For allthatI’vewritten about Montreal’s street signs, I haven’t mentioned much about the signs found in Old Montreal, the city’s birthplace and one of its most important tourist attractions. Although the signs here are meant to reflect the red-and-beige colour scheme of the city’s first street signs, they are actually a recent invention, created in the 1980s with a somewhat contrived typeface that is meant to look historic.
For a long time, I had assumed that all of the signs in the old city were homogeneous, but on a recent walk around the neighbourhood a friend pointed out to me that there were two different types: one, mounted on buildings with the street name written in all-caps, and others, mounted on posts and written in an entirely different font. I can’t explain the difference between the two — maybe some of our readers can help.
But I did notice something else that was interesting: at the corner of Le Royer and St. Laurent there is a building with street names engraved into its façade. Just like the street signs of the 1950s, when English signs were place on one side of the street and French signs on the other, the street name on one side of the building was in English (Le Royer Street and St. Lawrence Boulevard) and in French (rue Le Royer and boulevard Saint-Laurent) on the other.
Writers and journalists looking for a quick and easy symbol of Montreal’s political and linguistic divide usually find one in the city’s downtown west end. There, in the shadow of the Montreal Children’s Hospital, René Lévesque Boulevard turns into Dorchester Avenue as it crosses Atwater and passes from Montreal into Westmount, a remnant of the divisive legacy of nationalism in Quebec.
Symbolically, I’ve always thought that this streetcorner did Montreal an injustice. It’s too simple, too obvious. It doesn’t jive with the nuanced reality of the city’s everyday life.
A more representative streetcorner can be found further north, on the border between Montreal and Hampstead. On its west side, in Hampstead, a newish set of street signs marks the corner of Rue Macdonald Road and Rue Fleet Road. Right across the street, in Montreal, two much older signs, dating back to the 1950s, describe the corner simply as Macdonald and Van Horne, their English articles—“Ave.” and “St.”—covered by white tape.
About eight different varieties of street signs can be found within Montreal’s old city limits; that doesn’t include the two dozen other kinds of signs seen in former suburbs like Outremont or de-merged municipalities like Hampstead. As innocuous and quotidian as they might seem, these signs capture the real complexity of its social and political landscape.
Earlier this week, while walking to a friend’s place on Coloniale Street on the Plateau, I came across an unusual piece of street art. Pasted on an abandoned mattress that was leaning against the side of a building, it depicted the body of a skinny-jeaned, cardiganed hipster topped by the head of a motorized scooter. Its position on the mattress created an interesting optical illusion that gave the scooter-man an extra sense of depth; looking at it head-on, it seemed to be standing up straight in front of me. Later that day, heading home on the 80 bus, I saw a few slightly different versions of the same paste-up on the papered-over windows of a vacant storefront on Park Avenue.
It turns out that the scooter-men, dubbed Antlerheads, are a guerilla marketing campaign for Vespa, which commissioned a well-known street artist, Fauxreel, to promote its new Vespa S scooter in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. His work has already made a big splash in Toronto, where they appeared last month. “Guerilla marketing gone horribly right?” asked blogTO, which admired the fact that they are at once an advertisement and a parody of consumer culture — “the idea that we can exchange our faces and minds with a product.” Strategy Magazine reports that the posters are part of a much larger campaign that will include print advertisements, street teams distributing scooter-head buttons and a giant 40-foot projection.
As advertising in conventional media becomes less and less effective, marketers are turning to guerilla advertising to get the word out about new products. At its worst, guerilla marketing cynically co-opts street art and public space to sell us more crap we don’t really need. But, somehow, the Antlerheads seem different. They are a very oblique form of promotion, since they contain no obvious signs of being sponsored by Vespa. No logos, no web addresses; only someone who is already familiar with the company’s scooters would recognize them as advertising. Artistically speaking, they certainly hold their own against most of the graffiti, stencils and paste-ups found in our streets, and their cultural commentary gives them an added dimension.
Madrid’s iconography is strictly prewar. Between the gratuitous ornamentation dripping from the buildings lining Gran Via and the interiors of crowded tapas, the city centre appears decked out in full late-19th century regalia, fit for admirers of coattails and opera gloves. Tread out along the boulevards bursting from the city’s heart, however, and Madrid’s palette of pale yellows and burnt ochres takes on a slightly different form.
In ways, the commercial outskirts of Madrid reprise a sort of cityscape that’s as rare in Europe as it is fatiguingly common elsewhere. Black-ribboned towers wrapped in shades of brown and black will slump along streets that gape by whim, rather than necessity. The packs of pedestrians thin out. Walk along the arteries feeding the gargantuan Avenida de la Castellada, drown out the cheers from the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu, and one is in downtown Denver.
