Hydro Pole Art

Hydro pole street art on 4th Street SW in the Mission

The King of Kensington

I’m too young to have ever watched the CBC television series King of Kensington, which aired from 1975 to 1980, but if I had been alive at that time I think I would have enjoyed it. Set in Toronto’s Kensington Market, it revolved around the life of the charismastic Larry King, played by Al Waxman, and his multicultural group of friends. The show’s opening sequence shows a kind of happy urbanism that reminds me a lot of the music video for the Shuffle Demons’ “Spadina Bus.”

Twenty years later, another CBC comedy, Twitch City, was set in Kensington Market. With a housebound television addict as its main character (played by Don McKellar, no less), this show portrayed the neighbourhood in a much stranger, darker and more ironic fashion. In the first episode, one of the main character’s friends ends up killing a homeless man in the street — not just any homeless man, though, but a homeless man played by Al Waxman, the King of Kensington himself.

Riding the C-Train

Waiting for a train at Centre Street station

Afternoon on a Dalhousie-bound train

Door button on a 1981-vintage train

Riga: Language and the City

Having travelled in other parts of Eastern Europe when younger, I was excited about my first trip to Riga, Latvia, a few months ago. I was not sure exactly what to expect but had an idea that it would feel more developed than other parts of Eastern Europe while still bearing quite some traces of its communist past. The prosperity of the city surprised me – it feels like a wealthy Scandinavian city and, indeed, it has many cultural and business ties to Scandinavia. I did not feel during the course of my week there any hint of a communist inheritance.

I was also curious to see how the ethnic Latvians and ethnic Russians co-existed in this Baltic city. Having read up on Riga before my trip, I knew that Riga is about 42% ethnic Latvian and about 42% ethnic Russian, and thus was not surprised to hear quite a lot of Russian spoken in the streets. It did not take me long to find out that there is indeed some antagonism between the two groups.

What I was not prepared for, however, was the complete lack of any signage in Russian. I do not know what the law is there, but it does not appear to consist of having a Latvian sign at least twice as big as a Russian sign. I saw plenty of English signs. Russian was most noticeable for its absence.

I cannot decide if this is a good or a bad thing – the Latvians were unwillingly taken over by the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, and their culture almost destroyed. Independence provided them with a precious chance to protect and restore their culture. On the other hand, Russians are, unless they are willing to Latvianise, clearly treated like second class citizens. I met one Russian who used a Latvianised spelling on his business cards, but used his native Russian spelling to sign his e-mails.

I sympathise with both groups and cannot help but compare and contrast the situation in Riga with that in Montreal, which it seems to resemble more greatly than that in other bilingual cities such as Brussels. Is it the difficulty in reconciling the conflicting demands of justice for a minority within a minority?

More

The Blue Signs

In many corners of downtown Calgary it’s possible to see an old kind of street sign that dates back to the first half of the twentieth century. They’re invariably mounted on buildings and have been made superfluous by newer signs, which leads me to think that they’ve been preserved either by neglect or some sense of historical duty.

What’s even more remarkable is that nearly identical versions of these white-on-blue signs are found in Montreal, where they have also been overlooked or forgotten. I’ve seen one on Lincoln Avenue downtown and another on the rue de Bienville on the Plateau.

Dep City: Montreal’s Convenience Stores

If Montreal seems saturated with dépanneurs, that’s because it is: 1,127 crowd the island, about one for every 1,500 people. Since they emerged in their current form in the 1970s, the descendants of tobacconists and once-ubiquitous corner grocery stores, dépanneurs have become an inextricable part of life in Montreal.

They also are an important but often overlooked aspect of the city’s economy. For business owners, many of whom are immigrants, dépanneurs represent a rare field of work that poses virtually no barrier to entry, aside from a relatively small amount of capital.

