Sunset at English Bay

Every clear summer evening, as the sun starts to slide below the horizon, masking the mountains near Howe Sound in hazy layers of blue and purple, thousands of people flock to English Bay. The sunset, spectacular as it may be, is just a backdrop to their conversations, their laughter, their whispers and kisses.

Each evening, then, as a sunny day fades into a brisk Pacific night, the beach at English Bay, flanked by restaurants and apartment towers, becomes the greatest kind of urban living room. Here, in a way that seems befitting of the West Coast, the granite paving stones of a piazza are exchanged for sand, well-worn grass and an asphalt promenade.

Three Times East Hastings

“East Hastings” is usually associated with the Downtown Eastside’s funerary procession of barricaded storefronts, dive hotels and desperate people. But as the street heads east, through an industrial area, past a housing project, over the train tracks, and still further east up the hill beyond Commercial Drive, it gains a certain middle-class respectability, as Italian markets sidle up next to cafes and Chinese bakeries. Then, almost as soon as it started, the little shopping district huddled near Nanaimo Street begins to wear thin, its shops broken by strip plazas and drive-through restaurants.

Nanaimo’s Shack Island

The last thing you’d expect to see in Nanaimo, while driving down Hammond Bay Road in the city’s northern sprawl, is an island full of shacks. Yet there it is, just past the waterfront mansions, next to a bucolic park named Pipers Lagoon. The island, which is accessible at low tide, appears to contain at least a dozen brightly-coloured wooden shacks, so close to the water it is hard to imagine how they are not submerged when the tide comes rushing in.

Although many of the shacks are shuttered, none seem to be quite abandoned; indeed, this afternoon, when I went to see the island, a man stood outside, hauling a small boat to shore. A Canadian flag hung from a nearby porch. The last time I visited, almost ten years ago, I seem to remember entire families hanging around the shacks, kids running around and playing near the choppy water. It was entirely incongruous with the predictable cityscape of suburban Nanaimo.

I have no idea about the current legal situation of these shacks, but according to one Nanaimo website, the island was settled by fishermen squatters in the 1930s. Their shacks were passed down through the generations to the current inhabitants, most of whom use them only seasonally. I don’t imagine there is any electricity, plumbing or running water in these places, so living on the island full-time would probably appeal only to bearded eccentrics, artists and Unibomber types.

Shantytowns and squatter settlements were common in pre-war Canada — my grandmother used to tell me about the squatters who lived on the islands in Calgary’s Bow River — but today they crop up only occasionally before they are cleared and their inhabitants rehoused. It’s nice to think that at least one example of those Depression-era squats has survived more or less intact to this day.

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Fine Art Street Art

This summer the National Gallery in London has brought the fine art to the public, by lining the streets of West End with reproductions of some of its paintings. The campaign is clearly a comment on street art culture — and of course a way to draw people to the gallery. It also raises interesting questions about the importance of authenticity and context.

The Taste of a Japa Dog

In Vancouver, like in most Canadian cities, street food vendors are limited to hawking pre-cooked meat: hot dogs, in other words. But, even within the restrictive confines of the law, innovation is possible, especially in a global city like Vancouver. You can taste as much by wandering over to the corner of Smithe and Burrard. There, across the street from a supermarket and a megaplex cinema, amidst the daytime downtown bustle, is an ordinary-looking hot dog stand. Its hot dogs, however, are anything but ordinary: they are “Japa Dogs,” a new type of street meat invented by Noriki Tamura, an ad salesman who left Tokyo for Vancouver two years ago.

I read about Japa Dog in Maclean’s a week before I left for Vancouver. “Behind the spitting grill, Noriki Tamura keeps up with the crowd, dressing still-sizzling turkey dogs with pale brown miso mayonnaise, sesame sauce and a layer of crispy green radish sprouts,” writes Nancy Macdonald. “His $5 Oroshi packs a motley punch. The bratwurst frank is loaded with an inch-thick layer of finely shaved daikon radish and green onions, topped with wasabi and soy sauce. As the grilled German sausage burns a trail down the gullet, the wasabi delivers its unmistakable kick to the nose. Hands down, Japa Dog marks the single biggest innovation to hit city street meat since Vancouver vendors started hawking the Yves Famous Veggie Dog a decade ago.”

I had to check it out so, last Wednesday, on the kind of bright, impossibly fresh day that only the Pacific Northwest is able to produce, I wandered up to Burrard Street for lunch and bought a Terimayo, a beef hotdog topped with teriyaki sauce, Japanese mayonnaise and strips of dried seaweed. My food vocabulary is fairly limited, so I’ll describe it like this: it tasted Japanese. It was probably the combination of the seaweed and mayo, the former naturally savoury and the latter full of MSG, which combined to create a brothy, full-mouthed umami flavour. The $4.25 price tag was a bit steep, but not terribly overpriced when you consider that the going rate for the most basic Vancouver street meat is $3.50.

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Differences of Scale

In Paris, you’d need the better part of a morning to walk from the narrow, stone-laden streets of the Marais to the modern glass-and-concrete monumentality of La Défense. In Montreal, it takes less than ten minutes to wander from Old Montreal to René Lévesque Boulevard. Here, as in nearly all North American cities, the intimacy of the human-scaled city is but a fleeting illusion.

