Increasingly, parking your bike in busy areas like the Plateau is almost as hard as parking a car. This summer, though, the Plateau Mont-Royal borough will be leading the way in giving cyclists more places to rest their two-wheelers. By the time autumn arrives later this year, the Plateau’s 1,500 parking spots will have doubled to more than 3,000.
“The Plateau is the single area with the most cyclists in all of North America. Seven per cent of all movements are made by bike. That’s a lot, but we don’t have enough places for everyone to park their bike,” says Michel Labrecque, city councillor for Mile-End and the man in charge of the Plateau’s new Plan de déplacement urbain, which will guide the borough’s approach to transportation over the next few years.
A big part of that approach is to give priority to “active” modes of transportation like cycling and walking. So far, one way of doing that has been to replace parking spots for cars with on-street bicycle parking areas, several of which have already been implemented on busy retail streets like St-Viateur, Laurier and Mont-Royal, as well as in front of schools, daycares, housing co-ops and the Maison des cyclistes on Rachel.
“When we take away a parking spot, some people think of it as ‘their’ parking space and they might get angry. But that’s what it takes to make a change in the modal split, the way people get around. We can put between five and eight bikes in the amount of space that a single car would occupy,” says Labrecque. “We installed one next to the YMCA because it’s always full of bikes. There’s one on Laurier near Laurier Park, in front of a Metro supermarket, and it’s always full too, so it might be enlarged this year.”
While the on-street parking areas that currently exist can accommodate about 160 bikes, the Plateau plans to add four to six new areas this summer, with room for an additional 56 bikes. This doesn’t include the 14 parking areas, with space for 175 bikes, that will be built on the newly renovated St-Laurent, or the expanded parking area in front of the Plateau library and Maison de la culture, on Mont-Royal, which will be made permanent this year.
Each on-street parking area costs between $4,000 and $6,000 to install, but it’s well worth it, says Michel Tanguy, a Plateau borough spokesman. “The borough has really taken off in a direction that will see the number of spaces for bikes do nothing but increase.”
I had never noticed this small Ste. Famille St. apartment building until today. In fact, it was my girlfriend who pointed it out to me. According to the city’s property records, it was built in 1937, which seems about right given the Art Deco verve of its name and design details. It’s probably occupied mostly by students today, but I can’t help but wonder what kind of a building it was when it first opened…
Walking around this weekend I noticed a procession of odd posters around the Main: “Québécois et Québécoises ! Montréalais-Montréalaises ! Prenez part à un mouvement HISTORIQUE !” they declared rather excitedly. “Le mouvement boulevard Lucien-Rivard propose de rébaptiser le boulevard Saint-Laurent à Montréal : boulevard Lucien-Rivard.” Above was what appeared to be a mugshot, a streetsign reading “boulevard Lucien-Rivard,” a photo of Schwartz’s and a boulevard Saint-Laurent street sign that had been angrily crossed out.
“This has got to be a joke,” I thought to myself. The mere fact that the name “Mouvement boulevard Lucien-Rivard” rhymes seems to suggest that this is a jibe at the whole Park Avenue affair and the city’s eagerness to rename its streets. I made a mental note to check out mblr.org, the website advertised on the posters.
That website turned out to be an amateurish, seemingly earnest affair written in the same excitable prose as on the posters: “On parle beaucoup de Lucien Rivard ces temps-ci et c’est comme si tout le monde l’avait oublié!! Lucien Rivard fait partie de ces personnages historique qui dérangent on dirait,” it reads. “Trop de rues dans notre belle province portent les noms de saints inconnus ou de politiciens corrompus, ou encore des symboles serviles du système. Mais qu’en est-il des Québécois plus marginaux ?? Des personnalité hors-normes comme les Monica Proietti, le Grand Antonio, Denis Vanier ou Lucien Rivard ?”
