Signs on the Fringes of Little Italy
Kate McDonnell, who is the editor of the Montreal City Weblog and an occasional contributor here at Urbanphoto, has a keen eye for the city’s details. Some of the most recent images in her Flickr photostream depict a rusted heating vent in an apartment building lobby, patent medicine boxes at a Chinese herbalist on the Main, an outdoor café chair turned up against a table, shivering in the fall chill, and four mismatched doorbells outside a Mile End apartment building.
Given my latent obsession with signs, though, I thought I would highlight two particularly interesting ones from the fringes of Little Italy. The one you see above, on Jean Talon Street near St. Denis, is a neon bánh mì accompanied by a cup of coffee. How cool would it be if this became the standard sign for Vietnamese sandwich shops all across town? It would be like the animated shish taouk and creepy tooth I wrote about last week.
Next is a sign for a storefront autobody shop located on St. Laurent just above Van Horne and the CPR tracks. I pass by it all the time and wonder what it would be like to live in one of the apartments on top of it. For several years, it was called the Garage Viêt Nam, but it now appears to have changed name. If the recent addition of these vinyl signs are any indication, its new owners are ethnic Chinese.
Montreal Apartments
carrie says:
Ack! That would be the opposite of cool if a “standard” signage for vietnamese sandwich shops developed.
The creepy tooth signs are just that: creepy. Makes me think of some sort of dental conspiracy. Standardized signs show a lack of independent thinking - I would hate for my favourite Vietnamese sandwich shop to assimilate.
Also, regarding the garage sign: what is the difference between “chinese” and “ethnic chinese”?
October 31st, 2007 at 9:49 am
Kate McDonnell says:
I passed the Apollo garage again this weekend and noticed that the Garage Viêt-Nam sign still adjoins this one, but it’s not clear whether they’re two separate establishments.
carrie, there are communities of people of Chinese ancestry who grow up speaking and writing Chinese in other Asian countries, for example Vietnam and Malaysia. In other words, they’re ethnically Chinese, although their citizenship may be something else.
November 5th, 2007 at 12:05 am
carrie says:
Kate, thank you for the semi-clarification.
Unfortunately, I still don’t understand how a sign can be interpreted as having ethnic Chinese owners or “regular” Chinese owners.
It is this sentence that confuses me: “If the recent addition of these vinyl signs are any indication, its new owners are ethnic Chinese.” However, I do not speak Mandarin or Cantonese, so perhaps there is something in the character writing that would imply the owners are not from China?
November 5th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
No, there’s nothing about the sign that would indicate that its owners are “ethnic Chinese” or Chinese from China/Hong Kong/Taiwan. (Although, if it was written in simplified rather than traditional Chinese, that would be a good indication that its owners are from mainland China. But I digress.)
I wrote “ethnic Chinese” mostly because I was thinking that the garage’s owners were Chinese from Vietnam, but it was probably an unnecessary addition on my part.
November 5th, 2007 at 3:32 pm