Evening Light in Mongkok

Something for Everyone

Ahh the Bowness Shopping Centre. If it’s not a power centre - it’s a strip mall; that’s just Calgary. Home to baked goods, groceries, and family videos, one can always sit back enjoy a coffee, get their nails done and pick up the latest Catholic reads.

The strangest mishmash stores… complete with signs from another time.

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What $200 Will Buy on Shanghai Street

Shanghai Street is one of those long, straight Kowloon roads that seem to change character every few blocks. In the south, near Jordan Road, are grocery stores and restaurants, along with a handful of shops catering to Nepalese, Indian and Pakistani immigrants. In the north, past Argyle Street, home furnishing stores predominate. The red light district falls somewhere in between.

For the most part, brothels in Yau Ma Tei and Mongkok are coyly disguised as “karaoke bars,” their real vocation indicated by the pretty, busty girls on their signs, often accompanied by a price. On Shanghai Street, though, the sex trade is as blatant as it gets in Hong Kong, with hookers waiting on the sidewalk and brothels that do away with all pretense of offering karaoke and instead unabashedly advertise their real wares. Here, racism and sexism come together in cardboard signs posted at the entrances to old walkup apartment buildings: “China Girl 250; Hong Kong Girl 250; Malay Girl 200; Russian Girl 550; Free Preview.”

It’s a bit of a shock to see these signs displayed so openly, especially since most aspects of prostitution, including the operation of a brothel, are illegal in Hong Kong. It is hard not to read into them a mirror of the more unsavoury side of Hong Kong society, one that is often shameless in its contempt for the 300,000 Filipina and Indonesian domestic helpers that live and work in the territory.

Yesterday, on the bus, my girlfriend overhead a couple ranting about the gall their helper had in asking for time off to visit her sick mother in the Philippines. “What, does she think that she’ll get better if she goes to visit?” one of them said, before complaining about her eating habits. “Some of those damn Filipinas eat so much.” With attitudes like that, is it any surprise that such a low value is placed on women, and in particular Southeast Asian women, on Shanghai Street?

But the red light district on lasts for only a few blocks; it’s easy to walk past and, if you want, easy to forget.

Warsaw, Under the Fluorescent Lights

Even if they can’t bear to go there, practically all Montrealers know a place that they call the Underground City. But by no means is Montreal the only city with such a thing. Across the Atlantic, the city of Warsaw also has a network of underground passages spanning a good part of its downtown.

But you’d never think to associate the two. Where Montreal’s is shiny and commercial, Warsaw’s is gritty and low-slung. Montreal’s underground contains many of the finest international fashion chains, but in Warsaw, those are dispersed throughout the city’s various upscale malls. The underground passages in Warsaw are strictly a utilitarian affair, home to hardware stores, bakeries, arcades, and other small, independent shops.

In a sense, Warsaw’s underground world compensates for the barren landscape above the surface: where Montreal has Saint Catherine street above, the Aleje Jerozolimskie is wide, barren, and more or less devoid of commerce. The passages, on the other hand, teem; at busier moments, they almost resemble the arabic souk in intensity. The central train station is knit right in; some exits from train platforms even skip the train station, emptying out into the corridors. It’s a good thing I missed those when I arrived for the first time in the sleeper train.

At night, the stores close but the passages stay open. It’s only then that you can walk slowly enough to notice the imperfections: the dripping water, cracked floors, peeling yellow paint. A close friend and I passed through once at 1 AM on a wet spring night. There were only two things to be heard: the dripping of water, and our scuffing footsteps.

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Backyards of Bowness

Complete with memories of simpler times, Bowness is a small community that was swallowed up by the “big city” in 1964.

Fence, shed, garage…

Vintage motor under wraps

Country living within the city

Risking Your Life for a Neon Sign

Hong Kong often seems like a safety-obsessed city. Public service posters and announcements are ubiquitous: they warn people to hold onto the handrail when riding the escalator, to mind the closing doors on the subway, to make regular visits to the doctor. Sidewalks on busy streets are lined by fences to prevent people from tripping into the path of an oncoming bus. Restaurant patrons often wash their bowls and chopsticks in hot tea to ensure their cleanliness. Nobody drinks water straight from the tap, even though it is treated and, in theory, perfectly safe to consume. Instead they filter it, boil it—and only then do they drink it.

