YMCA vs. YMHA

YMCA, Park Avenue at St. Viateur Street

YMHA, Mount Royal Avenue at Jeanne-Mance Street

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.

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3am at the Casse-Croûte

It’s a bit past 3am and I’m sitting with a few friends in the Nouveau Palais, a 24-hour diner just around the corner from my apartment. It’s a classic Quebec casse-croûte with plastic booths and wood-panelled walls, a décor so timeless that, when the restaurant was damaged by fire a few years ago, its interior was painfully reconstructed to look just as it did before.

As we sit down, the waitress, a squat woman with a broad chest, narrow waist and constant frown, hands us our menus. Her skin is always tanned a deep orangey brown, even in the depths of winter, and her mood tends to swing from guardedly friendly to frighteningly surly with only the slightest provocation.

“I hate her so much,” mutters one of my friends, who grew up a few blocks away from the restaurant. She likes to annoy the waitress with snide remarks and passive-aggressive questions.

“Once I asked her how often she went to the tanning salon and she freaked out. She was like, ‘Tu penses-tu que j’ai le temps pour ça?’ But it’s so obvious!”

I open up the menu, a small book of photocopied paper, and try to decide what to get. My choices include all of the casse-croûte standards: hamburgers, poutine, souvlaki, fried rice, pizza, spaghetti and, of course, pizza-ghetti, that unbeatable combo of soggy pizza and overcooked pasta served side-by-side.

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An Echo of the Hagia Sophia

Over the years I’ve heard people surmise it to be a temple, a mosque, an Orthodox church, even a synagogue. Familiar sight though it is in central Montreal, the first thing the huge domed building at Saint-Urbain and Saint-Viateur brings to mind is not the Roman Catholic church.

At the turn of the last century there was something of a migration of Irish-Canadian working people from their overcrowded Point St. Charles and Griffintown haunts north into Mile End. In 1902, the Catholic archbishop of Montreal, Mgr. Paul Bruchési, gave his approval for a new parish to be created. The first mass was said upstairs of a fire hall at Laurier and Saint-Denis that no longer exists. Their first small church building was on rue Boucher near there; it no longer exists either.

By 1914 the growing parish decided it needed something bigger and grander. In July of that year excavations began. Work stopped briefly when war broke out that autumn, but resumed in April 1915, and the church was ready to use by that December. The price tag was $232,000 and the church could hold 1400 people.

This information comes from a booklet published in 1927 when the parish was already 25 years old. The text describes, and images show, that the dome and the cap on the tower were both decorated with patterns, and the massive façade with the words Deo dicatum in honorem St. Michaeli and a smaller motto on a banner over the doors. Those flourishes are gone, but carved shamrocks are still part of the façade, a nod to the time when the parish was pretty well a monoculture, with priests called McGinnis, Fahey, McCrory, Walsh, O’Brien, Cooney and O’Conor and church wardens Keegan, Gorman, Dillon, McGee and Flood.

Also, unusually, there’s no mention of bells, and no evidence that the tower ever contained any: unlike most church towers it’s closed all the way to the top.

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Two Synagogues, One Neighbourhood

There must be at least dozen synagogues within a five minute walk of St. Viateur and Hutchison, a busy corner at the heart of Montreal’s Hasidic Jewish neighbourhood. They exist in the midst of an equally large number of former synagogues, abandoned by more liberal Jewish congregations as they moved west in the 1950s.

Two examples can be seen above: the first is a newish building on St. Viateur, used by a Hasidic congregation, while the second is a much older synagogue that has been converted into a private residence. Look closely you can see two Stars of David and Hebrew inscriptions etched into its marble entranceway.

Laundry in the Laneway

Alleyway near Esplanade and St. Joseph, Mile End

Another Park Avenue Rooftop

In October, I took you up to the roof of my friend’s triplex on Park Avenue. Here’s another roof further up the street. I’m always amazed to see Mount Royal from up there; on the street, it’s invisible, blocked by buildings.

“Une bonne vieille tempête”

Until the rain washed much of it away today, it seemed like the snow wouldn’t stop accumulating in the streets of Montreal. A big storm in early December left more than 30 centimetres of the stuff on the ground; no sooner had that been cleared away did another 40 or 50 centimetres fall over the course of a few days last week. The city’s blue collar workers couldn’t keep up and streets were gridlocked for a good three or four days.

One random guy on the news (I think he was on the Magdalen Islands) described the storm as “une bonne vieille tempête.” I like that expression. It reminds me of fourteenth-century French poet François Villon’s famous line, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” It gives the impression that, even as we run towards something new and unknown, the icy hands of the past continue to grasp at our ankles.

(Sculpted) Eyes on the Street

École Ste-Julienne-Falconieri, Little Italy. Photo by Kate McDonnell

St. Viateur and St. Laurent, Mile End

Taking it to the Streets

“The Nest,” an early October installation by Chih Chien Wang

It glowed amid its sombre surroundings, a giant Lego-brick lantern underneath the Van Horne Viaduct. For three weeks this fall, Chih-Chien Wang’s installation The Nest was hosted by the artist-run centre Dare-Dare in a space at the corner of St. Laurent Blvd. and Van Horne Ave. that has been dubbed The Park With No Name.