As for why the Main in particular ought to be renamed, there’s an answer for that too: “La «Main» de Montréal est un boulevard au caractère symbolique pour tous les canadiens-français. À l’Ouest les anglais et les riches, à l’Est les pauvres canadiens français opprimé et manipulé par les institutions et les politiciens à la solde du pouvoir. Qui peut dire qui était Saint-Laurent ou ce qu’il a accompli ? Pensons-y… Quel rapport entre un homme d’église espagnol mort sur le gril en l’an 258 à Rome et la «Main» (à part les hot-dogs toastés?)???”
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.
“Les peaux de lièvres” is quintessential Tricot Machine. Deliberately innocent but twinged with melancholy, it revels in the simple pleasures of life, like wandering through a snowy, nighttime Montreal. I have to be honest when I say that I probably wouldn’t have remembered it if it weren’t for this music video, which is probably the first stop-motion animation I have seen that uses knitwear as its medium. It also features a nice visual narrative that takes us past Mount Royal and the downtown skyline and up the side of the Olympic Stadium, weaving between the intimacy of personal life and the greater experience of the city.
The Champ de Mars is one of Montreal’s most storied places. It derives its name from the French colonial era, when it was a military parade ground, but in the eighteenth century it was the site of the city’s northern wall. After the wall was torn down in the early nineteenth century, the Champ was used as a farmer’s market. Eventually, in the twentieth century, it was converted into a municipal parking lot.
While the field was restored and converted into a public park in the 1980s, it still maintains the essence of the parking lot it once was. Despite its stunning view of the downtown skyline and its location next to City Hall and the tourist hub of Place Jacques Cartier, the Champ de Mars feels like it isn’t quite living up to its potential. Something needs to be done to make it relevant, once again, to Montrealers.
Just a couple of ideas ago, I was walking through the Champ with my friend Sam, and he proposed a great idea: why not project movies on the blank concrete wall of the Palais de Justice? Free film projections are already a big hit at Place des Arts during the World Film Festival, and thanks to Montreal’s liberalism, we wouldn’t be stuck with a bunch of family-friendly schlock. It would be a great way to bring people together while highlighting one of the city’s historically significant public spaces as well as some of its best views and architecture.
Westmount is probably the most heavily stereotyped municipality in Quebec. It is the epitome of anglophone privilege and WASP snobbery, a posh district best represented by the “elderly women in pink suits” on Greene Avenue. While there is a grain of truth to that, as with any stereotype, Westmount is far more interesting than its reputation would suggest.
In fact, Westmount is one of my favourite places to wander on a sunny day, and my favourite place in Westmount is below Ste. Catherine, near the CPR tracks, where a procession of little streets contain a world of pleasant rowhouses and quiet dead-end streets. My walks usually start a bit east of Westmount itself, in Shaughnessy Village, where the blocks around Souvenir Street contain a number of surprising buildings and laneways. Heading west across Atwater Avenue, there’s Weredale Park, a strange circle of houses hidden behind Dorchester Boulevard. Beyond that are small, leafy streets with names like Bruce and Blenheim, most running straight into the CPR tracks and the escarpment on which they sit. Walk to the end of these streets and you can peer through a chain-link fence towards the church towers and silos of the city’s southwest.
Strolling around here is nice enough during the day, but it’s even better at night, when it feels like you have the streets all to yourself. Get lost in the laneways and stop by the playground at Stayner Park for a ride on the swings, which offer the perfect vantage point from which to admire the quaint Victorian cottages across the street. Don’t make too much noise, though; it’s Westmount, after all.
Click here for a map of my proposed walking route.
Whenever I walk through Westmount I am reminded of Julie Brock’s poem, “Greene Ave.,” from her 1999 book The End of Travel.
Montreal’s blazing in tufts
of acid green and crapapple pink.
Clouds mass at dusk behind
Mount Royal like additional summits,
as my father noted yesterday
from his favourite chair, pleased
as he should be with the rented view.
Framed by my office window,
two elderly women in pink suits
with matching handbags and shoes,
twin iced confections, swirl
across the parking lot to lunch.
It rains, the sun comes out;
a young girl in white begins
her slow, meditative dance
around each parked car.
The pastel ladies reappear, fold
their legs into the Seville.
Alone in their vacant space,
the girl in white spins and spins.
