Poster advertising keytar legend “Gils” at Limoilou’s Pub Chez Jean
The image above summarizes my perception of Limoilou: a neighbourhood locked in time where mullets, keytars, and bikers rule. I don’t go there often, and when I do I always experience culture shock (but I suppose it also makes me laugh).
Largely planned and built in the early 20th century, Limoilou looks more like Montreal’s triplex neighbourhoods than any other part of Quebec City. Spiral staircases, tree-lined streets, and a “balconville” atmosphere reigns. Locals in Nordiques caps and short shorts drink Labatt Bleue on their balconies. It could almost be Rosemont/Petite Patrie or Hochelaga/Maisonneuve, but not quite.
In order to get a different perspective on the place, I asked my British friends Tom Welham and Judith Kirby why they live there. After circling the world a few times and cycling across Australia, Tom and Judith decided Limoilou was the best place on earth. They immigrated from England, bought a flat here, and intend to stay.
Considering the mayor’s enthusiasm over bringing back tramways to Montreal—the city’s new transport plan, unveiled yesterday, proposed three new lines that will be built over the next several years—I thought it would be fun to take a look at this old tramway route map from 1941. What I find most fascinating is the way it’s possible to tell, from looking at where the streetcars go, why neighbourhoods and commercial districts developed as they did.
As in pretty much any other city, Montreal’s tramway network funnelled streetcars into major streets and transit hubs. Often, important business districts sprung up around those hubs. Five streetcar routes and one bus line met near the corner of Queen Mary Road and Decarie Boulevard at what was called the Snowdon Junction. It’s easy to see why Snowdon became the west end’s downtown, a bustling neighbourhood of bulky apartment blocks and landmarks like the Snowdon Theatre and a Reitmans department store. Nearby, a commercial district arose where the number 3A streetcar travelled along Monkland Avenue, before turning onto Grand Boulevard and heading up to Somerled Avenue. Even today, nearly half a century after the last streetcar was removed from service, the Monkland retail strip ends abruptly at Grand.
Although some of today’s buses follow the same routes as the long-gone tramways, the opening of metro lines in the 1960s and 70s was accompanied by a drastic reconfiguration of Montreal’s transit system. Streets once served by several streetcar and bus lines, like Notre Dame in St. Henri, became marginalized as their transit connections were removed. It didn’t help that some metro stations were located far away from traditional main streets, as is the case in Hochelaga, where the metro is a good seven-minute walk from Ontario Street.
The Lachine Market comes as a surprise: a small, pleasant outpost near the end of the Lachine Canal. For years, like the neighbourhood around it, the market suffered from neglect. Now, with a new format meant to better serve its community, it hopes to become a central part of life in the area and reinvigorate its sleepy surroundings.
Lachine’s market history dates back to the 1840s, but it was in 1909 that a permanent public market was built on the town’s main drag, Notre Dame St. By the end of the century, however, the market had faded out of existence, mirroring the commercial decline of Lachine’s old downtown.
Then came the market’s second act: In 2004, the Corporation de gestion des marchés publics de Montréal, which also manages the Jean Talon, Atwater and Maisonneuve markets, proceeded to transform it into a partially enclosed, year-round market open seven days a week. Strung along two blocks of Notre Dame St., between 17th and 19th Aves., the new market consists of a covered flower market and an indoor market hall, the two joined by a small plaza.
Originally, the market hall contained a number of boutiques and merchants, but they were too upscale for the neighbourhood; despite an initial burst of popularity, the market’s business soon declined. By the end of 2006, many of the businesses were ready to leave.
A couple of weeks ago, Midnight Poutine reported that Montreal’s new central library, the Grande Bibliothèque, has won first place in the 2007 Library Building Awards. “At once urban, human scaled, and extraordinarily open, the building succeeds by its exquisite use of materials and detailing both inside and outside,” wrote the jury. “There is a peaceful, tranquil feel that provides a welcome contrast to its grand urban gesture, masterfully executed.” The awards, which are jointly sponsored by the American Institute of Architects and the American Library Association, are given biennially to “the finest examples” of new library design by architects licenced in the United States.
When I first reviewed the Grande Bibliothèque after its opening in May 2005, I wrote that its “ugly” exterior, which “wouldn’t look out of place in a suburban office park,” was redeemed by the library’s interior beauty and functionality. Two years on, my feelings towards the library have grown only warmer. I am still ambivalent about the building’s green-glass façade, but I am impressed by its sensitivity to the surrounding streetscape. The library’s main entrance surrounds a small plaza that is constantly filled with people—despite the fact that it is almost always in the shade. On any given day in the warm months, dozens of bicycles are parked around the plaza. To the west, another entrance opens onto the intersection of two laneways, one of which leads to busy St. Denis Street. In recent months, a new café was installed here, and in the future the retail spaces that line this side of the library are meant to host some sort of book market.
What I love most about the Grande Bibliothèque is that it has so quickly been embraced by Montrealers. The decision to locate it at the corner of Berri and Maisonneuve, on top of the city’s main metro hub, next to a large university and alongside a major bicycle route, was genius. Without fail, the library is busy—and not just busy, but packed—whenever I visit. In fact, the library has been more popular than anyone expected, drawing an average of 12,000 visitors per day. The diversity of the people who use it is remarkable: this is probably the single Montreal institution that brings together a truly representative cross-section of the city’s population. I don’t think it is possible for any Montrealer to feel out of place when he or she visits the Grande Bibliothèque. In a city that is too often split along linguistic and ethnic lines, that, more than anything, is a testament to its success.
