Should Ben’s Be Saved?

Ben’s home since 1950. Photo by Quan Nguyen

Last fall, when the workers of Ben’s Delicatessen went on strike, it seemed inevitable that the nearly century-old restaurant would close. For many, it was long overdue. Despite its history as a hangout for such postwar Montreal poets as Leonard Cohen, P.K. Page and Louis Dudek—not to mention Pierre Trudeau and the Montreal Canadiens—Ben had long ago ceased to be a welcoming place. Its food was terrible, its waiters surly and prices high. Most of the patrons were tourists and nostalgic baby boomers who could remember its glory days.

So it was no surprise when the Kravitz family, which has owned Ben’s since it was a hole-in-the-wall diner on the Main, used the strike as an excuse to shut its doors and sell the building for an easy $12 million. Its impressive collection of vintage furniture and decor, which hadn’t changed since Ben’s opened on Metcalfe Street in 1950, will be donated to the McCord Museum.

But what about the building? The 57-year-old edifice is a downtown landmark, one of only a handful of streamline moderne buildings in Montreal. No matter to the American property developer who just bought Ben’s: he plans to tear it down and replace it with a highrise office or apartment tower later this year.

That isn’t sitting well with a lot of people. Next Thursday, June 14th, at noon, a demonstration will take place in front of Ben’s, urging the province to designate it as a historical landmark. Organized by Pop Montreal, it will feature speeches and performances by klezmer hip hop artist Socalled and art deco historian Jack Gaiptman, among others.

Although these activists point to Ben’s architecture as one reason why it ought to be preserved, it’s really Ben’s social history that makes it such a landmark. This, however, raises a question: without the deli that gave it such meaning, is there any reason to keep the Ben’s building? Would preserving it turn it into an irrelevant museum piece rather than a functional city building?

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Ottawa: A Monumental Dilemma

As the capital of Canada, Ottawa is endowed with numerous statues and monuments. Most of them grace the public spaces that surround the city’s federal buildings, museums, and sites of national importance. One of the most prominently-situated of these statues depicts the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who traveled past the future site of Ottawa in 1613 — two centuries before a settlement of any significance was established. Champlain who is now immortalized at the crest of Nepean point, a limestone outcropping that overlooks the Ottawa River, Gatineau, and Parliament Hill. The statue has graced this strategic site since 1915 and depicts an ‘eroicly-posed Champlain grasping his astrolabe — a navigational device that he famously lost during a portage up-river near Renfrew — as if to say, “Aha! There it is!”

But the majestic presence of the statue overshadows the controversies that have surrounded it in recent years. Historians have quibbled over Champlain’s astrolabe technique, insisting that he is holding the device upside-down (although, as my imagination leads me to believe, if the statue depicts Champlain in the midst of a “eureka!” moment, having just recovered the lost object and appraising its condition, it wouldn’t matter which way he is holding it). However, the most controversial part about the statue does not concern Champlain himself, but a Native scout that used to adorn the monument’s pedestal.

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Eating the Campus

Santropol’s old rooftop container garden. Photo by Jack Sanford

Is it possible to eat a university? A group of environmental activists, volunteers and McGill University researchers want you to think so. Last week, they launched the Edible Campus, a container garden located at the school’s campus in downtown Montreal.

Operated by Alternatives, a social and environmental advocacy group based in the McGill Ghetto, the garden will supply up to one-third of the food needed to feed Santropol Roulant’s meals-on-wheels program. At the same time, it will provide an opportunity for researchers from McGill’s Edible Landscapes Project to study the effectiveness of container gardening as a tool for urban food production.

“Gardens are not just a leisure activity,” said Dr. Vikram Bhatt, a professor in the school of architecture and the director of the Minimum Cost Housing Group, which runs Edible Landscapes. “They play a profound role in the lives of the elderly, immigrants and people who are just lonely.”

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Looking for Chinatown

“There’s no Chinatown in Quebec City. There’s never been one,” snapped a research assistant at the city archives. It sounded as if I wasn’t the first to come asking for information. “There were a handful of Chinese-owned stores in the lower city, but it was hardly a ‘Chinatown.’”

Had I been misled all these years? I had first heard about Quebec City’s former Chinatown in the NFB documentary Pâté Chinois. Articles mentioned it in Le Devoir and the Globe and Mail. I’d heard local Chinese reminiscing about it on the six o’clock news. Louisa Blair devotes a chapter to Quebec’s Chinatown in The Anglos.

Then there’s star playwright Robert Lepage, who staged a six-hour opus called La Trilogie des Dragons. It begins in a Lower Town parking lot where the kids, poised to dig to China, realize they don’t have to dig too deep to find it. They discover instead that memories of opium dens, mah-jongg, and Chinese laundries exist very close to the surface. “It used to be a Chinatown,” the play ends, “now it’s a parking lot.” Was it all just exaggeration, someone digging for a story? Well yes—and no.

