Cornices of Mile End

Only Decent?

Translated by Arthur.

I live in Shatin, which is only decent. It would be radical if I could walk to a good bakery.

I received a phone call last night, in my bedroom. I don’t think anybody else heard the phone ring. Not my sister, not my mother, no one. After taking the call, I stepped to the window and stared down at the river. It lay stiff, straight, and silent, center black, banks ghostly white. The last train to Lo Wu had already snaked by. I closed the blinds and changed quickly, lights off. Within five minutes I was dressed, dressed if not washed, and on the elevator. Reaching the podium, I walked down a flight of underlit stairs and onto the scrape of Shatin, already sweating into my hoodie. I walked a little distance, closer to the KCR station, before catching a cab. The driver had cracked the windows somewhat, and the wind stripped the sweat from my skin. An empty lot, swathed in barbed wire, whistled past.

The cab lurched slightly as it swiveled onto the highway, international pop hits on the dial, and I remember staring at the fans, counting them even, as we sailed under the mountains and into Kowloon. I got out, paid up, and began walking again. I curled back into my hoodie, kept one hand on the cash in my pocket. The rows of tenements stacked like black paint smudges against the even blacker smudge of the mountains. I hadn’t had time to mess with a purse, and anyway, I was afraid of attracting attention. She met me at the corner, as underdressed as I was, biting her lip.

“Hey Wendy, you okay?”

She nodded and bit her lip harder. And together we began walking.

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My Love-Hate Affair With Modernism

I used to hate Montreal’s Place Ville-Marie. I thought it was ugly, overly gigantic and hostile to the city around it. Built on top of an underground shopping mall, it seemed a fitting symbol of the way modernism had turned its back on the streets of the city.

But then something happened. I. M. Pei’s 1962 complex, which includes Montreal’s most iconic skyscraper, began to grow on me. I came to admire its daring, the way it broke from the achingly conservative mainstream of Montreal’s commercial architecture. Its main entrance is clear and graceful, and the lovely terrace is a great place to relax in the midst of the downtown bustle.

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Siberian Streetlife

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Looking Back on Huxley and Colonial Bombay

Most people are poor judges when it comes to architecture from one generation back. Take Montreal’s Place Bonaventure or the Concordia University Hall Building—some of you may appreciate these buildings, but most people don’t. I am considered a weirdo when I argue that Quebec City’s “le bunker” (also known as “le calorifère”) is an interesting post-war building that warrants preservation. The mainstream press look at these buildings and ask for their demolition, all the while lamenting the loss of the Victorian marvels that came before.

This is not a new phenomenon. People in the first half of the twentieth century felt the same way about late nineteenth-century architecture that we now feel about concrete. Let me illustrate this with an example: Bombay.

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“The City as an Avatar of Itself”

“Neighbourhoods” by Hamish Grant

My first exposure to tilt-shift photography was in 2004, when I visited Olivo Barbieri’s Site Specific: Montreal exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Commissioned to compliment the CCA’s great show on Montreal in the 60s, Barbieri used a tilt-shift lens to photograph major 1960s-era Montreal landmarks from the air: the Maison Radio-Canada, Westmount Square, Place Ville-Marie, Place des Arts, the Metropolitan expressway and La Ronde, among others. The result was a series of images that transformed Montreal into something as pristine and perfect as a scale model.

Such is the effect produced by a tilt-shift lens, which fools the eye into thinking it is looking at something much smaller than it really is. When used to document urban landscapes, the city becomes, in Barbieri’s words, “an avatar of itself.” Last year, he explained his mission to Metropolis: “I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything. After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again.” So far, Barbieri has shot Rome, Amman, Las Vegas and Shanghai.

Recently, tilt-shift photography—both the authentic kind and Photoshop imitations—has become popular on photo-sharing sites such as Flickr. When it’s done well, it achieves a similar surreal quality to Barbieri’s work, transforming the hard-edged reality of aerial views into something softer and more ambiguous.

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Oh… Canada?

Guess the city…

A New “Chinatown” Grows in Montreal

On a cold January night, Fabian Jean and his mother, Lily, were enjoying a warming bowl of tong shui (sweet dessert soup) at the Chinese restaurant Prêt à Manger on Ste. Catherine St. West.

“I find it’s actually a lot better than the Chinese restaurants in Chinatown,” Fabian said.

