July 12th, 2009
Paths in snow, on the beach and across fields show how people seem unable to walk straight even when they have a clear shot at where they’re going.
People don’t walk straight. Not only do they take short cuts when they can, they avoid trees, rocks and uneven places. The streets in old cities and towns reflect that meandering, but between the beginning of the 19th century and suburban developments in the middle of the 20th century, cities used right-angled street grids in their urban plans almost exclusively. It’s only where the grid met pre-existing footpaths that we can see evidence today of a time when walking feet determined where roads went.
One of the first attempts at “rational” planning began in 1803 when New York’s City Commissioners decided to survey Manhattan and bring order to the hodge-podge of grids that had been laid out along the island’s shorelines. Not much could be done about the earlier patterns, but they were integrated into a huge master plan which would not be completely built up for nearly 150 years. The chief exception to straight streets and right angles came when the commissioners recognized they had to include some footpaths used for centuries by Amerindians. The shortcuts and trails had become major thoroughfares, the most famous being the one running diagonally across the island and now known as Broadway.
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July 9th, 2009
Ding uk in Kam Sham Village, Tai Po
I never thought I’d find a triplex in Hong Kong but it turns out there’s thousands of them. While Montreal’s triplexes were mostly built in the early twentieth century, though, the ones in Hong Kong, known in Cantonese as ding uk, are actually fairly recent.
While ding uk are usually called “village houses” in English, this isn’t a very precise translation: the term actually means “sons’ houses.” They’re a product of a 1972 law that allows the first-born sons of Hong Kong’s indigenous families to build a house in their ancestral villages without having to pay for the land. There are hundreds of such villages in the New Territories of Hong Kong, which were granted special rights, including a certain degree of self-determination, when they were annexed by Britain in 1898. In order to regulate the demand for housing, the law limited ding uk to three stories in height and 2,100 square feet of floor space.
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July 4th, 2009
Another July 1st, another year I breathe a sigh of relief that I didn’t have to move on Moving Day. I must be exceptionally lucky: I’ve never had to move on the same day as more than 100,000 other Montrealers. Instead, I have been able to wander the streets and watch, with voyeuristic glee, as the curtain that normally hangs between us and our neighbours is ripped away.
That’s exactly what I told a journalist from La Presse when she called to ask what I thought of the odd way that Montrealers spend Canada’s national holiday. (Unfortunately, she somehow misspelled my name, adding a “v” and an “e” where they really shouldn’t exist.) As perplexing as it is to have most residential leases end on the same day, it’s also one of those charmingly illogical things that make Montreal such an admirably eccentric city.
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July 3rd, 2009
“Freedom! I want freedom! Let me go!” The woman’s arms were flailing wildly, and she was shouting at a police officer standing guard at the intersection of Christopher and Greenwich Streets. Her gesticulations could have been mistaken for a political protest — she was, after all, among the hundreds pressed against the crowd control barriers, not more than a few feet from which New York’s gay pride parade was moving past: an hours-long stream of floats and dancers coursed down Fifth Avenue and filtered into ever-narrower Village streets before reaching the route’s terminus near the foot of Christopher. But it turned out all she really wanted to do was cross the street and get home.
For all the inconvenience and discomfort of hosting a full-scale urban celebration along its slim sidewalks and underneath the drooping limbs of its trees, though, there could be no more poignant destination for the parade than Christopher Street, where, forty years ago, an uprising began the U.S.’ gay rights movement.
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July 3rd, 2009
Time-lapse footage of big city traffic is a bit of a cliché, but this isn’t time-lapse: it’s stop-motion. Edwin Lee has managed to capture Hong Kong’s evening energy with this animation made from more than 10,000 still images of the city. It’s meant to serve as a music video for an instrumental piece by the local band A Roller Control, whose song “TV Dream” serves as an excellent companion to the images. The video is also a finalist in I Shot Hong Kong‘s MV category. (I attended ISHK’s premiere the other night, incidentally, and the festival’s program includes some excellent short films — but also some that are entirely cringe-worthy.)
Another video by Lee, “The Way Home,” is much more conventional, but pretty enjoyable nonetheless. It reminds me why I always make a point of sitting in the top deck’s front seat whenever I ride the bus.
