Not too long ago, I noticed that construction workers were doing some renovation work at the Laurentian Bank on the corner of Park and Laurier in Montreal’s Mile End. It wasn’t until I took a closer look that I realized that they were in fact removing the building’s marble cladding, revealing a much older Beaux-Arts façade underneath. It was a complete surprise because, even though I knew the building was old, I never thought to consider what might be lurking underneath its plain exterior.
Montreal is rife with turn-of-the-century buildings whose cornices have been removed, balconies scrapped, brick replaced, all in some misguided postwar effort to make them look more “modern.” Some of the transformations were more permanent than others, ranging from a complete removal of the original façade to the addition of a crude corrugated steel mask.
Still, it’s hard to judge the aesthetic decisions of past generations too harshly. After all, we’re doing pretty much the same thing with many Modernist and Brutalist buildings from the 1950s, 60s and 70s: “updating” them to look a bit more “current.” In some cases, I think there are definite improvements, like when the ITHQ on St. Denis St. was transformed from one of Montreal’s most monstrous buildings into one of its most alluring.
But there are some mistakes, too. 5 Place Ville-Marie, a 1968 highrise with a prefab concrete façade, was covered last year in a blue glass envelope. It looks okay now, but what will Montrealers be saying in 50 years?
In just the past few years, Montreal has made some pretty big steps forward in developing its bike infrastructure. The new bike lane on Maisonneuve might have caused a crack in the street that threatened to pull the whole of downtown into a giant sinkhole, but it’s otherwise pretty snazzy. The counterflow bike lanes and sharrows in the McGill Ghetto are pretty cool. The new bike racks being installed on parking meters around town are a vast improvement over the old ones.
What I really like the most, though, are the seasonal bicycle parking lots installed on commercial streets in the Ville-Marie and Plateau Mont-Royal boroughs. In busy areas, like on Ste. Catherine St. near UQAM, in front of the Plateau library on Mount Royal Avenue, or next to the Mile End YMCA on Park Avenue, a car parking spot is removed and replaced with space for two-wheeled vehicles. It’s reminiscent of the approach taken in European cities like Paris, where entire blocks of parking space are given over to bikes and mopeds.
Each one of these bicycle parking areas is a reminder that at least a dozen bikes can fit into the space occupied by a single car. That’s twelve people arriving on two wheels instead of one or two arriving on four.
There’s something serene about Willowdale Avenue, a broad residential street that runs from Édouard-Montpetit metro in the east to the Université de Montréal’s HEC in the west. It must be a combination of the thick foliage and unassuming architecture, apartment blocks on one side and Tudoresque houses on the other.
Although it is surrounded by Côte des Neiges, the oval streets signs along Willowdale remind you that it is, in fact, part of a little Outremont panhandle that juts west along Côte St. Catherine Road. It’s not the only remarkable thing about this street. While the apartment buildings on its north side are, at first glance, squat and dour, a closer look reveals them to be quietly playful, with art moderne curves and names like Modern Court and Canterbury.
Late last month, as I wandered down to the CBC building for a radio interview on Spacing Montreal, I passed by this gem of unreconstructed kitsch on St. Hubert Street.
There are so many things I love about it. There’s the signs, which are tacky in the most timeless of ways. There’s the motorcycle parked out front, harking back to the days when biker gangs, not street gangs, claimed ownership of Montreal. There’s the name — Quartier Français — which, combined with the abundance of fleurs-de-lys, makes me think that a bloke would not be welcomed at this place. Finally, there are the “Bienvenue aux dames” signs, a reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that women were excluded from most taverns in Quebec.
Of course, my love of Le Bar du Quartier Français is strictly ironic: I doubt I would really enjoy drinking a pint of Coors Light (the availability of which is advertised on a poster inside) here. But I can admire it from afar, can’t I?
(I first posted about Il fait beau dans l’métro last April. Today, an article was published with a more in-depth look at the advertisement.)