“It’s so hard to park in Chinatown, too,” added his mother, who was born in Hong Kong, but moved to Montreal “too long ago to remember.”

Lily Jean (the name, which is Toisanese, is pronounced like the jean in blue jeans) and Montreal-born Fabian, an artist who lives on the Plateau, have seen the area west of Concordia University revitalized by students and immigrants.

“It was a struggling part of Ste. Catherine St. for many years,” Fabian said. “It’s refreshing to see a bit of life here.”

The transformation goes beyond Ste. Catherine. In the last few years, thousands of students, immigrants and business owners from Asia have turned the west end of downtown, from Guy St. to Atwater Ave., into a sort of Chinatown West.

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Juifs, caodaistes et la Petite Italie

Entrée principale du Temple Caodaiste de Montréal

Le Temple Caodaiste de Montréal, ancienne Synagogue Poale Zedek, a une histoire qui remonte près d’un siècle. Cet édifice jaune vif se démarque des entrepots industriels ternes au coin de Saint-Urbain et Jean-Talon. Il témoigne d’une présence juive et vietnamienne dans un quartier traditionellement associé aux Italiens.

Lors de la construction de la synagogue Poale Zedek, qui commence en 1911, le quartier au nord de la voie ferrée CPR est tout jeune. Des immigrants provenant du sud de l’Italie s’y installent. Cet endroit peu habité avec ses grands terrains vagues avait sans doute l’allure de leurs campagnes natale. On pouvait cultiver son jardin et ses légumes tout en étant près des lieux de travail de l’ère industrielle.

Des Juifs s’installent également dans ce quartier. Ils sont un peu excentrés des grands bassins de population juives de l’époque, qui se trouvent majoritairement sur le Plateau Mont-Royal. Qui sont ces juifs de la «Petite Italie» ? Le nom de leur synagogue, signifiant «ouvriers pour la justice» , démontrent qu’ils sont de la même classe sociale que les ouvriers italiens. Ils travaillant dans les usines ou pour le CPR. Le nom de la synagogue laisse également entendre des affiliations socialistes ou communistes.

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Dépanneur Weijia

I can’t remember what was there before Weijia. Another depanneur, sure, but obviously not a remarkable one. I’m not even sure it had a sign. But then, a couple of years ago, a friendly, middle-aged couple from the northern Chinese province of Shandong bought the depanneur and mounted a large vinyl banner that clearly announced both the store’s vocation and the ethnic origin of its owners. Neither of the couple can speak French or English; instead, they speak a mangled hybrid, so that when you buy a bottle of beer they are likely to say, “Bonjour! Two dollar! Merci!”

Dépanneur Weijia is located on Park Avenue in Mile End, between a laundromat and a vacant building that onced housed Marko’s Textiles. (The story of Marko, which involves a shooting death, flags and a mysterious fire, can read here.) Although it has a Chinese name and sign, there is nothing particularly Chinese about what is sold at Weijia, just a run-of-the-mill assortment of newspapers, snacks, soft drinks, beer and cigarettes.

Intentionally or not, however, Weijia is part of a neighbourhood trend. As new Chinese immigrants buy Mile End’s depanneurs, they are giving them distinctly Chinese names: Zi Yuan, for instance, or Xin Ying. This appears to be a break from the tradition of maintaining old or generic names. Of course, every Montrealer knows that a depanneur’s name is hardly important. Some stores don’t even bother to display them, or even to mount a sign—the Molson placards in the windows will suffice.

Perhaps, then, giving their dépanneur a name like Weijia was a way for an immigrant couple to claim a bit of the Park Avenue landscape for themselves. That certainly seemed the case last summer, when the neighbourhood was experiencing a bout of World Cup fever and flags from around the world were paraded around Montreal. China’s team didn’t even qualify for the cup, but that didn’t stop Weijia’s owners from mounting a small People’s Republic flag on their door, five yellow stars shining in the summer sun.

Bruges: Back to the Future?

There probably aren’t too many places left in the world like Bruges. Located in Western Flanders, in the northwest of Belgium, Bruges is probably the best-preserved medieval city left in Europe. It’s a classic storybook town, drawn straight out of romance movies and children’s books, the kind of place you’d never imagine a city bus snorting through.

Yet here I am waiting for the bus. The roads here are too small to be anything but one-way, and the road in front of my destination, the hostel where I’m staying, goes the wrong way. I’m not entirely sure where I’ll end up.

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