Whenever I’m walking down the street in Hong Kong I think about all of the information I’m missing because I can’t read Chinese: menus, advertisements, election signs, protest banners. (I’m particularly regretful I can’t read the menus.) Sometimes, though, I wonder if I’m actually being given a break, considering how many thousands of words compete for your attention in the average Hong Kong street. Just look at all of the words written around this single doorway: to me, they’re incomprehensible, but to any literate person they must be the visual equivalent of a screaming match.
The geography of Lisbon bends pespectives - up, down, and around its seven hills. Beyond the occasional slow-swooping streetcar, the dramatic undulations of the city’s streets are broken only by its graffiti, which boldly explodes against pastel-painted houses, or grafts messages - somehow both timely and timeless - deep into centuries-solid walls.
Of all the kitsch that pervades Montreal’s commercial signage, little is more gaudy and outlandish than its strip club signs. In other cities, they’re discreet and euphemistic; here, they employ neon and cartoon illustrations to demonstrate what goes on inside. Nowhere is this more obvious than at Ste. Catherine and the Main, a corner that has been seedy for decades. In the early twentieth century, it was a busy shopping district, but it was also the heart of Montreal’s red light district, with brothels, gambling parlours and bars that flourished during Prohibition, when Quebec was the only place in North America where booze flowed freely.
The queen of the corner is Café Cleopatra, which opened in 1969, one of the first modern-day strip clubs in Montreal. Its ground floor is aimed at straight men; upstairs, a more diverse crowd mingles inside the city’s best-known tranny bar. Cleopatra’s sign, which is cheeky and almost innocent by today’s standards, promises a “unisex disco” with “strip-teaseuses” and “spectacles continuels.” Its best feature is a nude, decidedly robust woman (Cleopatra herself?) lying on her side, red-striped headband tied around her golden locks of hair.
Further west, even more garish strip clubs and peep shows are found right in the heart of the downtown retail district. The most famous is Club Super Sexe, located on Ste. Catherine near the corner of University and likely the best-known strip club in Montreal. A large part of its notoriety comes from its two-storey sign, an orgy of blinking neon and caped, bikini-clad women flying through the nighttime sky. It must be quite an awesome sight for a teenager from upstate New York who has come to Montreal for his first taste of legal debauchery.
Two doors to the east, in a handsome greystone Gothic structure built in 1914, is Super Sexe’s sister club, Super Contact. Its lurid neon signs, which depict two sets of disembodied hands grasping at the body of a busty stripper, are almost comically at odds with the forced sobriety of the building in which they are housed. The maternity store located immediately underneath Super Contact, its windows filled with posters of rosy-cheeked pregnant women, only adds to the irony.
They’re tacky and unabashedly sexist, but the strip clubs along the downtown shopping strip are an essential ingredient in the street’s heterogeneity, which is what makes it so appealing in the first place. Without the incongruous mix of chain clothing stores and strip clubs, their doormen trying to entice passers-by with obscene catchphrases (“Pussies, tits and giggly tits!” yelled one, in a lilting Caribbean accent, as I walked downtown last summer), Ste. Catherine would be just another humdrum high street.
One of the things I love about Hong Kong is the city’s captivation with light. There’s the neon for which Hong Kong is famous, of course, but in recent years it has really taken to dressing up its buildings in LED displays. Here are two examples I came across while wandering around town. Below, a McDonald’s sign backlit by neon, is really nothing exceptional, but it captures how even the most banal of businesses have invested in lighting displays. Above is the new LED-lit façade of the W Hotel in Wan Chai, which fades from one colour to the next between dusk and midnight.
Montreal’s marginal spaces seem to hold particular appeal for its artists. Last year, Karen Spencer decorated fences, laneways and parking lots with her oblique trilingual dreams; Julie Favreau and Caroline Dubois occupied a vacant storefront on Beaubien Street, turning an empty space into one of constant reinvention; and the artists of Dare-Dare took a forlorn corner of Mile End and made it into the centre of gravity for the city’s most interesting and innovative art. Now, the wayward Heather Utah has found herself in the area around the Falaise St. Jacques, where she has marked an entire corner the city with her “flags for a vengeance”: colourful quilts that mark an outpost of ambiguity, spontaneity and humanity in the rigidly-marked space of this drably suburban landscape.
Hong Kong is full of interesting doorways. They aren’t quaint or pretty, but they’re loaded with ephemera that reveal small bits of Hong Kong’s everyday life and culture. Take this one for example, which leads to the upper floors of a cheap hotel on a Mongkok sidestreet near Prince Edward Road. The metal door is typical, and so are the banners wishing good fortune upon the hotel and its occupants, but the stern notice taped to the door is not. “These premises are no longer used for the purposes of prostitution,” it reads, suggesting that a police raid and perhaps new ownership have transformed the place from one of Mongkok’s many hourly hotels into a somewhat more legitimate one.
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.
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.
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