Woodframe Somerville

Cottage Avenue in Davis Square, Somerville, Boston

Paris: Beyond the End of History

Quai d’Orsay: From Commuters to Connoisseurs

French culture is dead. So declared Time magazine’s Don Morrison recently. Complacently subsisting off plentiful government subsidies, France’s once-trendsetting culture class have failed to keep up and compete with any of the noise issuing forth from the anglophone world. If France’s capital city is any reflection of the country’s cultural decline, one might be inclined to agree with him — at least superficially.

The museum-like quality of Paris, which remains — seemingly — a sort of improbable continuation of its late 19th century self, has long been lamented. The City of Light has maybe taken its very apt nickname a bit too far, bathing, perhaps, in too much of a stage-set’s glow. It’s easy to forgeet, while strolling through the Tuileries in the evening, that the city isn’t some recently dreamed-up theme park — especially since half the park literally serves as a sort of fairground.

It’s telling that the two most controversial building projects in central Paris – the reconstruction of Les Halles, a former marketplace turned mall and train station, and the potential rebuilding of the Tuileries palace, are, respectively, an attempt to snuff out one of the few mid-20th century intrusions into central Paris, and the attempt to restore a building lost to fire in 1871. The recent installation of the Velib’ bike-sharing system has only added further to Paris’ 19th century flair: never since then have there been so many pedal warriors on the city’s boulevards. Paris may not only be ossifying, but taking active steps to turn back the clock.

Place Vendôme: Sepulchral City

Morrison hasn’t completely given up on French culture, claiming that hope lies in the cultural explosion percolating in the immigrant ghettos that proliferate in France’s suburban banlieues and the untapped engine of neoliberal economic growth: the former providing new twists on what “French” means, the latter allowing this new France to competitively export itself to the rest of the world.

It’s true that these two forces have brought considerable change to Paris, though not, perhaps, in the positive ways Morrison expects. The upscale offices of American firms have quintupled along the Avenue Georges V, and St-Germain has steeply declined from Bohemian Rhapsody to Banana Republic. This sort of sterility, more than the mere preservation of belle époque facades, has paralyzed Paris.

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Turn on the Red Light

The video screen of a silhouetted stripper was once a landmark at the corner of Ste. Catherine and the Main. It was a symbol of sorts for Montreal’s rapidly-dwindling red light district, a seedy neighbourhood of cheap bars, diners, peep shows juxtaposed with music venues, theatres and university buildings. It was about the only remarkable thing left on the building it occupied, a hideous, dilapidated, mostly-abandoned structure that was an eyesore even for a scuzzy part of town.

It’s a bit of a surprise to look at the above photos, compiled by Spacing Montreal’s Guillaume St-Jean, only to realize that that ugly building is in fact quite old. When it was built around the turn of the twentieth century, it was solid and elegant, if somewhat unremarkable. Over the course of a century it was brutalized to such an extent as to be all but unrecognizable, save for its distinctively narrow width.

Sometime next year, the building will make way for a landmark that represents a different kind of Montreal. The municipal government has expropriated the two properties at the corner of Ste. Catherine and the Main for a new cultural centre that will be called the Red Light. The name is an awfully cynical appropriation of the area’s often rough-and-tumble history (and I’m sure some might take offence at the way it glorifies the sex trade), but the building itself doesn’t seem too bad. That is, if we can get a clear idea of how it will turn out, because the renderings that have been released are not exactly detailed.

The Red Light will anchor the new Quartier des spectacles, an attempt to reinforce the arts-driven character of the east end of downtown. Last month, $120 million worth of public space improvements were announced, including the creation of new plazas and squares and the part-time pedestrianization of Ste. Catherine St. There’s plenty of things to be wary about in this plan, but as far as the Red Light is concerned, I can think of worse things to build at one of Montreal’s more infamous intersections.

Cherish Your Clothesline

Nobody hangs their laundry out to dry in Calgary. In fact, there are hardly any clothelines. My grandmother’s house had one, but I don’t think she ever used it. She, like everyone I knew while growing up there, had a washer and dryer set tucked neatly in a musty corner of her basement, across from a half-century-old furnace.

It was an eye-opening experience to travel to Newfoundland as a teenager, where I discovered that St. John’s was precisely the opposite of Calgary: everyone had clotheslines. Clothes hung over alleyways and backyards, billowing in the salty Atlantic breeze like flags of chores vanquished. There was something inexplicably romantic, something timeless, about clothes drying on lines, whether in the city or in a stark outport on the Avalon Peninsula.