Clean and Green

The first time I went to Singapore — in April, 2000 — the city state was in the middle of a “Clean and Green: That’s the Way We Like It” campaign. That was nothing unusual, I discovered later, but as I wandered around this densely populated island nation I was impressed by just how green and how clean it was.

I’d gone there to look at the Singapore Botanical Garden for my book Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens, and I didn’t know what to expect. Shortly before somebody had been flogged for marijuana possession and there was much rumbling about what a police state the place was. So I was surprised when I was there for several days before I saw anyone in uniform besides a cop directing traffic. And I was amazed at what a green place this city of high-rises was. When I decided to do a book exploring the ways that people interact with nature in urban settings — Green City People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2006) — Singapore was at the top of my list of cities to check out. I visited twice in 2005, and I came away even more impressed.

Singapore is an island about 250 kilometers north of the equator, and 13 hours ahead in time of the east coast of North America. It’s hot all year round, and as soon as you go outside you’ll meet the smells and the sights of a tropical paradise. Orchid and bromeliads grow on big trees shading thoroughfares, bougainvillea cascades from pedestrian walkways over roadways, well-tended gardens surround tall buildings where more almost all of the city’s 4.5 million people live.

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Looking Down on Us

The view from behind the Silo No. 5. Photo by Karl Harrison

On a late July evening, with the last fingers of dusk lingering in the sky, Karl Harrison and Roma Lake were looking for a roof to climb. They headed south to the Lachine Canal, toward the old Silo No. 5.

“We’re going up really soon. I know the way in,” said Harrison, pointing toward the silo.

But not tonight. Instead, they veered west to tackle another abandoned building in Point St. Charles.

Harrison, a photographer who works in IT, and Lake, an event planner, have been sneaking onto rooftops for several years, taking in the view from dozens of buildings around Old Montreal and the Lachine Canal.

“Once you get up there, it’s as if you’ve climbed a mountain,” Harrison said. “There’s this aspect of getting these beautiful views that nobody else is seeing.

To him, the city’s fire escapes and abandoned buildings are gateways to an extra dimension of urban space. They offer a chance to escape the bustle of city streets, but also to see and understand how the different elements of Montreal’s urban landscape fit together, like pieces of a vast toy metropolis.

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When is a Lake Not a Lake?

Anjou sur le Lac

Montrealers are accustomed to thinking of their city as an island, with a big river out front and a small river out back, as simple as that. But on old maps you will find other watercourses marked on the island, long since drained or driven underground to make human settlement more convenient.

Here’s one case in which a small urban watercourse has been revived as a landscaping feature — and not the only one in the metropolitan area.

One winter night as I was accompanying a friend on an aimless drive, we passed a sign saying Anjou sur le Lac. I blinked. “That makes no sense — Anjou’s not even on the back river, much less a lake.” Curious, we drove around and could see a bit of a frozen snow-covered pond, but that was the extent of our investigations. I assumed that sur le lac was merely a marketing ploy meant to evoke the wealth of Laval sur le Lac or the ease of summer resort towns.

I was mistaken, at least partly. On the map there’s definitely a sort of tiny lake in this part of Ville d’Anjou. The satellite view of the area shows that it appears to wind its way north as a watercourse through the grounds of CEGEP Marie-Victorin and the Parc Ruisseau de Montigny (possibly its original name) but then vanishes, probably underground, before reaching the Rivière des Prairies.

Anjou sur le Lac is a recent development with rows of new single-family houses — their still raw brick architecture focused around the all-important garage — some sixplex condo buildings, and two anonymous eight-storey buildings that could be apartments, homes for the elderly (as suggested by one web search) or even offices. All are clustered around something resembling a lake.

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Is Barrhaven a Model for the Future?

Entrance to new subdivision in Barrhaven, Ottawa

I have written previously on the state of suburban expansion in Calgary, a topic I am very familiar with. Despite having lived in Ottawa for six years, however, I cannot say the same for this city. While a lack of interest on my part played a part, this is also due to Ottawa’s built form. Unlike other Canadian cities, Ottawa’s new suburbs are separated from the central city by a large greenbelt. To be specific, there are three primary built-up areas outside of the greenbelt: Kanata to the West, Orleans to the East and Barrhaven to the South. All of these areas are separated from one another, and collectively they receive much of the cities new growth.

Formally adopted in 2003, Ottawa’s “20/20” plan aims to accommodate the growth of the city in a more sustainable manner. A major recommendation of the plan is increased intensification of the areas within the greenbelt, but it conceded that much of Ottawa’s new growth will be at the urban fringe. For these urban fringe areas design features such as higher densities, pedestrian oriented designs, accessible public transit and modified grid street layouts are recommended. In short, new developments are intended to adhere at least loosely to the tenets of new urbanism. In order to see if such depatures from traditional suburban development have in fact taken place, I recently decided to cycle the 15 km to Barrhaven from my apartment.

Neighbourhood focal point with traffic circle and condominiums

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Moving Through Shanghai

Runner south of Suzhou Creek

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Grey Day Near Van Horne

Sunset in Mile End, near the Van Horne Viaduct

Feltly Hats

Feltly Hats in Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY

Street Sports

Sports in the Habitations Jeanne-Mance, a public housing complex