Earlier this year on Spacing Montreal, Thomas-Bernard Kenniff wrote about “ghost buildings,” the traces of long-gone buildings visible on the surface of blank walls. I wasn’t a surprised when I spotted a few ghost buildings while wandering around downtown Boston on Saturday. Unlike ghost ads, whose raisons d’être are usually pretty obvious, ghost buildings are surrounded by mystery. What did they look like? When were they demolished? Why?
Faubourg des Récollets
Griffintown
Cité du multimedia de Montréal
Darling Brothers Foundry
Date: 1889, recycled in 2002
Address: 735, rue Ottawa
Architects: J.R. Gardiner, recycled by Atelier In Situ
Materials: brick, concrete, glass and rust
This building is the Quartier Éphémère’s (www.quartierephemere.org) multidisciplinary arts/culture space and the Cluny Art Bar.
Once woodland to the west of Old Montréal at the base of the hill leading to Montréal’s modern city centre, the Faubourg des Récollets has evolved several times over its history. The western gate of Old Montréal was in fact the Porte des Récollets located at Notre-Dame and McGill streets. Griffintown, was located south of des Récollets between rue William and the canal. The lower lying Griffintown often flooded before the construction of the Canal Lachine (1821-1825). During Montréal’s industrial revolution in the second half of the 19th century, the mainly Irish residents of Griffintown moved out of the sector as it was taken over by manufacturing and warehouses in proximity to the new Canal.
Up until the 1930’s Depression, the Faubouge des Récollets – Griffintown was the site of many manufacturers, foundries, warehouses, wholesalers, retailers and a few residents. From the Depression on, the area began its decline. In 1933, CN constructed the elevated railway link into the new Central Station (1938-1943). This ‘split’ the Faubourg des Récollets (east) from Griffintown (west). After the St-Lawrence seaway opened in 1950, the Canal Lachine slowly declined to finally close in 1968. The canal reopened for recreational use in 2002. Another contributor to ongoing decline of the area was the addition of the Autoroute Bonaventure in 1965 and later the Autoroute Ville-Marie to the north.
Since the mid-nineties, Montréal’s southern gate has experienced a renaissance starting with the dot-com boom resulting in the conversion of many of the old industrial spaces into lofts, studios and offices for high-tech companies. The Ville de Montréal created the Cité du multimédia (www.citemultimedia.com) in 1998 to encourage the regeneration of the neighbourhood where new buildings were also added to attract more information technology and multimedia firms.
Admit it: at least once, while walking past a big construction site, you’ve stopped to gaze down at the workers below, scurrying like safety-vested ants as they pour concrete and install girders. You probably weren’t alone. Chances are, others joined you, equally transfixed.
Julie Favreau and Caroline Dubois hope to capture that kind of attention with their new artistic intervention, Plan d’aménagement, which runs every day this month until Monday, Nov. 26. Favreau and Dubois have occupied a vacant storefront on Beaubien, where they, with the help of a small cast of dancers and artists and a whole pile of junk, will create a performance of perpetual construction and destruction.
The goal, explains Favreau, is to explore the public’s curiosity with “space in the making.” Passers-by watch their activities through the store’s large picture window or enter to ask questions and talk with the artists.
“Some people just watch outside, others have come in,” she says. “Earlier, there was a man who wanted us to buy the building and stay here permanently. He said, ‘You can’t go, there’s nothing like this in the neighbourhood, it’s so nice to see you here.’”
(Indeed, even during an afternoon interview last week, another man stopped in to ask what was going on. “I’m in the salon across the street and I’m so curious to know what you’re doing,” he asked, before Dubois and Favreau explained their “projet d’occupation.”)
“There’s a sort of desire attached to the location,” says Dubois. “It’s been vacant for two years, so you take for granted that there’s a fascination attached to this space. We have to go beyond that and have people come back and see the shows we’re going to put on in the evenings.”
Each week of the performance is guided by a different theme—last week was “comfort,” this week “risk” and next week “filth”—culminating in a show that ties together all of the weeks’ experiences.
“It’s a bit as if we’re taking the context of people going home from work and coming in here to see this, and creating something else, a piece of art,” says Dubois.
More than that, though, what the duo hopes to achieve is to engage people not only in the finished product of their art—the performances—but in the process as well.
“When we’re really into what we’re doing, people stand on the sides like they’re watching a construction site,” says Dubois. “You know, sometimes you’re watching the big machines and it’s like…”
“You understand that it’s not finished,” interrupts Favreau. “We’re building something but we get the sense that it’s not done. It’s not a show.”
“So we’re interested in why people stop to watch those big construction sites. I know I do it a lot. We thought about why, in art, we don’t have access to the whole process of research, only the finished idea, project and object. We don’t see the whole period of reflection, of doubt, of construction. We wanted to make sure that these steps of creation were accessible, so that people see not just the end but everything that came before.”
