McGill College Avenue

In my post extolling the virtues of Quebec City’s Honoré-Mercier Avenue, Patrick Donovan suggested that McGill College Avenue in Montreal ought to be considered a good boulevard too, and I agree. Too narrow to serve as much of a barrier and just short enough to avoid feeling pointless, it is most remarkable, in my view, for its amazing sightlines. Looking north up the avenue from the esplanade of Place Ville Marie, there is a tremendous view of McGill University and Mount Royal; looking south, from McGill, is an impressive canyon of office towers. Along the way are cafés, benches and, in the summer, an annual photography exhibit. My only qualm is the preponderance of humdrum postmodern architecture — but hey, this is Canada: we can settle for less.

Montreal by Bus: What Is a Bus Line?

This is part of an ongoing series about how Montreal’s bus system could be made easier to navigate.

Photo by Christopher Dewolf

In many Montreal neighbourhoods–especially those that are underserved by the Metro–the bus is absolutely central to life. The 139 whisks Montreal-Nord and Rosemont residents southward along Pie-IX, and the 51 carries passengers from Hampstead and Montreal-Ouest all the way to Laurier station, hugging the mountain more tightly than the Blue Line does. I even suspect that there might be some emotional attachment to some lines: some friends of mine who live off the 80 “Parc Bus” are thinking about having tee shirts printed.

I am convinced, however, that buses are often popular largely in spite of themselves. Across the network, bus lines are often poorly marked and incoherently planned; unlike the iconic Metro map, the bus route map of Montreal is basically a birds’ nest of criscrossing paths. Where other cities have bent over backwards to make their systems comprehensible – colour codes, bright signs, terrific signage – it’s as if our system just became so complicated that everyone stopped trying to make it easy to ride.

My interest in this series of articles is to speak a bit about how we could help people navigate our city’s buses. As you’ve probably gathered by now, this will be mostly a critique! I’d like to explore some the changes that we could make to render our bus lines more “readable” by newcomers: not only newcomers to the STM buses, but also newcomers to individual lines or neighbourhoods. In this article, I’ll begin by setting out just what a bus line is and how it works.

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When Street Art Comes to Life

Muto, filmed in Buenos Aires by the street artist Blu.

Canada’s Only Good Boulevard

Canadian cities fail miserably grandiose urban planning. Every single effort at creating a monumental boulevard has resulted in something mediocre. University Street in Toronto, which runs straight into the Ontario provincial parliament building, has a nice median and a good visual terminus, but it’s ruined by drab furnishings and even more banal buildings. Montreal’s René-Lévesque Boulevard starts nowhere in particular and ends nowhere in particular; although it passes by a number of great Modernist landmarks, like Place Ville-Marie, the CIBC Tower, Hydro-Quebec building and Maison Radio-Canada, it feels aimless and kind of pointless. Ottawa, the one city that could really use a boulevard or two, suffers from an ordinary provincial street grid that ignores the existence of the capital’s many important buildings.

The only example of a Canadian boulevard that really works, at least in my experience, is in Quebec City: Honoré-Mercier Avenue, formerly known as Dufferin Avenue (it was renamed in 1996, with Dufferin’s name given to an expressway, an exchange that brings to mind the renaming, in Montreal, of Dorchester Boulevard after René Lévesque and Dominion Square after Lord Dorchester). First planned in the late nineteenth century, after the construction of Quebec’s provincial legislature, it runs between the Mercier Monument and the edge of the hill separating Quebec’s upper and lower towns. What makes it so remarkable is that it opens up a spectacular vista of the suburbs and hills to the north of Quebec. Restrained street furniture keeps the view uncluttered. Walking down from the parliament, or from the narrow streets of either Old Quebec or Saint-Jean-Baptiste, it is breathtaking.

Expo ’58: Fifty Years Later

A decade before the psychedelic euphoria of Montreal’s Expo ’67 was another emblematic World Fair, Brussels’ Expo 58. Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, the fair’s symbolic centrepiece, The Atomium, was restored for the occasion.

The Atomium was intended to represent a giant iron molecule magnified billions of times. As cheesy as this may sound, it is actually a striking piece of architecture that is historic and avant-garde all at once. The interior is full of Expo ’58 paraphernalia and gives an idea of a World Fair that was part “The Jetsons,” and part “Father Knows Best.” Like Expo ’67, the archives that remain from the period exude a similar spirit of naive optimism fronted by the paste-on smiles of Expo hostesses. Whereas the Brussels fair celebrated the dawn of a prosperous post-war era, there was still a zoo of “Live Africans” at the Belgian Congo pavillion, and some USA-USSR Cold War tensions in the air.

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Le Sud-Ouest

Looking out over Montreal’s southwest, with Little Burgundy in the foreground and Verdun in the distance.

Antlerheads Transformed

Not too long ago I wrote about the “Antlerheads” that had appeared around Montreal as part of a guerilla marketing campaign for Vespa. I defended the ads, arguing that their corporate sponsorship did not diminish their artistic integrity, but over on Spacing Montreal, many readers disagreed.

While we were sitting at our computers arguing, though, some other Montrealers were out in the streets, subverting the Antlerheads and their message. Over the past couple of weeks, nearly every Antlerhead that I have seen has been literally defaced by the street artist Zato1, who has covered the Vespa headlights with the face of something vaguely monsterish. One ad that Zato seemed to have overlooked, on Casgrain Street, has been transformed in another imaginative way.

