Super-Sized Street Signs

Photo by Kate McDonnell

A few years ago, the City of Montreal installed a new set of street signs at the corner of University Street and René Lévesque Boulevard, in the heart of the business district, kitty-corner to Place Ville Marie. They’re part of a pilot project that will eventually determine the appearance of signs at major intersections across the city. Unlike other Montreal street signs, of which the most recent design dates to 1987, these new signs are displayed more prominently and they are extremely large: obviously designed to be visible to motorists travelling at high speeds.

There are actually two different types of signs on display at University and René Lévesque. Both feature capitalized text in the Univers typeface and both have relegated the city’s flower logo to a small panel above the sign itself. The difference is that one type of sign is white with black text; the other is green with white text, a colour scheme common to many North American cities, including New York, Boston and Chicago. Personally, I dislike the green signs, simply because they symbolize the kind of car-dominant vision that sees city streets in the same light as interstate highways.

Other people seem to disagree with me, according to Sylvie Tremblay, a conseillère en aménagement urbain with the city. “Opinion is very mixed,” she told me. “There’s no consensus. Some people like the green, others the white.” Still more have suggested a blue background, but Tremblay said this might cause confusion with tourist information signs, which are also blue.

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Vancouver Orange

Fruit markets on Commercial Drive and East Georgia Street

Lucky Luke Makes An Appearance

Arriverderci Tivoli

Almost every city has a collection of neighbourhood institutions, businesses known and used by such a wide variety of people that they become convenient meeting places as well as local reference points, secure admist the great of spasms of change in the city beyond. Some of these places seem to be fuelled on nostalgia alone, their outmoded menu and decor sought by people eager to recall earlier days. The best of them, however, have lasted so long because they have never failed to provide the great food and memorable ambiance that made them popular in the first place.

The New Tivoli Restaurant seemed to fall into the latter category. For three decades, the Gardanis family supplied the corner of St. Clair and Dufferin in Toronto with coffee and comfort food; in return, they were rewarded with a loyal and diverse clientele from the surrounding neighbourhood. “It ruled the eastern boundary of Corso Italia, whatever the mood, fashion or World Cup Champion. It was like the old sweater that you couldn’t part with—a bit frayed and rough-around-the-edges, but a constant source of comfort and security,” writes the designer and photographer Mondo Lulu, who lived above the restaurant.

Thanks to his uniquely intimate relationship to the restaurant—he calls its staff and owners his “second family”—Lulu was able to create a particularly engaging collection of photos that document life at the Tivoli. Last fall, when rising rents forced the restaurant to close, Lulu’s photos became a record of its existence as a focus of life on St. Clair. Many of Lulu’s photos can be seen on Flickr. Those of you in Toronto, however, might want to check out his photos in person, at the “Arrivederci Tivoli: Photos from the Centre of the Universe” exhibit. It opened this weekend and runs until June 7 at the Side Space Gallery, 1080 St. Clair West.

“After the SOS/ROW row, it looks like the hood is in healing mode,” Lulu told me last month. “I’m hoping that my show will be key in that, since the Tiv was the place where all factions laid down their arms in the name of bacon.”

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People-Watching

Prince Arthur Street

Evening Under the Bridge

Patterns of light, shadow and reflections underneath the Charlevoix Street Bridge, over the Lachine Canal in Montreal, during rush hour. Music is “Wildlife Analysis” by Boards of Canada.

Politics, Street-Level

I love demonstrations and rallies. Sometimes I go out of my way to find them. The presence of thousands of people, all singularly motivated, is a fairly rare phenomenon—all the more so when it comes to political thought.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve been following the French election, and it’s not my place to sum it up here. But let’s just say that this election season has approached the levels of polarization and viciousness that Americans, ahem, enjoyed in 2004. When I found out that no less than ten people who I knew were going to a rally for Parti Socialiste candidate Ségolène Royal, I figured that I might as well show up too. So I coerced a friend into coming along and set off for the Stade Charléty down in the 13th arrondissement.

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They Work On So Many Levels

Classic turn-of-the-century triplexes on St. Urbain Street

In Montreal, it’s hard to avoid plexes. Found in almost every neighbourhood, they define the landscape and have made this city what it is today, architecturally, culturally and socially. With their distinct form—several superposed flats, each extending from the front of a building to the back—plexes are a popular form of housing, adaptable to many different lifestyles. But what’s their story? How did Montreal come to be a city of walkup apartments, outdoor staircases and balconies?

According to David Hanna, professor of geography at the Université du Québec à Montréal, the origins of the plex can be traced to a nineteenth century “marriage of convenience” between French and Scottish traditions. Historically, some French-Canadian settlers used outdoor staircases to link the first and second floors of their houses; immigrants from Scotland, meanwhile, brought with them the custom of stacking one flat on top of another. “It kept morphing in the nineteenth century until it settled into the form of an outdoor staircase leading to each apartment,” said Hanna.

Architect Susan Bronson, who teaches at the Université de Montréal, notes that turn-of-the-century building codes, designed to improve living conditions, played a big role in reinforcing the dominance of the plex. In Montreal and the suburb of St. Louis (now Mile End), lot sizes were increased from 20 by 60 feet to 25 by 100 feet and laneways were built in between blocks to service new apartments. Setbacks were mandated on newly-built residential streets, indirectly encouraging the use of outdoor staircases as a space-saving measure.

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Two Streets, Two Neighbourhoods

The laneway running between Esplanade Avenue and St. Urbain Street, just above Villenueve, does not have a name, but it is home to several dwellings, including the duplex on the left of the above photo. (It has an address on Esplanade.) This laneway developed in the first decade of the twentieth century when today’s Mile End was under the jurisdiction of a burgeoning suburb known as the City of St. Louis. Inspired by a City of Montreal building code passed in 1901, St. Louis’ building regulations required, among other things, the construction of laneways to remove some more unsightly activities from the streets. They quickly became hubs of neighbourhood life and occasionally the site of laneway houses.

Today, most of these old laneways are far too narrow to serve their original purposes, so garbage collection and other unsavoury services are performed once again in the street. At the same time, their newfound quietude must make them a nice place to live.

Walkley Avenue, like many NDG streets, was built in the early twentieth century by developers eager to transform the area’s farmland into lucrative middle-class housing. Its name reflects the bourgeois anglophone character of the new suburb; nearby streets are called King Edward, Mayfair, Coronation and Park Row. Like Mile End, NDG was an independent suburb until it was annexed to Montreal in 1907. Unlike Mile End, it wanted to emulate its more upscale neighbour, Westmount. Although multifamily housing was standard even among middle-class Montrealers, NDG did all that it could to disguise its walkup plexes as single-family houses. Many eastern NDG streets are lined by homogenous rows of semi-detached fourplexes built in the 1910s and 20s.

Like most streets in western NDG, however, Walkley has a more heterogenous appearance. Near Sherbrooke Street, it contains a mix of detached houses, duplexes and the occasional apartment building.