A man pees behind a parking meter,
hails a cab with his free hand.
The cab pulls over, the cab
will wait, and that ring is my rented phone.
Anything to be that girl, turning.
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.
In 1936, when these photos were taken, Montreal was just beginning to climb out of the Great Depression, which had hit this industrial city with particularly brute force. Unemployment remained high and thousands of the city’s inhabitants lived in squalour — but not in Mile End. Though far from wealthy, the north end neighbourhood was reasonably prosperous, home to upwardly-mobile Jews, French-Canadians, Irish and immigrants from across Europe.
That diversity was reflected in Mile End’s built fabric. The neighbourhood boasts a particularly impressive collection of churches, synagogues and other institutional structures: there’s the Byzantine mystery of St. Michael’s Church, the florid wedding-cake façade of the Église Saint-Enfant-Jésus and the faux-château styling of the former St. Louis City Hall at Laurier and the Main. In the midst of all this were two buildings that served the neighbourhood’s two major religious and cultural communities: the Young Men’s Christian Association, on Park Avenue, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, on Mount Royal Avenue.
Both institutions were products of the moralistic zeal of the late nineteenth century. Although they differed in faith, their goals were similar, and each offered a network of social services designed to improve the physical, moral and social well-being of young Jews and Christians. The YMHA was particularly successful: in 1948, its members made up half of Canada’s Olympic basketball team.
Eventually, though, the institutions took a divergent path. The Park Avenue YMCA eventually became a secular institution that served the entire community. By the late 1980s, though, its was so decrepit that it was torn down and rebuilt from scratch. The City of Montreal took the opportunity to jointly finance the construction of a new pool in the YMCA, replacing the public St. Michel Bath further east in the neighbourhood. Today, the Y is a focal point for community life in Mile End.
After awhile, even the largest city can shrink to the size of a village. On a good day, this creates a comfortable intimacy; on a bad day, it can impose a banal, oppressive familiarity. Passing through the same streets day after day, it’s easy to lose sight of the things that so charmed you about them in the first place.
I try to avoid that by wandering through Montreal’s laneways, its ruelles, as they’re known in French. To walk through them is to uncover a secret city, a stripped-down, domestic one, the lipstick and blush of its streetscapes removed. The laneway experience is defined by the detritus of everyday life: the flutter of laundry drying on clotheslines, decrepit old sheds, gardens filled with vegetables, doors and gates through which you can glimpse the lives of others.
Laneways first emerged in Montreal in the mid-nineteenth century, but they were usually found only in middle-class and wealthy neighbourhoods. Poorer areas had courtyards accessible by portes cochères, which led to small workers’ homes hidden behind larger buildings. By the dawn of the twentieth century, though, Montreal and most of its suburbs had begun to mandate the construction of laneways in new residential developments, seeing them as a solution to the city’s sanitation problems. Eventually, nearly 500 kilometres of alleyways were built.
Montrealers have made great use of them. Every week, in the warm months, dozens of garage sales and bazaars can be found in the city’s laneways, selling books, furniture and assorted junk. Three years ago, the YMCA in my neighbourhood organized an alleyway art fair that drew inspiration from those alleyway bazaars. Artists hung their paintings on backyard fences, a graffiti crew painted a cinderblock wall and somebody set up a television viewing room in an apartment building courtyard.
What makes laneways so alluring is their ephemeral nature: they change with the rhythm of daily life, never quite the same from one day to the next. There is always a new piece of discarded furniture waiting for someone to claim it; a previously unnoticed view through trees, fences, walls and wires; or a new piece of street art.
The street art, in particular, provides the laneways with ever-changing décor. Over the years, I’ve seen political statements (“25,000 Montrealers call this home” spray-painted on a brick wall, next to a drawing of a homeless man), paste-ups and graffiti and even poetry (“We walked in Lake Ontario / Up to our ankles in sour water / For the feeling of sinking, you said”). My favourite can still be seen in one of the ruelles near my apartment, where somebody has scrawled a succinct message in whimsical cursive to wanderers like myself: “I love you.”
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