I’ve always resented the fact that Calgary’s streets are numbered. Not just numbered, but numbered according to quadrant, so that streets are known as 4th Street SW or 36th Avenue NE, and 4th Street and 4th Avenue intersect not just once, but four times, in each corner of the city. What makes this even worse is that nearly all streets in Calgary are numbered. Except in recent subdivisons, or in rare cases, there are no names to break up the monotony. It lends the city a certain soulless, anonymous air.
That wasn’t always the case. When Calgary was just a young city, a town really, all of its streets were named. Look at an old map and the history of Calgary is revealed in its street names. In the downtown area, straddling the Canadian Pacific Railroad tracks, many streets were named after CPR executives: Stephen Avenue, for the company’s first president; Van Horne Avenue, after the man who oversaw construction of the transcontinental railway; McIntyre Avenue and Angus Avenue, after two of the CPR’s investors. In Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Avenue, which ran along the north and south side of the railroad tracks, there was a certain sweet harmony.
Even more interesting was Rouleauville, an old French-Canadian village located just south of Calgary, around St. Mary’s Cathedral, in what is now known as the Mission. Here, the street names honoured prominent Franco-Albertan religious leaders like Lacombe, Doucet and Grandin. Rouleau Street enshrined the name of the two brothers who promoted the idea of a French village near Calgary and secured a land grant from the federal government. Other streets testified to Rouleauville’s Catholic faith, like Notre Dame Road, St. Jean Baptiste Street and St. Joseph Street.
Calgary lost its street names in 1904, when it adopted a numbering system that saw the city divided into quadrants, with Centre Street — formerly McTavish Street — dividing east from west. Rouleauville, a separate municipal entity, retained its street names until 1907, when it was annexed to Calgary. Not only did its French-speaking character eventually erode, it lost the only overt reminder of that French-Canadian heritage: its street names.
I can’t help but wonder Calgary’s the loss of its street names at such a formative time in its history planted the seed of an ahistorical city. For years, Calgary’s relationship with its own history has been one of complete ignorance. Its politicians and developers have long been eager to do away with what few old buildings it has and it could be said, at least until recently, that Calgary has lacked a sense of self. Much of its identity revolves around traditions invented for the purpose of tourism and economic investment, like the white cowboy hats that have come to symbolize the city.
This summer, while wandering through one of the sidestreets between Prince Arthur and Sherbrooke, I veered off into a laneway. Expecting to find some interesting graffiti, a picturesque clothesline or maybe some discarded furniture, I was surprised to come across an entire triplex at the intersection of two alleyways. It appeared to be abandoned — windows boarded up, balconies rotting — despite its prime location.
Montreal has a long tradition of laneway housing. In many of its neighbourhoods, especially those built before the 1920s, you’ll find old houses, duplexes and even the occasional triplex in back alleys. I don’t know how they ended up there — property owners trying to squeeze more money out of their land, probably — but they add to the laneway’s sense of being a sort of secret, parallel city, where things are quieter, more intimate and a bit more mysterious. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a laneway.
So why we building any new laneway houses? In Toronto, many architects and urban designers have embraced laneway housing as a form of incremental densification, a way to add more people to existing neighbourhoods without seriously disrupting their atmosphere or urban form. Although the city has so far refused to legalize new laneway housing, it does make case-by-case exceptions to its zoning laws, which has opened the way for some intriguing bits of domestic architecture.
Laneway houses don’t have to be newly-built; they can capitalize on existing garages and sheds. Wander through the laneways of Montreal and you’ll see an endless variety of them, many with second floors. It would be so easy to convert them into tiny but innovatively-designed apartments and houses, infusing our neighbourhoods with a cheap and flexible form of housing. But nobody’s talking about it. Unlike Toronto, Montrealers haven’t had a public discussion about laneway housing. Why not?
You can’t find an urban tradition more firmly rooted in Asia’s cities than the night market. Since emerging in Tang dynasty China, about 1,200 years ago, they have become a quintessential part of the urban experience in Taiwan, Hong Kong and throughout Southeast Asia. In Taiwan, night markets are so firmly rooted they have spawned an entire cuisine of street foods known as xiao chi, or “small eats.”
Now, just as Chinese immigrants brought the night market tradition to other parts of Asia, they have taken it across the Pacific. The largest night market in North American can be found in Richmond, a flat, sprawling suburb of Vancouver about a twenty minute drive south of downtown. Since it first emerged in a shopping mall parking lot in 2000, the Richmond Night Market has grown into a 400-stall behemoth that draws up to 35,000 people per night. It is held every weekend between May and October, from 7pm to midnight. Although most of the people who visit the night market are Asian, including many Chinese — all of the announcements over the PA system are in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, and signs on nearly all stalls are in English and Chinese — it still manages to attract a fairly diverse crowd of Vancouverites, especially as it has gained attention in the English-language media.
