Blue/Green

Fire hydrant on Viger Street

Perth, Ontario: A Case in Heritage Planning

Perth is a town of approximately 6,000 permanent residents situated about an hour’s drive southwest of Ottawa on the Tay River, a tributary of the Rideau Canal and Waterway. Several times voted the “Prettiest town in Ontario”, its summer daytime population booms as cottagers and tourists from throughout the eastern part of the province flock to the town to enjoy a stroll along the Tay River, to browse its unique shops, or to have a bite to eat in one of its dozens of restaurants, pubs, and cafés. Some must come to Perth just to escape the flashy, oversized, and overadvertised world of their everyday; to be surrounded by Perth’s wealth of well-preserved heritage structures, many of which date to soon after the town’s inception.

Perth, named for its sister city in Scotland from where many of its initial settlers arrived, was founded in 1816 as one of three military settlements in the region established after the War of 1812. Its mathematical square-grid layout with a central parade route (now Gore Street) reflects the influence that British military planners had on the town’s development (similar layouts can be found throughout Canada with varying degrees of success — Halifax, Nova Scotia and Kingston, Ontario were both established on military rectilinear grids).

In the 1820s, the town became the centre for administrative, judicial, and social activities in the Bathurst district, and this attracted a number of settlers to the area. Perth still has a a number of well-preserved Georgian buildings from its early settlement period, including several magnificent residences, not least of which being McMartin House, built in 1830 in the American Federalist style by a wealthy expatriate.

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Metro People, Metro Stations

Cartier

Urban Diversions

Music videos and urban issues are not a likely combination. Most videos are daft things intended merely to promote a pop single of dubious musical value. Some are works of art in their own right. Rare, however, is the videoclip — as they are called in Quebec — that has a unique or interesting perspective on public or urban space.

One of these is the video for indie songstress Arianne Moffatt’s song Montréal. The video takes a fairly literal approach to the song’s content — it’s about returning to Montreal from Paris — but what makes it fascinating is the way it plays with the relationship between maps, signs and public transportation. One of the best sequences is when the headlights of an RER train morph into stops on a map of an RER line; the camera follows the line, pulling back to reveal the train’s interior. Also memorable are the scenes from Charles-de-Gaulle airport, the landing in Montreal and the closing shots taken along the Ville-Marie Expressway heading into Montreal, the concrete overpasses of the doomed Turcot Interchange looming overhead.

Another video I like comes courtesy of Lily Allen. It’s an alternate MV for her hit LDN. Although the mise-en-scène is completely straightforward — it’s just Allen riding around London on her bike — it is more effective than the more heavy-handed original. The cheery, colourful visuals are the perfect accompaniment to Allen’s sarcasm… and who doesn’t like looking at some street-level footage of London?

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My Dep

My depanneur is shy, hiding under a staircase on the long block of Park Avenue between Bernard and Van Horne, about five seconds from my front door. A large Coke sign (joined more recently by a few sandwich boards) advertises its existence. Inside, all of the dep staples — lotto machine, cigarettes, chocolate bars, soda, packaged food and beer — are crammed into a tiny space not even half the size of my four-room apartment.

When my girlfriend and I moved into our apartment three years ago, the dep was owned by an odd, talkative man from Guangdong province in China. Small, bald and skinny, he spent his days watching Radio-Canada on a small TV — not, I suspect, out of enthusiasm for Canada’s public broadcaster, but simply because that was the only channel his television’s rabbit-ear antennae received.

One evening, while buying a can of coke, my girlfriend chatted with him for a bit in Cantonese. Rather abruptly, he lectured her: what was nice Chinese girl doing in such a crummy neighbourhood? Why not move downtown?

She didn’t go back to the dep very often after that. It was with a tinge of relief, then, that we noticed one winter day two and a half years ago that the bald man had sold the depanneur. In his place was a fresh-faced couple from northern China. Where, exactly? I asked one evening. “Near Beijing,” said the new owner, shyly. His wife beamed and rubbed her pregnant belly. Their baby was born that summer. They named her Zoey.

The depanneur’s new owner is as sincere and shy as the old one was smarmy and condescending. Over the past couple of years, he has earnestly rearranged the store and installed new fridges. A selection of Hollywood movies is available to rent.

It wasn’t long before he discarded the old television set, too, replacing it with a new one that featured a built-in DVD player. Now, when I step in every so often to buy a case of beer, I find him sitting behind the counter, watching historical epics or episodes of 24 subtitled in Chinese.

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Beaches Are For Cities!

Barceloneta, Barcelona, Spain

Malecon, Havana, Cuba

hTo, Toronto, Canada

Shanghai Talk

A Bit of Brazil on the Edge of Mount Royal

Jean-Michel Labrosse looks like the kind of guy you’d expect to meet at the tam-tams. As he crosses Park Ave. with a big drum in one hand and a saxophone case in the other, you can’t miss his long, grey beard, with two braids dangling from its tip. Maybe that’s why virtually every journalist who writes about the weekly tam-tams is drawn to him. “I’ve had reporters from the United States, from China,” he said, smiling.

The tam-tam draws him because of the freedom it represents; it’s the one place in the city you can just show up with an instrument and play along.

Labrosse has come for twelve years. He plays the sax and totes around a big plastic drum he made six years ago out of a chemical bin his neighbour sold him for five bucks. All in all, he’s been playing sax for thirty years.