But then you see something like this and nobody seems fazed in the least. I was apparently the only person on the entire street who found it odd that a man was fixing a neon sign by leaning precariously out from a third-floor ledge, on a windy day no less, without so much as someone to spot him. As a Hong Konger might say, yau mo gau cho ah, which translates roughly as “WTF?”

Fleur-de-Lys Studios

Fleur de Lys Studios (1885), Providence, RI

Surprised Canmore

Motel

Canmore’s on the grow. In this small Alberta town on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, there’s one tea boutique, a handful of internet cafés, and a good number of places for tasty dishes. Lifestyle amenities are targeted not only at tourists, but the nouveau riche who enjoy their life away from Calgary and can’t do without a sharp espresso. Interestingly enough, it still has that small town charm.

Local artisan carving walking sticks

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Wan Chai Neon

Johnston Road near Spring Garden Lane, Wan Chai, Hong Kong

Under the Manhattan Bridge

It’s a bit of a paradox — bridges are meant to connect two sides of a gap, to bring them together, but they often act quite intentionally as barriers because the space beneath them is so problematic. There is a tendency to leave it unused and overgrown with weeds, or to give it up for some perfunctory use, like parking.

But there are many creative solutions to dealing with the space underneath a bridge. I came across one of them when I walked under the Manhattan Bridge in New York’s Chinatown. Shops, retail arcades and produce stalls occupy the space beneath its stone arches; a fruit and vegetable market winds its way up the sidewalk along the north side of the bridge. Instead of dividing a neighbourhood in two, the bridge serves as a focal point for Chinatown.

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Skywalking in Style

The term “skywalk” conjures up something decidedly modern, and for the most part, the elevated pedestrian bridges linking office buildings in cities around the world really are quite recent. Rare before the 1960s and 70s, they have since become popular as a means of separating high volumes of pedestrians from high volumes of vehicular traffic (like in parts of Hong Kong) or of insulating downtown pedestrians from a harsh winter climate (like in Calgary or Minneapolis). At their best, they are a beautiful in their functionality; at their worst, like when a drab modern skywalk has been built between two historic structures, they are a blemish on the cityscape.

Last week, when I saw this skywalk on West 32nd Street in midtown Manhattan, I was surprised not only by how graceful it was, but how it seemed to have been added quite a long time ago, perhaps only shortly after the construction of the buildings it connects.

Underground Art

Axel Morgenthaler’s “.98.” Video by Matt McLaughlin

It becomes obvious as soon as you enter the métro car: this will be no ordinary ride. The usual advertisements and bright orange colour have been replaced by a dark blue, wood-textured film covering the car’s interior walls. Distorted, semi-transparent photos are pasted on the windows. As the métro doors close, eerie music starts playing, followed by the mournful wail of a fog horn.

Nowhere are the odd sounds and visuals explained, which is exactly what artist Rose-Marie Goulet wanted when she created Point de fuite, an unprecedented art project that has been riding the rails of the métro’s Orange Line since last September. When she first teamed up with the Montreal Transit Corp. to create the installation, in 2006, she insisted that it not be labelled explicitly as an art project.

“It’s by chance that you come across this car,” Goulet explained. “People aren’t expecting it, that’s what’s important.”

At Henri Bourassa station, meanwhile, métro riders have even more unusual art to consider: .98, a new light mural that was inaugurated last April. Located in one of Henri Bourassa’s long corridors, the mural consists of several dozen LED lights programmed to change colours and blink in different patterns.

Art has been part of Montreal’s métro since the system first opened in 1966. In some ways, with its abundance of sculptures, murals and unique architectural details, it is a vast underground gallery through which hundreds of thousands of commuters just happen to pass every day. What makes .98 and Point de fuite stand out is the way they engage métro riders in unorthodox ways.

When lighting designer Axel Morgenthaler was commissioned to create a new work of art in the Henri-Bourassa station, he wanted to make something unusual that would grab the attention of harried commuters.

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Welcome to Riverdale

Floral gallery set to open December 1st

Canada Post drop box and local graf

Westward Skyline

Toronto skyline from beyond the Don Valley, Fall 2007