A troupe of exuberant dancers isn’t what most commuters expect when they descend into the métro. But there they were, in Il fait beau dans l’métro, an iconic 1976 television advertisement that was a triumph of public transit geekery, gaudy fashion and vintage Québécois kitsch.
The advertisement opens with the familiar sight of a métro car entering Atwater station. A troupe of lively dancers jumps out, singing, “Il fait beau dans l’métro, tout le monde est gai, tout le monde a le coeur au soleil.” The métro’s distinctive three-tone chime - created by air rushing out of the brakes when trains leave the station - is incorporated into the tune.
You would think that this ad would be long forgotten. In the last year, however, Il fait beau dans l’métro has won a new generation of fans online, part of a burgeoning trend of nostalgia for public transit imagery and pop culture kitsch from the 1960s and ’70s.
The ad has racked up more than 100,000 views on YouTube and it has been featured on most of Montreal’s most widely read blogs. On Facebook, a group devoted to the ad has attracted close to 600 members.
Andrew Martin and Michael Baillargeon, undergraduate students at McGill University, created the Facebook group this year.
“I am a rapid-transit nerd, with interests in advertising, musicals, and costumes, so naturally I became an instant fan of the clip,” said Martin.
“It was Michael who took the initiative to start the Facebook group. Part of the original intention was to get a group of people to go down and reenact the ad. Sadly, to my knowledge, this has yet to take place.”
Over at Spacing Montreal, we’ve launched what I like to call the Election Sign Project. As a probable federal election approaches, we’re taking a look at the election signs that occupy such a prominent part of our public space during election campaigns. We’re going to be looking at how people interact with them, what their design and content says about the candidates and they district they hope to represent, and also the double-standard that affords politicians the right to plaster the city with their posters while restricting the right of ordinary citizens to use the same medium to advertise their own events.
Today, I wrote a bit about the school board election that is currently underway in Montreal. Some of the signs for the English school board’s candidates intrigue me because they’re multilingual. One candidate’s signs urges people to “Vote - Votez - Votate” while another goes a step further, asking voters to “Vote Votez Votate ψήφος,” nodding at his district’s Italian and Greek populations.
Multilingual election signs were common in the past, but they’re rare nowadays, despite the fact that Montreal is more multilingual than ever. In Toronto and Vancouver, it’s not uncommon to find election signs in Chinese and other non-official languages, but in Montreal, language is such a fractious and emotional issue that most politicians would probably prefer to avoid any sort of fracas that might deprive them of votes.
Shelter is a weekly Montreal Gazette series that peeks into the lives of ordinary apartment-dwelling Montrealers.
Well, my first impression is that it’s small but very bright.
Marcus Benigno: It’s very airy, very bright. Bright makes things look bigger.
What appealed to you when you first saw this apartment?
Benigno: The most important part was the location. It’s really close to McGill but it’s not in the ghetto. It’s sort of in the Plateau, and Carré St. Louis is right there. We can hear the fountain at night. Oh, and it’s old. It used to be the maids’ chambers to the house that’s on the square. That’s why this apartment building only has four or five units and it’s connected to the house. So we’re actually living in two maid chambers. There are two doors (to the apartment.) I would prefer that it didn’t open to the kitchen but, you know, the kitchen is the hearth of the home.
That’s a nice table in the living room.
Benigno: That’s Kevin’s grandmother’s table.
Kevin Garneau: Great-grandmother.
So it’s a family heirloom?
Benigno: A lot of the furniture is his great-grandmother’s. But you know, this table shows you that I can’t really have space for a real living room. But I guess it works because the centre of the house is food.
Do you eat most of your meals at home?
Benigno: Oh yes, definitely. We cook a lot. A lot. Trust me. I’ve spent the whole day washing dishes.
The kitchen is small, but is it functional?
Benigno: We have the tiniest kitchen in Montreal! But we do with what we have.
You told me earlier that you both spent the summer away on trips, Marcus in the Middle East and Kevin in Africa. Did you collect anything?