“An immigrant arrives in this country with a degree, with skills, but cannot find a job because he doesn’t have Canadian experience,” said Bakr Ibrahim, a professor at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business who specializes in small business and ethnic entrepreneurship. “For one reason or another, he cannot gain employment in mainstream (fields), so the first thing he knows is to start a business on his own.” Increasingly, however, independent dépanneurs are under pressure from corporate convenience-store chains and from supermarkets, so the independent operators need to be ever more nimble and attuned to the market they serve, which can be as small as a few blocks.

For example, Yodh Ubhi, who owns a dépanneur on Park Ave. in Mile End, has begun selling “heat and eat” Indian food made by Aliments Nutrifresh Ltd., a prepared-food supplier based in St. Laurent. He said the move was based on requests from customers who had travelled to Toronto and noticed many convenience stores there served prepared food.

In some neighbourhoods, dépanneurs have expanded their offering by selling fruits and vegetables, meat and ethnic products. That’s the case in Park Extension, said Ubhi, who has lived there since the early 1980s. “There’s very cutthroat competition” in that area, he said, adding that South Asians who operate dépanneurs know the competition’s prices because “they go to every different store and make their own prices cheaper. They buy bulk and they sell fresh meat, too.”

More

A Day in the Life of a Dépanneur

Owning a dépanneur has a big impact on your social life, says Yodh Ubhi, standing behind the counter of Dépanneur PMS at the corner of Park Ave. and Villeneuve St.

“You have none,” Ubhi said.

He’s not kidding. Ubhi’s hours—14 hours a day, seven days a week—would make most office workers weep. Every morning, he opens the store at 7 a.m., and works without a break until early afternoon, when his wife arrives with lunch. Ubhi eats in the store’s basement, a former bank vault, before taking a three-hour siesta. At 6 p.m., he trudges back upstairs and takes over from his wife, who returns home to make dinner. The day finally ends at midnight, when Ubhi closes shop and returns home to Park Extension.

“It’s not a one-person job,” he said, adding his 18-year-old daughter and 21-year-old son, both students, often come to help.

Ubhi, who came to Montreal from India’s Punjab state in the early 1970s, bought his dépanneur in 2002, after nearly two decades in the textile business. At $65,000—a little over $100,000 with inventory—the store was a bargain. Spacious and well-stocked, it had already undergone a $150,000 renovation in the 1990s when it was part of a small dépanneur chain that ultimately folded.

“I had no experience whatsoever in the dep business,” Ubhi said. “I saw guys working and thought, ‘Hey, that’s nothing, it’s a piece of cake.’ But it’s not that easy. It’s very demanding. There are long hours. You have to know about your supply, cash flow, customers, your neighbourhood, and on top of that you have to provide good service. If you don’t have even one of these, you’re screwed up. You’re not going to last a year.” At the beginning, Ubhi made mistakes, like offering credit.

“When you’re new, you believe everyone,” he said, but he soon realized he had lost nearly $7,000 to customers who had scammed him out of cigarettes and alcohol. Now, a cartoon drawing of a gangster with the caption, “No Credit: It’s Time to Pay Up, Sucka!” is displayed prominently at the cash.

More

What If Public Art Came to Life?

I don’t think I’ve ever been more awed—or creeped out—by public art as I was when I first passed through Monk metro, beneath the giant metal sculptures meant to represent the construction workers who built the metro. In the vast concrete belly of the station, there is something eerie, otherworldly and epic about them; their frozen state seems impermanent, as if they will resume their work as soon as I turn away.

That’s the idea behind Terminus, a short film posted earlier this week by Andrew Chau on urban-ism. Set in 1970s Montreal, and mostly in the metro, it follows a man’s descent into lunacy as he is followed by a large concrete sculpture, which stands over him incessantly, its gaze expectant. Soon, the man starts seeing public installations following other people. A woman walks down a metro corridor as one of Villa-Maria station’s round mural sculptures rolls behind her; a man is hounded by Beaudry’s moving sidewalk; a child is followed by Pierryves Anger’s Le Malheureux Magnifique.