In the sweltering Roman summer, balconies aren’t used so much to escape the heat—that’s what air conditioning and metal shutters are for—as they are to linger over a cigarette, spying on the neighbours. Or maybe just to hang the laundry.
Helen’s Children’s Wear, Burnaby. Photo by M.J. Milloy
Vancouver used to be one of the world’s capitals of neon before its dour city fathers ruined the fun in the 1960s and the signs were banned. A handful of gems managed to survive, though, and over the past decade, Vancouver’s neon heritage has become increasingly appreciated. The city even encourages the use of neon on a handful of streets. Still, a number of great signs have vanished in recent years. The latest to go is one of the most unique: Helen’s swinging neon sign in Burnaby Heights, an old streetcar suburb centered around East Hastings Street.
Helen Arnold opened her children’s clothing store in 1948. At the time, Vancouver’s cityscape was littered with a collection of neon signs rivalled only by a few other cities like Hong Kong; presumably, she needed a particularly remarkable sign to stand out. So she leased a sign that depicted a girl on a swing that actually swung back and forth, thanks to magnets and a timing mechanism. Even though the sign cost a lot to operate, Helen credits it with bringing in a lot of business over the past fifty years: “We often get people in here who say that if it wasn’t for that sign, they would never have found us,” she told Burnaby Now in 2004.
Unfortunately, Helen is retiring, and now her sign’s future is in jeopardy. Rumour has it that the City of Burnaby will buy the sign and use it to welcome people to the Burnaby Heights neighbourhood; problem is, in doing so, they would change the sign’s text to “Heights” and prevent it from swinging, since local by-laws prohibit animated signs. This strikes me as a particularly backwards way of saving the sign; not only would moving it and changing the lettering completely decontextualize it, stopping the swing would ruin what made it famous in the first place.
Railroad viaducts make for a distinct kind of underpass: not too long but exceptionally dank and dreary, made ominous by the rattle of trains passing overhead. In downtown Montreal, pedestrians passing under the Windsor Station CPR tracks are subjected to all manners of mysterious liquids and pigeon poop. The tracks that feed Rome’s Trastevere Station are no different when they pass over the busy via Portuense, except for one thing: the Roman penchant for tagging, and the apparent efforts to cover up the tags with murals and paint, have created a strange patchwork of colours and designs.
Last month I wrote about Montreal video artist Thien Vu Dang, known as VJ Pillow, and his work for the Minute Moments series of one-minute videos. Yasuko Tadokoro is Pillow’s frequent collaborator but she is also a talented videographer in her own right: consider “Le fil rouge,” a Minute Moment video that muses on the interconnectedness of urban life. Tadokoro’s images of Japanese streetlife are nothing short of striking.
It’s not hard to buy sex. You need only turn to the back pages of your local alt-weekly, where escort agencies advertise women like Natasha, whose age (twenty), height (5’8”), measurements (36B-24-34), weight (120 pounds) and ethnicity (French-Canadian) are listed beneath a photo of a topless woman, legs spread, face and breasts obscured by black stars. There’s always the street, too, where women with open sores and hollow faces look for customers amid nighttime traffic. Yet despite its visibility, sex work is outlawed in Canada. The result is a dangerous, opaque industry where women—who make up the vast majority of sex workers—are all too easily abused and exploited.
Prostitution hasn’t always been illegal in Canada. Until the twentieth century, brothels operated in abundance, with only occasional intervention from police. With the dawn of the Victorian era, though, came the birth of a new movement: social reform. Led by devout Protestants, the social reformers declared war on society’s dark side, which included drugs, alcohol, weird and newfangled dance moves and, of course, prostitution. “Prostitution is the lowest, cruelest, filthiest and most injurious offspring of perdition,” harrumphed the Reverend Frederic Du Val, a Winnipeg reformer, in 1910.
The movement also extended its attacks to non-white Canadians, whom reformers accused of patronizing brothels and controlling the sex trade. The Chinese, among others, were accused of importing prostitutes to Canada and luring innocent white women into the so-called white-slave trade. For many Canadians, the largely fictional image of young white girls forced into a world of vice by “foreign” heathens was a compelling argument against prostitution. By the 1920s, the social reformers had won their war: Chinese were excluded from Canada, Chinese-Canadians had been stripped of their civil rights, alcohol and gambling were illegal, and prostitution had been bid adieu once and for all.
Or so the reformers thought. Prostitution hadn’t been eliminated, of course: it simply slid underground—in some cases, not very far underground at all.
As a hazy dusk descended over Rome, we caught the tram into the old city and wandered past all of the historic sights whose names had filtered into our imaginations through generations of pop culture: the Tiber River, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain. All of them, predictably, were packed by tourists, each one trying desparate to take photos that would make it seem like they alone had encountered these landmarks in their most pristine, unmolested state.
But the throngs of visitors (not to mention the vendors lurking around to sell them stuff, and the few locals passing by who pretended to ignore the whole scene) provided ample amusement for me. Also, apparently, for this young Polish girl, who spoke enough English to tell us that she was on a class field trip and that she was enjoying it very much.
Montreal Apartments