Garneau: This is a box with all my stuff from Africa. I have all of these art objects and posters that I have yet to put on the wall. Otherwise, it’s Marcus that normally takes care of the decoration. The decor isn’t really ready. We put something on the wall, not because it’s beautiful, but because it touches us, because we have a connection with it. It’s a relation d’appartenance.
[I called LAX the next morning. After stopping at Watsons, she met me for the train ride towards the Island. We stood at one end of the car and talked. What follows is both translation and transcription. Arthur]
I got the name LAX while I lived in California. San Francisco, mostly. My aunt gave it to me almost as soon as I arrived at the airport. I said I wanted to see Hollywood. I said this in Canto. And she laughed at me, supposedly a warm laugh, but it’s safe to say I already knew better. She spoke in English to me, even, most often, when it was unnecessary. I never should have left whatever home was mine.
“This is the wrong airport, you should have gone to LAX!”
It was not what I had been expecting. America was not what I had been expecting. Whatever in extremis: the name grew wings and crossed the ocean. I had to choose a name when I began applying to work at bars. I do think of it as a form of protection. Beyond this, I’ll attach no significance to it, not important.
My mom announced the move by email. It was as if she’d forgotten I had already returned from California, and was only at school. She wasn’t sure how to talk to me anymore—American had made it harder. But, whatever, within a couple weeks it was done. There were the movers, dad’s growing neurosis, the bottles of 7-11 whiskey that lined his mantle to be disposed of. I hid in Mei’s and my room, door pulled shut, the street whirling up to me through the open window as I sat cross-legged on the bed. The air conditioner silenced, I tried to meditate, but instead I began inventorying everything I’d miss. In America, I’d gotten so sick of the overdose of space, the long, silent, carpet stifled halls from bedroom to bedroom. Lonely, homelessness. Here, I could reach out and nearly touch both dull walls.
St. John’s unique architectural vernacular is something that must be seen in person to be truly appreciated. No other large Canadian city has the degree or extent of revitalized heritage buildings that central St. John’s has, and the fact that the City of St. John’s fostered huge improvements to its built heritage beginning in a time when the province was at its economic nadir is a testament to the city’s innovative methods of heritage planning.
St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, home to just under 200,000 people, was one of the first Canadian cities to enact heritage planning legislation. In the 1970s, the city’s downtown core was in a highly deteriorated condition. Buildings were underused, clad in makeshift materials, and seen as a liability for people who wished to develop anew.
Despite the poor economics of the time, the city was not immune to large-scale commercial development: in the late 1960s, the twelve-storey Royal Trust Building took down a stand of traditional buildings on Water Street, and in the early 70s, the similarly-styled Atlantic Place cleared three blocks of St. John’s downtown building stock.
Following the changing values of the era — heritage issues were beginning to appear on the national radar, and Heritage Canada was founded in 1973 — the city issued a study into the creation of a heritage by-law. This by-law was approved in 1977, creating the first major heritage district in the nation and enabling the Heritage Advisory Committee, who still today act as intermediaries to council.
The city also lifted disincentives to homeowners who wished to renovate their older downtown properties and worked with new local heritage foundations to establish design guidelines that would restore the unique architectural character that the city accumulated in the years following the devastating fire of 1892.
Spacing Montreal contributor Jacob Larsen was the first to tell me, at our last meeting, about his strange experience of riding in a metro car with a dark blue interior and creepy music playing over the PA system. Then, earlier this evening, my friend Mary told me that she too was in dark blue metro car when a woman’s voice could be heard saying, in Mandarin, “I think the next station is Berri-UQAM. It’s such a nice day out! That woman over there is cute. Oh, that other woman looks sad. But it’s such a nice day out!”
The spooky metro car is an initiative by the artist Rose-Marie Goulet called Point de fuite. Goulet was interviewed last month on Radio-Canada’s morning show. The goal of the project, she said, was to reach out to “people who don’t necessarily have the opportunity to go to a place where they can see art, like a gallery or a museum. Why not have a work of art in our daily lives that can change attitudes, to provoke discussion amongst people in the metro?” In a nod to Montreal’s multilingualism, the audio clips in “Point de fuite” are in French, English, Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic.