Montreal is similar to St. John’s, at least in that regard. Here, the clothesline tradition never really died. Although they’re less prevalent today than in the past, you’ll still see an abundance of them if you wander down the laneways of just about any neighbourhood. Immigrant neighbourhoods in particular have a ton of clotheslines, probably because they’re home to so many people who come from countries where drying your clothes outside is still the norm. I remember, earlier this fall, driving east through St. Michel on the elevated Metropolitan Expressway, staring at long rows of triplexes tied together by strands of billowing clothes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that kind of scene became even more common in the future. That’s because clotheslines are no longer just quaint — they’re fashionable. The growing marketability of anything “green” has led to a resurgence of interest in drying clothes outside. It’s cheaper than clothes dryers, which can consume as much as 900 kilowatt hours of energy per year, and better for your clothes. According to La Presse, which extolled the benefits of clotheslines last summer, the sun eliminates odours and removes stains, and is easier on natural fibres than clothes dryers.

But, as much as I like to know that the sun can whiten my whites, it’s the clothesline aesthetic that really appeals to me. I’m still charmed by the sight of them, which is good because they’re ubiquitous in my back alley from March until November. More than that, though, clotheslines domesticate the street. We’ve spent so much effort over past half-century trying to sterilize our cities, to turn them into machines, that we need these kinds of reminders that they are, first and foremost, places where people live, messy as that may be.

Still, prejudices linger. Many new subdivisions include provisions in house purchase agreements that ban residents from drying their clothes outside. It’s a class thing more than anything else, since clotheslines are still associated by many with poverty. There has been a clear shift in attitude, however. Earlier this month, Ontario’s environment minister announced that he wants to override those clothesline bans.

I’m not alone in enjoying the look of clotheslines, either. There are plenty of Flickr groups dedicated to clotheslines, including one called Les cordes à linge de Montréal.

A Street Market? No, a Railway Market

Mark Slutsky sent me a link to this video today, showing a market lining a railway in Thailand. Within seconds of a train passing through, the market springs back to life.

Naturally, the video raises some pretty obvious questions, like why on earth would a market be located on a set of train tracks? Andrew Leonard, on Salon’s How the World Works, points the way to some explanations. Apparently, the train tracks in question are actually part of the the Mae Klong Railway, an interurban line that runs diesel trams from from Bangkok in the east to Samut Songkhram in the west. Along the way, it passes down some local roads, including a neighbourhood market. The trains are infrequent enough that they don’t pose much of a danger or inconvenience to shoppers or vendors.

According to Justin Bur, who wrote in to Salon, this is not so different from streets markets in Belgium or France through which trams pass. In Hong Kong, trams pass right through the middle of a street market in North Point.

Photos by Richard Barrow

Sunny Bus Stop

Light and Shadow

Jean Talon Market

Park Avenue

Milton Street

Chinatown is Changing

In September, the owner of Swatow, an import/export business, announced he will replace his St. Laurent Blvd. store with a $20-million shopping centre – the first major real-estate investment in Chinatown since the 1980s – that will include a supermarket, office space, a rooftop banquet hall and small boutiques similar to those found in Toronto or Vancouver’s trendy Asian malls.

Earlier this year, a number of new businesses opened elsewhere in the neighbourhood, including the third Canadian location of Xiao Fei Yang, a Chinese hot pot chain with hundreds of locations across Asia.

These changes in Chinatown’s retail landscape – toward businesses that appeal to a wider segment of the population, like young people and Mandarin-speakers from the mainland – are happening as Montreal’s growing Chinese population is becoming increasingly dispersed throughout the city.

“The demographics of Chinatown are definitely changing,” said Ting Kwan Hung, a community organizer who lived in Hong Kong, Liverpool, New York and Toronto before coming to Montreal in 2004. “There are more and more non-Cantonese speaking people and you also see more Chinese youth who speak French.”

Nodes of Chinese businesses and services have emerged outside of Chinatown, especially in Brossard, home to the largest concentration of Chinese immigrants in the Montreal metropolitan area. Other neighbourhoods, like Ville St. Laurent, Côte des Neiges, Verdun and the west end of downtown, also have large or growing Chinese populations.

Now that Chinese supermarkets, restaurants, dentists and other services are found throughout the city, can Chinatown stay relevant to Chinese Montrealers?

“There’s a lot of new immigrants, but they don’t spend much money,” said Tran Tao Cam, the vice-president of the Montreal Chinese Chamber of Commerce. “There are also lots of students from very rich families, but they don’t come to Chinatown. Look at the area near Concordia, along Ste. Catherine. There used to be only two or three Chinese businesses, now there’s 30 or 40.”

Tran worries the high cost of parking, issues with cleanliness, competition from business in other parts of the city and even the rising dollar will keep people from coming to Chinatown in the future. Still, he said, it remains “a very special area for business,” one that continues to draw a large variety of people.

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