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.
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?”
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.
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?
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.
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.
Toronto, like many cities across North America, uses its street signs to identify neighbourhoods. Chinatown and Greektown are no exception.
In Greektown, which extends along the Danforth for several blocks, Greek signs are posted above the standard English signs. It’s more a token recognition of the neighbourhood’s historical ethnic character than anything else.
In the downtown Chinatown, however, all street signs are bilingual, and these Chinese/English signs can even be found on streets well outside the neighbourhood, like on the Queen Street West shopping district, across from MuchMusic and a block away from the Paramount entertainment complex.
Anyone with a finicky sense of design would best avoid this restaurant on Jean Talon Street in Montreal’s St. Michel district. I particularly like the thrifty way that “Beer Wine” was changed to “Bière Vin” in compliance with Quebec’s language laws.
What do you do with an abandoned building? Turn it into art. Such is the case in Liverpool where the British sculptor Richard Wilson has created Turning the Place Over, an ambitious intervention that removes an eight metre chunk of façade from a building in central Liverpool, rotates it and puts it back into place. An introduction to the piece by the Cass Sculpture Foundation describes it in more detail:
Turning the Place Over consists of an 8 metres diameter ovoid cut from the façade of a building and made to oscillate in three dimensions. The revolving façade rests on a specially designed giant rotator, usually used in the shipping and nuclear industries, and acts as a huge opening and closing ‘window’, offering recurrent glimpses of the interior during its constant cycle during daylight hours.
The ovoid section of facade is then mounted on a central spindle, aligned on a specific angle to the building. When at rest, the ovoid section of facade would fit flush into the rest of the building. The angled spindle is, however, placed on a set of powerful motorised industrial rollers and will rotate. As it rotates, the facade not only becomes completely inverted, but will also oscillate into the building and out into the street, revealing the interior of the building and only being flush with the building at one point during its rotation.
This astonishing feat of engineering will stun audiences on many levels. Disturbing and disorientating from a distance, from close-up passers-by have a thrilling experience as the building rotates above them.
Some observers have noted that Wilson’s intervention draws heavily from the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, an American architect and artist who carved up houses with a chainsaw in the 1970s. His work dwelled on the disintegration of the United States’ public life, including the decay of its cities; one of his more well-known efforts, very similar to Turning the Place Over, involved cutting out a large piece of wall from a New York warehouse and suspending it from a crane.
It’s not entirely clear what Wilson’s installation, which was commissioned by Liverpool in celebration of its designation as 2008’s European Capital of Culture, is trying to say. But it’s still remarkable, if only because it merges the public and private spheres of life into one, revealing the inner workings of a building that is normally shielded from passersby.
I think it’s safe to say that most cities have some kind of house numbering system, but the nature of that system differs from place to place. It took me awhile to figure out that there are two sets of civic numbers in Paris, one for residential buildings and another for retail spaces. Here in North America, many cities are divided into sections, with house numbers increasing with distance from a main street or particular geographic feature.
That’s the case for Montreal, where numbers on north-south streets increase depending on their distance from the St. Lawrence River. It’s a neat arrangement that allows you to determine the location of an address by its “hauteur” relative to the river. On a north-south street, for instance, I know that 3000 corresponds roughly to Ste. Catherine, 4500 to Mount Royal, 7000 to Jean Talon and so forth. 10,000 or more is inconceivably far north, near the edge of the island or perhaps the edge of the world.
Beyond the numbering system, though, I’ve always been curious about the way the numbers are represented. Throughout the central part of Montreal, most buildings and apartments have the same white-on-blue signs, which all appear to have been issued at the same time. There are also some black-on-white versions of the same signs. I don’t know much about them — when were they made? Who distributed them? As they gradually disappear, is anything being done to preserve them?
Photos taken on Demers Street in the Plateau Mont-Royal.
Montreal has eight American Apparel locations, more than any other city but New York and LA, but our streets are devoid of the company’s notorious advertisements, except for those on the stores’ façades themselves. (The back pages of our weekly newspapers, however, are another story.)
In New York, though, American Apparel has made a mark with frequently-changing billboards that feature the kinds of ads that have made it so infamous: young-looking hipsters, clad to various degrees in the company’s clothes, shot in unflattering light and in a variety of pseudo-pornographic poses. (If you still haven’t seen any of the ads, American Apparel has some of the tamer ones on its website, along with photo galleries of its models.)
Lately, there has been a sort of backlash against American Apparel. Earlier this year, a series of ads at the corner of Allen and Houston, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, raised the ire of some nearby residents. The first, described by one blog as a “leotard-and-knee high socks beaver shot,” came in the early spring. Then, over the summer, it was replaced by a new billboard advertising tights, its topless model visible only from behind, bum thrust outwards. By the end of October, it had been defaced with neon green paint and the inscription: “Gee, I wonder why women get raped?” Shortly thereafter, in early November, a paste-up appeared on a SoHo street lampooning a 2005 American Apparel tube sock ad.
I can’t help but find myself amused by the consternation over American Apparel’s advertising. For the most part, it is no more revealing or exploitative than most other fashion ads; the difference is that American Apparel’s provocation is cheeky and only half-serious. It takes typical fashion advertising and strips it of all pretence and glamour, reducing it to its bare sex-driven essence. American Apparel’s ads are vulgar, and they’re certainly brash, but at least they’re honest in their intentions. They don’t dance around the fact that they are using tits and ass (and other things, too) to sell fabric. At least its models are human-looking, unlike the hairless androids often featured by other companies.
American Apparel’s other, non-sexploitative marketing efforts suggests that the company has a pretty good sense of humour, too. In May, at the corner of Houston and Allen, it took a break from crotch shot billboards to run an ad featuring Woody Allen, from a scene in his 1977 film Annie Hall, dressed as a Hasid. It was accompanied by the Yiddish phrase der heyliker rebe, “the holy rabbi.” When asked about the ad, which only lasted for a few days, American Apparel’s representatives would only say that they view Woody Allen as their “spiritual leader.”
On American Apparel’s website, the company declares its devotion to “people, places and things that surround us” with photos of everyday streetlife in Hong Kong, signs in Montreal and mid-century architecture like Habitat ‘67. (Sound familiar?) This is a company with a heightened awareness of kitsch, and a passion for kitsch is what is driving a large part of our current urban culture. That might explain why, even though many people seem repulsed by American Apparel, even more are attracted to it.
Montreal Apartments