Unlike its Asian counterparts, the Richmond Night Market does not take place in the confines of a street. Instead, it’s held in a vast open space, sandwiched between the Fraser River and an industrial park, accessible only by car. But the stalls are arranged in rows, creating the illusion of a crowded lane. Despite its distinctly suburban setting, it offers a kind of outdoor space of interaction that is normally foreign to the suburbs. This is especially true in the most crowded part of the market, around the food vendors. Amidst the odd scent of curried fish balls and miniature donuts, thousands of hungry people munch red bean pancakes, barbecued squid, noodle soup and tong shui.
Despite its popularity, though, the night market’s future is threatened. Earlier this year, its landlord decided not to renew its lease, perhaps seeing development opportunity in its waterfront location. Even with strong support from City Hall, the Richmond tourism bureau and the local chamber of commerce, the market has been unable to find a home for its upcoming 2008 season. It would need at least 15 acres to operate, but finding such a large chunk of open space in Richmond is a huge challenge.
Recognizing the market’s potential both as a tourist attraction and an incubator for small businesses, one Richmond city councillor proposed creating a permanent market space underneath the guideway of the Canada Line, an elevated railway that will link Richmond to Vancouver in 2009. “When I was in Beijing, I saw markets under the roadways and overpasses. They utilize any available space,” he told the Richmond News.
While the councillor’s proposal would do nothing to solve the night market’s immediate need for space, it is a brilliant long-term solution. Not only would it reduce the need for parking, it would create a hub of activity around the Canada Line, which is already attracting new high-density development. Wouldn’t it be fitting if the Richmond Night Market, so suburban until now, ultimately ended up resembling its more urban counterparts across the Pacific?
From the 1940s to the 1980s, vast areas of North American cities were demolished and replaced with freeways and large concrete skyscrapers. This process, which came to be known as Urban Renewal, did not hit Quebec City quite as hard as Montreal or other cities in Canada. Though the old city was left untouched, over 1,200 homes were demolished to widen boulevards and make way for skyscrapers in historic neighbourhoods immediately outside the city walls. In 1974 alone, four of the city’s ten tallest skyscrapers were inaugurated. One of these was topped with a revolving restaurant on the 31st floor.
The restaurant in question, L’Astral, tops the Loews le Concorde hotel. The Italianate home of Cyrille Duquet, little-known inventor of the double-ended telephone handset, once stood on the site of this hotel. Promotional literature of the time claimed Le Concorde provided the “sophistication of the vieux regime with a bold contemporary statement.” Though it’s difficult to see the link between a mass of brutalist concrete and the traditions of New France, there’s no doubt that the building was bold.
I went to this rotating restaurant for the first time a few weeks ago. The whole idea of lunching at L’Astral had always seemed a bit corny. A few work colleagues managed to talk me into it with promises of nice views. To be fair, it was better than other tourist traps on the same strip, and it got me mind thinking about revolving restaurants.
When it opened at the end of April, 2005, the Grande Bibliothèque defied expectations when it attracted tens of thousands of people who were eager to check out its airy architecture and multimedia, multilingual collection. The crowds never let up: even today, two and a half years later, a visit to the library reveals an always-crowded place enjoyed by a large cross-section of Montreal’s population. It is, quite clearly, Montreal’s most important public building of the past three decades.
There’s just one problem: shortly after it opened, big chunks of the green-glass cladding popped out and fell onto the street below. Temporary safety barriers were erected while the library, city, borough and province all squabbled over how best to deal with the situation. Now, finally, a permanent plan has emerged: decorative planters, fences and awnings will be built around the library to protect pedestrians should any more pieces of glass fall. The work will start next spring and finish by July.
Without any renderings, I can’t say what effect this will have on the library’s architecture. It will at least be improvement over the status quo. But what I’m curious about is whether or not this will finally enable the library to deal with its western flank facing Savoie Avenue, a small laneway in between Berri and St. Denis. When it was built, you see, the library was conceived as being open to all of its surroundings. This building has no back end: there are entrances on all four sides of the building.
Savoie was given a particularly special treatment. Along with a nice entrance bearing the inscription “Vous êtes ici,” the library faces this alley with a succession of shallow retail spaces. According to promotional material during the library’s construction, these spaces were originally intended to be leased to vendors to create a book market along Savoie. Last spring, the city renovated the alley, installing attractive concrete paving stones and new lampposts, possibly in anticipation of the market.
