, classes end, the dam opens and the trickle becomes a torrent. Hundreds of people spill east out of campus onto Milton Street, walking and cycling. If I pick the right time to walk down Milton, I could run into someone I know on every block.

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Hérouxville and the Big City

Over the past year, Montrealers have been subjected to a steady flow of stories on “reasonable accomodation,” a catchphrase that refers to the accomodation of religious minority needs in public institutions. Like other major Canadian cities, Montreal is very diverse. It has a long history of intercultural relations, so reasonable accommodation seemed, well, reasonable.

But then something happened: some media began interpreting reasonable accommodation as an attack on Quebec’s values and identity. Last year’s Supreme Court decision to allow a Sikh boy to wear a kirpan—a ceremonial dagger—to school, as long as it was permanently encased in a wooden sheath, was met with almost universal furor from the francophone press. Columnists saw it as an attack on Quebec’s cherished secularism. Then came news that men had been excluded from a prenatal class in Park Extension attended mostly by Hindu and Muslim women. The breaking point was a minor controversy that erupted over the Mile End YMCA’s decision to frost the windows of its exercise room after concerns from the adjacent Hassidic synagogue that its young male students were being distracted by the sight of Spandex-clad women. That set off a storm, with the YMCA affair being used as an excuse to dredge up every conceivable concern over immigration and ethnicity. Last week, the storm reached its peak with what seemed like a joke: a headline in La Presse that read, “It is forbidden to stone women!”

It wasn’t a joke. The people of Hérouxville had spoken.

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Life vs. Bombay Taxi-Wallah

Taxi drivers, it’s safe to say, have attained iconic status in the annals of urban folklore. They’re the embodiment of a city’s wiry energy and gritty determination to survive. They are strange, slightly crazy and defiantly individualistic. Surely, it takes a special character to drive strangers around for hours on end, competing with thousands of other drivers for customers and cash. (The debt faced by drivers is often staggering—in Montreal, where 9,500 taxis prowl the streets, taxi licences cost upwards of $200,000.) Maybe that’s why so many of them have such interesting things to say. Pierre-Léon, author of Un taxi la nuit, just landed a book deal; Lebanese-Canadian Rawi Hage wrote his first novel DeNiro’s Game while driving a taxi in Montreal. It was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and is now a national bestseller.

Most cabbies, however, are just trying to survive amidst the particular challenges of their own city. “Horn OK Please” is a day in the life of a Bombay taxi driver, Lucky, who struggles to earn enough rupees to buy a new air-conditioned cab. This short film, produced by a team of Indian and Irish animators at Belfast’s Flickerpix Animations, is made with a combination of stop-motion models and drawn backgrounds. The result is colourful, chaotic and charming. Take a look.

Cheonggyecheon: The Flow of Progress

Restoring a six-kilometre stream that has been covered by an expressway for over fifty years is not an easy task. The job is even more difficult when the stream happens to meander through one of the world’s largest and most densely populated cities. The Cheonggyecheon, or the Cheonggye Stream restoration project is without question the most ambitious urban renewal scheme to have ever been undertaken in the history of Seoul.

The aims of the Cheonggyecheon restoration project, completed in 2005, were first, to rectify a severe public safety problem caused by an expressway that threatened to collapse at any moment; second, to address Seoul’s deteriorating environmental conditions by creating an environmentally friendly place in the centre of the city; third, to pay tribute the history of the 600 year old Korean capital; and fourth, to spur redevelopment in the surrounding neighbourhoods, which at that time lagged behind other neighbourhoods in the central city.

To fully appreciate the significance of the Cheonggyecheon project to the Korean people it is necessary to know a little bit about Korean history, particularly as it relates to Seoul. The Choson Dynasty, led by Emperor Taiju, chose the land on the banks of the Cheonggyecheon near its intersection with the mighty Han River as Korea’s capital in 1392. Monk Muhak, on behalf of Taiju, selected the site after an extensive two-year search for a location that satisfied the principles of feng shui. According to Muhak, the site possessed powerful Earth energy that was enhanced by a prominent mountain directly to the north, another to the south and two other mountains situated to the east and west of the site.

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Calgary and the Imaginary Cowboy

What comes to mind when you think of Calgary? If you’re like most Canadians, the answer is likely a combination of oil, cows and Stephen Harper—and, oh yes, the Calgary Stampede. The Stampede, a celebration of cowboy culture that modestly proclaims itself “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth,” is an enormous, all-consuming event, anticipated months in advance by fluttering banners hoisted above traffic lights and an army of white cowboys (shoulders hunched, legs firmly grounded, left arm raised to wildly spin a rope into a gaping ‘O,’ presumably to lasso some scampering animal with triumphal cowboy furor) set against a scarlet red backdrop.

The Stampede’s relationship with its host city is unlike that of nearly any other event in the world; for more than nine decades, the Stampede has come to define Calgary’s character and identity. This is the Calgary of popular imagination, a Calgary synonymous with its annual ninety-three-year-old cowboy festival.

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Park Avenue Saved… by the Bourassas?

Just as I was getting used to the idea of living on Robo Avenue, Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay came to his senses: Park Avenue will no longer be renamed in honour of former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa. (You can follow the whole story in our archives.) In a statement yesterday afternoon that can only be described as passionless, Tremblay insisted that his intention was “solely to honour [Bourassa’s] memory and never to generate controversy.” Apparently, the Bourassa family felt that the acrimony over Park Avenue’s renaming would tarnish Robert’s memory. The famously temperate premier would never have wanted to cause such discord, they told the mayor.

Word has it that Tremblay is now considering naming the new Pine-Park intersection after Robert Bourassa—an idea, you will remember, I wholeheartedly endorse.