Under the Asphalt

Waiting to Cross

Then and Now #3: The Concrete Chapel

Guillaume St-Jean, urban history buff extraordinaire, has pointed me towards some remarkable then-and-now photos. The Nazareth Institute, (visible in the top photo, taken around 1910) opened in 1861 as an orphanage and home for delinquent boys. At the time, Guillaume reports, the insitute’s chapel was affectionately known as les buisonnets or “the chapel of the bush” due to its location in a wooded area at the base of the Sherbrooke Street ridge. After a twentieth century stint as a commercial academy and then again as an orphanage, the old chapel was demolished to make way for Place des Arts, a large Modernist performing arts centre that opened in 1963.

As much as I appreciate Place des Arts (especially the terrace that opens onto Ste. Catherine Street, which was actually built in the early 90s), I’m sorry to say that the Nazareth Institute’s chapel didn’t make way for a grand concert hall or museum. No, it was replaced by a concrete tarmac that is currently used for about four weeks per year during the Jazz Festival and Francofolies. The tarmac is in fact a place-holder for a future addition to Place des Arts; the site now occupied by the Musée d’art contemporain was similarly vacant for thirty years. Eventually, a new concert hall for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra is supposed to be built there, which I suppose will be good considering the MSO’s revival under the leadership of conductor Kent Nagano.

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Confrontation

Dog walking, Crescent Heights, Calgary

Are Our Cities Becoming More Segregated?

“Mapped Presence” by blacqbook

According to Statistics Canada, Canada now has 254 “visible minority neighbourhoods”—neighbourhoods that have more than 30 percent of their population from a particular visible minority group—most of which are found in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. When this number was first revealed in 2004, many members of Canada’s mass media saw it as an indication that our cities are becoming racially segregated patchworks of ethnic enclaves and insular communities.

Some have used the number as a convenient way to raise questions about official multiculturalism. Last year, pollster and pundit Alan Gregg wrote in a Walrus essay that the rise of “ethnic enclaves” tells us that “Canada’s fabled mosaic is fracturing and that ethnic groups are self-segregating.” Later, he adds that “this growing sense of separateness can have troubling consequences for national identity.”

More recently, in a Le Devoir article on the 25th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the reporter Hélène Buzzetti rolled out the same numbers to question whether Charter-led multicultural policy might be undermining Canada’s social fabric. Could the rise of such enclaves ethniques be a sign of the “obliteration of Canadian society?” she asks.

But Buzzetti and Gregg, like many others, cite the “ethnic enclave” number without seeming to understand the demographics behind it. In fact, few people in the mass media have ever taken a close look at why the number of visible minority neighbourhoods has increased. (For one, nobody really seems to grasp that Statistics Canada’s “visible minority neighbourhoods” are not actually the same as ethnic enclaves.) The end result is that the media give the impression that Canadian cities are becoming more and more segregated when, in fact, the opposite is true.

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Afternoon on Jeanne Mance Street

Je ne suis pas triste que vous partiez

It turns out that I’ve been oblivious to some strange goings-on just two blocks from my apartment. Since last summer, a group of artists have been producing some interesting and inventive videos in a loft they call the Moment Factory, at the corner of Hutchison and Van Horne. Most interesting of all is their new series, Minute Moments, which consists of minute-long videos produced by various Montreal artists.

Thien Vu Dang, alias VJ Pillow, and Yasuko Tadokoro, aka VJ Mademoiselle, have produced some of the best work for Minute Moments. I first encountered Pillow and Mademoiselle at a strangely fascinating improv session in which they jammed with a scratch DJ named Manna and the Toronto-based experimental musician Lee Pui Ming. Manna mixed sounds and Lee, through a realtime audio and video feed from Toronto, contributed what might best be described as piano noise and animalesque wails. Pillow and Mademoiselle, meanwhile, did a great job of mixing video footage from the streets of Hong Kong with live shots of Lee and Manna. It was downright hypnotic.

The Minute Moment clip I’ve shared above isn’t quite as trippy. Shot by Pillow and featuring Mademoiselle, it was filmed on a lonely industrial street on the edge of Mile End. It opens with a few lines in French, credited to Jean-Luc Godard, which can be translated as “I am not sad that you are leaving. I am not in love with you. I will not join you in Brazil. I do not kiss you tenderly.” As Mademoiselle wanders down the street, yellow balloon in hand, she passes by a piece of graffiti lurking in the background: “Love is a mystery,” it reads.