“The ambient sound in the metro is very loud, up to 85 decibels, so we created sound ‘bubbles’ that interfere with our own aural space,” added Goulet. “The idea was to create another voyage, by sound and sight, beyond the trip that we take every day.”
I’d love to experience the installation myself, if only to see how passengers react. Unfortunately, many metro commuters are shoe-gazing zombies, so the effect of the art might be lost, at least at rush hour. “A lot of people on my train turned their heads wondering who was carrying speakers,” observes Fagstein. “The sound is surprisingly clear, and just a little bit louder than the station announcements. Reaction was sadly underwhelming. People coming home from work are amazingly uninterested in things going on around them.”
Point de fuite will ride the rails for another six months, eventually taking the blue and yellow lines as well as the orange. Pretty much the only way to experience it is to encounter it randomly. If you want to hunt it down, though (and I have no idea how that would be possible), you’ll find it in the centre car of the number 78-007 metro train.
By now you must know about my love for viewing cities from on high. That’s true even from three storeys up. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Boris took me up to the roof of his building on Park Avenue. This was what we saw.
Radio Canada International, a branch of the CBC that broadcasts around the world in several different languages, has launched an interesting competition. Digital Diversity, or Métissé serré as it’s known in French, invited young filmmakers to submit short films on the theme of immigration. From now until December 2nd, you will be able to vote on 60 videos that can be viewed online. Among this week’s finalists are five that, in some way or another, touch on the issue of cultural exchange in the city and the relationship between place, language and identity.
(Unfortunately, due to the competition’s form-over-function Flash interact, it’s impossible to link directly to each video. You can find them all here and check this week’s list of films.)
“Jahsun,” by Paul Aflalo and Laura Cohen, is a short but polished look at Jahsun, a Montreal drummer and the leader of Kalmunity, a musical collective that blends funk, hip hop, jazz, soul and spoken word. Kalmunity’s goal is to bring people together in a positive way — hence the name, which blends “calm” with “community.” (I’ve seen Kalmunity live and it does indeed bring together and interesting, almost unlikely, mix of people.) Part of Jahsun’s philosophy might come from his childhood experience in different parts of Montreal.
“Growing up in Ville Saint-Laurent, which is very multiethnic, going to a school that was like Asians, Indians, blacks, Québécois, Anglo-Saxons, just a nice mix, and moving to Châteauguay, where I did my high school, that was just a culture shock,” he says. “You’re one of two black males and maybe three black females in the whole school and that was it. It was a hard time. All of that is why being creative spoke to me. I’ve always loved music because but it really came to me in Châteauguay, because that’s when I was more on my own.”
In “Binding Borders,” Tiffany Hsiung weaves a story of four Torontonians — one from Vietnam, one from Mexico, one from the Philippines and one from Rwanda — and their lives before immigrating to Canada. What I like about this film is that it explores the backgrounds, at least briefly, of the strangers with whom we share the city everyday. How many times have you looked at someone on the street, or in the bus, and wondered who they are, where they are from, what life they have lived?
“The Ride,” by Onur Karaman, is another fictional film about the encounter between a Muslim taxi driver and two white passengers in Brossard, a suburb of Montreal. As he drives them to their destination, the three start talking: first about language — the driver understands French but doesn’t speak it, and the women won’t speak English — and then culture and religion: the women see a photo of the driver’s wife and take issue with the fact that she is veiled. Although the acting is a bit stilted, and the film is a bit didactic, it’s still nice to see this kind of intercultural exchange on film.
Unlike the other films I’ve selected, “Regard,” by Medhi Benboubakeur doesn’t have much dialogue. Although it focuses on the “quest for identity” of Maiwenn Méhrer, a young French violinist of Chinese and Breton descent, who has recently settled in Montreal, it doesn’t have any characters in the traditional sense. Rather, the whole of la métropole and its habitants become the stars of this homage to the city’s multiculturalism, set to an eloquent violin score.
Montreal Apartments