Rich and Poor Colours

Colours in Working-class Brussels, Belgium

Colours at the Maharajah’s Palace, Jodhpur, India

The City’s Arboreal Landscape

Late last month, as a breeze rustled through the leaves overhead, a small group of people stood at the corner of Laval Ave. and Sherbrooke St., waiting for a tree tour to begin.

Their guide was Bronwyn Chester, a writer fascinated by trees, who has decided to share her knowledge by taking people around the streets and parks of Montreal. Her plan, she said, is to introduce Montrealers to the arboreal diversity of the city, to expose them to an entire world of trees that is often ignored or taken for granted.

Chester began by handing out a list of trees found on and near Laval Ave. – more than three dozen in all – then unfolded a map of Montreal’s largest parks.

“The area around Montreal is where the richest forest in Quebec is found, but it’s also the most heavily farmed and exploited forest,” she said, gesturing to the parks on the map.

“We’ve managed to replace a degree of the biodiversity that once existed and, in between, on the streets, we’ve created bridges between those islands of green.”

As Chester ushered the group up Laval, she pointed toward the street’s thick canopy of trees, explaining that many of them are maples that were planted only 30 years ago — a bit surprising when you consider that the street was first developed in the 1860s.

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Quebec City Tour: Le Campanile

In the early 1980s, New Urbanism arose as a reaction to suburban sprawl, advocating a return to traditional city planning. The Campanile area, laid out in 1986, was built according to these ideas. This dense neighbourhood lies beyond the low-density suburbs of Sainte-Foy on the edge of Greater Quebec. Just when you think you’ve hit the wilderness, there it is.

New Urbanist principles dictate that neighbourhoods should have a discernable centre. The centre here is a “campanile,” or clock tower. Beneath the tower is a modern day take on an old market hall, containing a supermarket, a pharmacy, and a few specialty food stores. A typical main street stretches up from this clock tower and has managed to attract an interesting array of shops.

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Last Hurrah for a Park With No Name

Rooftop sleepovers aside, Mile-End isn’t normally known as a camping destination. That will soon change, at least for four days, with “Camping aux bons plaisirs fugaces,” a camping-themed arts event, hosted by the artist-run centre Dare-Dare, which will take place this weekend.

From tonight, Thursday, June 5 until Sunday, June 8, 13 artists will sleep under the stars at the Parc sans nom, the vacant-lot-cum-arts-space at the corner of St-Laurent and Van Horne. In a sense, the event will be a last hurrah for the park, which will be converted into a storage space for the Plateau Mont-Royal borough’s public works equipment when Dare-Dare leaves at the end of the month.

“We wanted to do something with the Parc sans nom and it came up that we could do some camping there,” says Marjolaine Samson, one of the event’s organizers. “The park will become a really dynamic place and we want all the neighbours to come participate. It’s going to be an artistic and community space—a lived-in space…. With what the city is doing there won’t be much left. It’s too bad. So this will really be an ephemeral event.”

The 13 artists participating will use their tents, the park and the neighbourhood around it as their artistic point of departure. The projects include an instruction video on urban survival, an experiment in underground camping and a sound-based walking tour from Rosemont metro to the Parc sans nom. One artist will recreate a night sky; another will serve a meal each night made entirely from food scavenged from Mile-End’s dumpsters.

Originally, the plan was for the public to be able to access the campground around the clock, but the organizers were forced to scale back when the borough refused them permission, allowing them only to open the site from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.

“We thought we could really push the limits of what we can do in the theme of camping, because a campground here is not legal. We wanted to see if it was possible to create a real campground, but the borough said it wasn’t possible,” said Jean-Pierre Caissie, Dare-Dare’s creative director. “It could have been fun having people come to camp in their neighbourhood park.”

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Rush Hour at Kowloon Tong

June 4th, 2008

Up the Yangtze

Posted in Asia Pacific, Film, Society and Culture, Video by Christopher DeWolf

The night before last, as the remnants of a thunderstorm drizzled down on Bernard Street, I walked to the Outremont Theatre to see Yung Chang’s documentary Up the Yangtze for the second time. Seeing it again only confirmed that this is truly a remarkable film — and one of the best and most important foreign-made movies made about modern China.

That’s quite a statement, I know, but what makes me say that is the profoundly human way in which it approaches a truly monumental subject: the impact of the Three Gorges Dam on the people who live in the basin of the Yangtze River. Two million people have already been displaced by the dam’s flooding and another two million are expected to be moved as a result of design flaws and environmental degradation. The film focuses on one of the “farewell tours” that take tourists up the river to wave goodbye at the disappearing landscape, and it follows two teenagers, Yu Shui and Jerry—one shy, stubborn and poor, the other arrogant and middle-class—who leave home to work on one of the boats.

Yu Shui’s story is the most compelling of the two and she, more than Jerry, becomes the real focus of the film. After her family’s hometown, Fengdu, is abandoned and rebuilt across the river—the old town will soon be flooded—her family builds a shack near the water where they can grow their own food. They eat well but have no money, so instead of going to high school, Yu Shui takes a job on a farewell cruise, scrubbing dishes in the boat’s kitchen. Before making his film, Chang earned such trust from the Yu family that he was able to film some truly extraordinarily intimate family scenes.

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