Means of Transport

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Will Tramways Return to Montreal?

Yellow and olive-green streetcars used to be a common sight in Montreal as they clattered around the city. That changed in 1959, when Montreal, ever so fashion-conscious, scrapped the last of its trams.

Now, nearly half a century after they disappeared, it would seem that the people who run this town are determined to bring streetcars back to its streets. Yesterday, La Presse reported that City Hall will announce the construction of a new tramway linking downtown, Griffintown, Old Montreal and the Latin Quarter as part of a broader transport plan that will be unveiled in May. Apparently, the federal government might be willing to cough up enough cash to pay for the project, but nothing is certain just yet. That hasn’t stopped others from dreaming: today brought with it the news that officials in Montreal’s Southwest borough want to reclaim disused CN and CPR tracks to build a tramway along the banks of the Lachine Canal.

If Montrealers are sceptical, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. We’ve heard this kind of thing before, such as when Mayor Gérald Tremblay visited Paris, gazed upon its new shiny new streetcars and declared, with a strange look in his eyes, that Park Avenue would have a tramway by the end of the decade. Of course, nothing came of that and, considering Tremblay’s new relationship with the people of Park Avenue, it’s likely that nothing ever will.

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A Balloon and a Bouquet

Scenes from the Seoul Metro

Today, in the subway, I stood beside a young woman who thought it would be a good idea to place her caramel macchiato in the overhead compartment. Predictably, the cup fell over and spilled its sticky java contents all over two men wearing fairly nice looking suits. One of them quickly gave the girl a used tissue, demanding that she wipe off the coffee from his back. Nosey ajumas (older Korean women) on the other side of the train, dressed in their best hiking outfits, reached over to provide the humiliated young lady with a seemingly endless supply of tissues and moist towelettes. At first, judging by their stern faces, it seemed like the ajumas wanted the young woman to know that they were disappointed in her. As she set about the arduous task of cleaning up her mess, though, the old ladies smirked.

It was just another day in the Seoul subway, the best place in the city to watch the interaction of everyday Koreans of various ages and social classes. Seoul’s subway system is one of the most extensive in the world. It consists of eight lines, spanning 287 kilometres, connecting virtually all neighbourhoods within this massive metropolis of over 20 million people. There are currently 266 metro stations, from the Incheon International Airport near the coast of the Yellow Sea, to the distant northern suburb of Uijeongbu, down to the posh “new cities” of Gangnam (the district south of the Han River) and then out east to a rusty, Soviet-like area called Sangil-dong.

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Prazeres 28

As dusk falls on Lisbon, the number 28 tram rattles into the Largo do Chiado, past crowds gathering for an evening in cafés, bars, shadowy streets. It stops at a red light. The conductor looks down, his face inscrutable. Then, with a lurch, the tram is off again. It disappears down a bend in the road.

Then and Now #2: Gas Station

This image was created by Guillaume St-Jean, an urban planning student at the Université du Québec à Montréal who has been doing an admirable job of exploring Montreal’s history on Flickr. In the top photo, which was taken in 1929, you see the old Molson house at the corner of St. Laurent and Sherbrooke. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century when Sherbrooke Street marked the edge of the city. By the early twentieth century, though, St. Laurent had become a full-fledged commercial street. Sometime in the 1910s or 20s, when car ownership was still rare enough that it carried with it an air of privilege and distinction, the house was converted into a rather striking gas station.

Alas, as tends to happen all too frequently in Montreal, the house burned down in 1937—but the site retained its vocation as a gas station. The bottom photo reveals its current incarnation: a bland, unremarkable chunk of suburbia marooned at one of Montreal’s most prominent corners. To its credit, the retail portion of the gas station, which contains a depanneur and a Tim Horton’s, faces the corner of Milton and St. Laurent with a streetside entrance and a café terrace. But that doesn’t make up for its profound waste of space in such a bustling neighbourhood. Personally, I’ve always thought that the gas station site, which forms a neat square between Sherbrooke, Milton, Clark and St. Laurent, would make for a beautiful and well-located plaza.

It Was This Big…