The Chinese first began arriving on the West Coast during the 1850s gold rush. A second wave came in the 1870s, cheap labour for the cross-country railway, where they earned ten to twenty times what they could earn in Guangdong. The last spike in the CPR railway was driven in 1885, and a discriminatory Chinese head tax was implemented that same year. This made further immigration difficult. Anti-Chinese sentiment ran high and many landlords would not lease apartments to them. They banded together and created Chinatowns.

Some Chinese fled discrimination by coming east in the 1890s. A trickle made it to Quebec City, but most settled in larger cities. In 1911, there were 68 Chinese in Quebec City while 1,200 had settled in Montreal. Nevertheless, their presence was visible. Most ran laundries or restaurants.

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Laundry Lines

Where Latinos Speak Korean

Se habla español in LA’s Koreatown. Photo by Hunhee.

Multiculturalism is usually framed in terms of the relationship between immigrants and a “host society.” But what about the relationship between immigrants themselves? In Los Angeles’ sprawling Koreatown, a growing population of Latino immigrants is leading to a cultural and linguistic exchange that is unprecedented in recent American history.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal describes the trend: “At the Galleria, a large Korean supermarket here, store manager Yoonah Yoon greets Hispanic cashiers and bag boys each morning with a hearty ‘buenos dias’—’good morning’ in Spanish. The Latino workers, who make up more than half the store’s 162 employees, answer him with the equivalent greeting in Korean: ‘Ahn-nyung-hah-seh-yo.’”

Korean immigrants began settling along Wilshire Boulevard in the 1960s, gradually establishing a vast Korean neighbourhood that eventually became the epicentre of the world’s largest Korean community outside of Asia. Eventually, most of the neighbourhood’s Korean residents decamped for other neighbourhoods and suburbs around Los Angeles, motivated in no small part by the 1992 riots that targeted Korean-owned businesses above all. Over the course of the 1990s, Koreatown became home to a new wave of immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Despite the area’s changing demographics, Koreatown remained the most important hub of commerce and culture for the Los Angeles Korean community. In fact, in recent years, Korean investment in the neighbourhood has increased, including the construction in 2001 of a $40-million Korean spa and a new Korean shopping mall.

That’s where things get interesting. Many of these Korean businesses draw their employees (and, in some cases, customers) from the surrounding area’s largely Latino population. The relationship is such that many Koreans business owners are learning Spanish—and many Latino workers are learning Korean.

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Street Market Quebeciana

Some of the fine Quebeciana for sale at the Grand Marché aux Puces du Quartier Montcalm

Dates

Dates on Montreal buildings from Villeray to Mile End, except for “1953″ which is on a building on Mayor Street in the fur district.

No Ching-Chong Here

“Yeah, but where are you really from?” It’s a question familiar to many Chinese-Canadians who grew up feeling torn between different cultures, identities and places. Tomorrow, seven young Montrealers of Chinese descent will share a roundtable discussion on what it means to be Chinese in a multicultural Canada: General Tao, Kung Fu, Ching-chong: Chinese Identity in a Multicultural Canada.

I met up with three of them last week at Magic Idea, a popular Chinatown café. Shuang Liu is a 19-year-old college student who is one of ten students allowed to skip her undergraduate studies and enroll straight into dentistry at McGill University in the fall. Sandra Lee is 26 and an environmental activist. Cedric Sam, also 26, is a web developer who runs Smurfmatic and the upstart subway-oriented restaurant review site Métro Boulot Resto (to which he has graciously allowed me to contribute). As we made introductions, a Jay Chou song came on and the café staff cranked up the stereo. We almost had to shout.

I started with the obvious question: why pick a title that plays so heavily on stereotypes? “The media plays such a huge role in how others see us,” Shuang answered. “When you think about Chinese food, you think about General Tao. When you think about a Chinese guy, you think he must do kung fu and talk like ‘Ching-chong ching-chong.’ The influence is huge and how I perceive myself is not really separate from that.”

Like many young Chinese-Canadians, Shuang has struggled to find her place in Canadian society. Born in Beijing, she immigrated with her family to ethnically homogenous Sherbrooke when she was two years old. (They later relocated to Quebec City, which isn’t any more diverse.) After a few years of being the only Asian kid on the playground, Shuang adopted a non-Chinese name, Melissa, to better blend in. It wasn’t until after her family had finally moved to more cosmopolitan Montreal that she decided to change it back. “It’s a name I’m really proud of. My parents happened to have the same [family] name and ‘Shuang’ sort of means ‘bringing together.’ It’s really beautiful,” she said.

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