The film also does great work in bringing out the creepiness inherent in so much 70s-era art, architecture and design in Montreal. It’ll be something to think about next time you’re descending into the concrete abyss of Lucien L’Allier or Place-Saint-Henri.

Crossposted from Spacing Montreal

Indigo India

More

The Automobile Experience

Travelling around the city on different modes of transport can completely change your impressions of it. When you walk, you're exposed to the details of urban life: the scent of fruit as you pass a greengrocer, the words and illustrations of posters glued to lampposts. On the train or a bus, you watch the passing streetscapes while surrounded by fellow spectators, as if you were in a movie.

Coke Machine Glow

Chinatown was probably the oddest part of central Boston, mostly because it had yet to be scrubbed clean of its grit. This old Coke machine, randomly found in the middle of the sidewalk and stocked not with soft drinks but with Miller Lite and Budweiser, is a prime example.

The Cavern Quarter

When you mention the name Liverpool to a non-Brit, they are likely to think of one of two things: Liverpool Football Club, whose worldwide brand power is second only to their Premiership rivals Manchester United, or The Beatles (indeed, mention the city’s name to a typical North American and they will likely only make a connection with the latter).

Liverpool, the perennial underdog of British cities and the butt of many jokes from Londoners, is this year’s European Capital of Culture — far from being just a city of football and youth gangs. Large-scale redevelopment projects carrying designs by such ‘Starchitects’ as Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli are flowering up all along its UNESCO World Heritage Site-designated waterfront. Liverpool is hoping that its cultural coronation by the EU will shake the image that many hold of the city — that of a rough-and-tumble, crumbling port town where the locals speak a perplexing dialect, Scouse, which can be best described as a cross between Gaelic and Swedish.

Today’s Liverpool is more akin to the boomtown of the 19th century, when the steamship lines and related merchant industries held great sway in the city. However, despite the attention that Liverpool has recently been receiving for its cultural and economic revitalization, the city will perhaps always be umbilically tied to the fab name of its most famous export.

More

Construction Site

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that downtown Calgary is in the midst of a construction boom. Construction explosion, more like it. Nearly two dozen new condominium and office towers are under construction in the city’s compact centre; some are destined for obscurity but others, like Norman Foster’s The Bow, which will become the city’s new tallest building, are daring and ambitious in their design.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of the Le Germain, a hotel, office and condominium complex currently under construction at the corner of Ninth Avenue and Centre Street, right across from the Calgary Tower. I like that it subverts the plain-box archetype that has dominated Calgary since the 1970s; by taking two different boxes and bridging them with an bunch of glass condos, it creates an unusual building in a city that strays far too often towards the banal.

At the same time, though, it’s pretty ugly — but I guess it’s better to be interestingly ugly than pleasantly average.

Morning Coffee: Café Ekberg, Helsinki

Inside Café Ekberg, Helsinki

Most people don’t think of coffee when you mention Helsinki. The usual things that come to mind are death metal bands, formula one racers, and blonde people. Nevertheless, statistics show that Finns are the biggest coffee drinkers on earth. They drink almost twice as much coffee as the French, and nearly three times more than us. It is no surprise that Helsinki, the capital city, has loads of great coffee shops.

But I don’t drink coffee, though I still like to linger in cafés. So I stopped by the oldest café in town: Café Ekberg, which opened on February 3, 1852. It is small, yet quiet and sophisticated. More importantly, it provided me with the instant shelter from the chilly Finnish winter I was seeking.

I went for a delicious frothy hot chocolate. The place was full of formal Finns in evening attire. But then the sun rose and I remembered it was daytime, 10:00 AM, still somewhat dark, not really helping my jet lag. I looked around at the stiff elderly blond women and quiet gentlemen serving themselves heaping plates at the Nordic breakfast buffet table. I felt surreal, like an extra in a David Lynch movie, or should I say Aki Kaurismäki.

But that’s how I expected to feel in Finland, so there wasn’t any culture shock.

Outside the Bio Rex Cinema café, Helsinki