With the falling-glass problem, that plan was shelved, but now that an awning will be build along this side of the library, I don’t see any reason why it can’t be put into action. Let’s hope that, by next summer, the Grande Bibliothèque will finally be able to live up to its full potential.
On a crisp evening early last week, I joined about two dozen other people in a crowded studio on the fourth floor of McGill’s Macdonald-Harrington Building. We were there to see what ideas for reshaping the Pine/Park interchange four teams of McGill urban planning students, led by former Vancouve planning director Larry Beasley.
I won’t go into details, since I arrived halfway through the presentations, but, among the plans was a “recreational archipelago” that scattered various points of interest around the Pine/Park site. Another proposal focused quite intensely on the actual intersection of Pine and Park itself, surrounding it with various uses — a bus station on the northwest corner and a public market across the street, for instance — meant to encourage activity and create a bustling urban corner. Other students planned a linear promenade that extended up Park Avenue to Duluth St.
The most interesting plan involved a fine balance between built and open space. The small street running parallel to Pine between Hutchison and Park would be pedestrianized, creating a larger public square at Pine/Park’s southwest corner. Midrise housing would be built along Park from Pine to Duluth, with a laneway running alongside the Hôtel-Dieu’s stone wall. The green space where the volleyball courts currently stand would be preserved. The end result would be a well-defined, functional urban setting that would balance greenery with residential, community and commercial development.
Problem is, that kind of plan has virtually no chance of being realized. In fact, none of the student plans pay attention to the political realities of the Pine/Park intersection. The entire chunk of land north of Pine is already accounted for — it is in the process of being landscaped as I write this — which leaves only the two small, awkwardly-shaped parcels of land south of the avenue to work with. Community groups in Milton Park and the McGill Ghetto, the neighbourhood just south of the intersection, have already made it clear that they will only accept a public use for the land, with a preference for green space.
Raphaël Fischler, the urban planning professor who organized the charrette, noted at one point in the evening that there was a tension between the local and the city-wide vision of Pine and Park. That’s true, and it risks jeopardizing the success of the new intersection. The clear challenge here is to build a site of activity and engagement in what is now an extremely passive space. By ignoring the politics of the situation, the McGill students were able to offer fresh ideas, and hopefully they’ll be able to push the interchange discussion in a more creative direction.
In Quebec, the question of how to “reasonably accommodate” religious minorities has morphed, over the past year, into an all-consuming debate over immigration. It has tangled together every conceivable strand of Quebec’s identity issues: language, religion, ethnicity, sovereignty and geography.
Many people, myself included, have become frustrated with the xenophobic tenor of the discussion and the lack of strong voices in support of immigrants and ethnic minorities. While politicians like Pauline Marois cynically exploit (and obfuscate) the issue with appeals to linguistic nationalism, and old-stock Quebeckers in homogeneous villages fret about the threat posed to their culture by immigrants who reside hundreds of kilometres away in Montreal, the real problems faced by immigrants — barriers to employment and discrimination, notably — have gone largely ignored.
Still, as painful as this whole process as been, it has remained abstract. Some might say that this is because the people most fearful about immigration are those who live in the most homogeneous settings. I certainly haven’t experienced any tension on the streets of Montreal or in the day-to-day interactions of its culturally diverse citizens.
That isn’t quite the case in Prince William County, Virginia. Over the past several months, this exurban area on the fringes of metropolitan Washington, DC, where one-fifth of the population is foreign-born and nearly half is non-white, has been the setting for a sometimes vicious quarrel over immigration and, more specifically, Latino immigration. More specifically, the debate has revolved around a resolution that would force police officers to verify the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the United States illegally.
In response, two filmmakers have taken it upon themselves to document the conflict. Annabel Park and Eric Byler, Asian-Americans who grew up in Prince William County, have launched 9500Liberty, an interactive documentary that straightforwardly explores all facets of the debate. Park and Byler are editing their footage as they shoot it and uploading it to YouTube as quickly as possible, giving viewers the chance to shape its direction and engage with it in a way that would not be possible with a traditional film.
So far, the filmmakers have documented county meetings, interviewed key players in the debate and shot confrontations between supporters of the crackdown on illegal immigration and its opponents. The most-viewed video, which you can watch above, deals with the so-called Liberty Wall, a large banner that urges Prince William County residents to “stop your racism to Hispanics!” After it was erected, several attempts were made to destroy it.
Byler and Park’s project has been widely viewed and discussed. Like any documentary, it creates an opportunity for reflection. That’s something we could use here in Quebec. Unlike the proposed resolution in Prince William County, or even the larger debate over illegal immigration, the question of reasonable accommodation is astoundingly vague. That, in large part, is the reason why it has veered so drastically off course. What we need, most of all, to explore, as honestly as possible, the ground-level reality of immigration and multiculturalism in Montreal and Quebec.
Montreal Apartments