“It’s a Sunday community, like a big family,” he said. “When I was young, we’d go to mass — I was raised a Catholic — and now, this is my mass. It’s a way to meet people and celebrate.”

It has been twenty-five years since the first modern drum beats echoed out over the city from the Sir George-Etienne Cartier monument at the foot of the east side of Mount Royal. In 1978, a group of percussionists chose the site for their Sunday drumming workshops. Inadvertently, they founded a Montreal institution.

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Street Food Freedom!

While Montreal obstinately refuses to allow any sort of food vending on its streets — ostensibly for health and cleanliness reasons — Toronto has convinced the Ontario government to liberalize its street food rules so that vendors may sell more than just hot dogs. Soon, in addition to the several hundred sausage stands and chip trucks that dot the city’s landscape, Torontonians will be able to buy samosas, brochettes, crêpes, Taiwanese fish balls — and pretty much anything else you can imagine — on the street.

Considering the extent of Toronto’s cultural diversity — half of its population is foreign-born — you can pretty much bet that this move will introduce the city to a vast array of street vending traditions from around the world. Immigrant entrepreneurs will finally have a way to build a low-overhead business selling the food they know best; Toronto’s pedestrians, meanwhile, will have access to an international food fair on every block.

In fact, last Friday, a street food festival was held in front of Toronto’s City Hall to celebrate the new rules. According to the Toronto Star, one of the highlights was murtabak, an Indian Muslim wrap that is a popular street snack in Singapore and Malaysia.

Down the 401 in Montreal, however, in a city supposedly known for its laissez-faire attitude, cosmopolitanism and joie de vivre, politicians and bureaucrats claim that allowing street vendors to sell food would put the city’s hundreds of cheap restaurants out of business. Yet Toronto has no shortage of hole-in-the-wall falafel joints, take-out jerk chicken restaurants and inexpensive Korean cafés. Montreal certainly wasn’t hard-pressed for cheap eats back when street food was allowed in the 1950s and 60s.

Like most Montrealers, I’m a fan of the occasional shish taouk from Basha or soggy steamé from La Belle Province. But wouldn’t it taste so much better if you could buy it on the street?

Going to Work

This series of photos was taken by Alain-Pierre Hovasse on the way from his home in Montreal’s West Island to his work as the photo director of La Presse. It has been years since I have had to endure an early-morning commute; these images bring back memories of waking up bleary-eyed before the winter sun has risen, pushing through the cold into a bus or train riding heavy with fatigue.

The Vanished Newsstands of Montreal

Kate McDonnell snapped this photo of a newsstand at Pine and St. Laurent in 1991. Back then, it was one of three remaining outdoor news kiosks in Montreal, along with one at University and Ste. Catherine and another at Place d’Armes. By 1996, they had all disappeared, the victims of declining business and a municipal government that was hostile to street vendors of all sorts.

The first crackdown on street vendors came with the election of Jean Drapeau as mayor in 1960. He reigned over the city for nearly two and a half decades, doing more to reshape its cityscape than any other mayor. While he deserves credit for some of Montreal’s boldest and remarkable achievements, especially Expo and the metro system, Drapeau was also a fussy and paternalistic man who tried to remake Montreal in his own clean-cut, conservative image. When it came to sidewalks, this meant getting rid of anything that might be perceived as unsightly or old-fashioned: newspaper boxes, food vendors, café tables and, of course, newsstands.

It took a good twenty years for most of the newsstands to vanish. In the 1960s, reported the Gazette, “the city’s streets were dotted with dozens of newsstands, many of them occupied by newsies who had been in the business for decades.” In a city with high volumes of pedestrian traffic and five daily newspapers—two in English and three in French—newsstands were an essential part of the local media.

Nevertheless, in the early 1970s, Drapeau passed a law that required newsstands to be demolished immediately after being vacated by their tenants. Needless to say, as their owners left or retired, they disappeared rather quickly. Since the city owned most of the kiosks, Drapeau justified his actions by claiming that there was no money left to maintain them. “They were ugly, rusted structures in condemnable condition,” he told the Gazette in 1996.

Of course, the was little more than excuse. There were plenty of ways to make sure that the newsstands were kept in good condition, but Drapeau just wanted them gone — whatever the cost to the city’s streetlife.

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Rue Saint Félix

Backlit

Airport Space

Welcome to the airport. Photo by Ivan Makarov

Long lines, delays, security hassles. Going to the airport brings to mind a number of things, but art, especially interactive art with a political conscience, is generally not one of them. That’s where Terminal Zero One comes in: A new art project at Pearson International Airport, it hopes to transform one of Toronto’s busiest — yet, because of security concerns, most restrictive— public spaces into a place for open dialogue.

Located on the public departures level of Terminal 1, the exhibition brings together five digital installations that explore the experience of contemporary air travel. Passage oublié is arguably the most ambitious one. It’s a politically charged take on extraordinary rendition, the CIA’s controversial practice of covertly transferring suspected terrorists from Iraq and Afghanistan to secret prisons where it is alleged they are likely to be tortured. Airports around the world are believed to have been used as transfer points for these prisoners.

Passage oublié allows passersby to learn more about extraordinary renditions by interacting with a world map displayed on a large video touch screen. Its real goal, however, is to turn the airport, Toronto’s gateway to the world, into a space for public dialogue. Through the Internet or text message, anyone can send a message to Passage oublié that will be displayed on its virtual map and “flown” — using real-time flight data supplied by the Greater Toronto Airport Authority — to one of the international airports used for rendition flights.

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