Wang assembled his nest using cardboard boxes, painted white on one side and stacked in the shape of a cube. Inside, amid the glare of white fluorescent lights, visitors could hear and feel the sounds of the viaduct overhead.

“(It is) a way to connect people and the city through an organic experience. This is a place where people and city come together,” proclaimed Dare-Dare’s written on-site introduction to the installation.

Ultimately, though, the way people interacted with his art was a surprise to Wang.

“Kids actually came here to smoke. They were very careful and didn’t throw their cigarettes away inside,” said Wang one afternoon as he swept the ground outside the nest. “People also like to drink inside at night. The sound wasn’t too bad.”

One overnight visitor even left behind a drink, a paper bag and, bizarrely, two perfectly assembled hairballs.

Wang’s installation is part of a new wave of public art that reflects - and draws inspiration from - the city’s urban landscape. It is ephemeral, designed to last only temporarily, and it draws heavily from the aesthetic and philosophy of street art.

This past summer, also in collaboration with Dare-Dare - an organization that helps artists develop their projects and bring art out of galleries and into public space - the Dutch artist Franck Bragigand painted the manhole covers along Bernard and St. Viateur Sts.

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Views from the Viaduct

Views from the Van Horne Viaduct (also known as the Rosemont Viaduct) on the edge of Mile End, Montreal.

A Saint On Your Doorstep

You can almost always tell when an apartment in Montreal is home to a Portuguese family: there’s usually a small tile mosaic depicting a saint next to the door. On some blocks in Montreal’s old Portuguese neighbourhood, which includes much of the western Plateau and eastern Mile End, especially the areas around Duluth, Rachel and St. Urbain streets, nearly every apartment has these tiles.

Portuguese culture has a strong tradition of azulejos, or ceramic tiles. In Lisbon, there are entire houses and churches covered in tiles. Here in Montreal, that might have been prohibitively expensive, so I guess the smaller tilework we see is a small way for Portuguese immigrants to assert their heritage. I’m curious to know what happens when a Portuguese family moves out of their apartment: do they take their tiles with them, or do they leave them for the next occupant?

A Streetcorner From the Second Floor

Climbing up one of Montreal’s many outdoor staircases to a second-floor balcony is a great way to get a new perspective on the street. It’s high enough to feel removed from the action but still low enough to observe it. This is especially true at intersections, like that of Park Avenue and Bernard Street in Mile End, where a constant flow of pedestrians, cyclists, cars and buses keeps things interesting.

Shish Taouk and the Happy Tooth

Not too long ago I wrote about the standard bat-shaped neon sign used by Hong Kong pawnshops. Well, Montreal has its own ubiquitous neon symbols, what I like to call Shish Taouk and the Happy Tooth.

The first sign is found on just about every Lebanese fast-food joint in town. Their menus are always identical — the usual array of shawarma, falafel, garlic potatoes and what Montrealers call shish taouk, but isn’t really shish taouk — so I guess their owners feel that having a standardized neon animation of a man slicing shawarma is appropriate for the same reason that every pharmacy in France is marked by the same green neon cross.

Montreal’s dentists must think the same thing: a neon tooth hangs outside nearly every dental clinic in the city. Unlike the shish taouk or pharmacy signs, though, these teeth aren’t always the same. Some are a simple green outline while others are more elaborate. Often enough, they anthropomorphize the tooth, fixing it with a creepy grin. In the example below, the tooth is posing quite happily with its friend the toothbrush, but a bit further down Park Avenue is another sign that features a tooth apparently walking away with a toothbrush in hand. “See you, sucker,” it seems to be saying.

You know, I sometimes have dreams about my teeth falling out. Signs like that are not something I need to see.

A Bank Shows Its Good Side

Not too long ago, I noticed that construction workers were doing some renovation work at the Laurentian Bank on the corner of Park and Laurier in Montreal’s Mile End. It wasn’t until I took a closer look that I realized that they were in fact removing the building’s marble cladding, revealing a much older Beaux-Arts façade underneath. It was a complete surprise because, even though I knew the building was old, I never thought to consider what might be lurking underneath its plain exterior.

Montreal is rife with turn-of-the-century buildings whose cornices have been removed, balconies scrapped, brick replaced, all in some misguided postwar effort to make them look more “modern.” Some of the transformations were more permanent than others, ranging from a complete removal of the original façade to the addition of a crude corrugated steel mask.

Still, it’s hard to judge the aesthetic decisions of past generations too harshly. After all, we’re doing pretty much the same thing with many Modernist and Brutalist buildings from the 1950s, 60s and 70s: “updating” them to look a bit more “current.” In some cases, I think there are definite improvements, like when the ITHQ on St. Denis St. was transformed from one of Montreal’s most monstrous buildings into one of its most alluring.

But there are some mistakes, too. 5 Place Ville-Marie, a 1968 highrise with a prefab concrete façade, was covered last year in a blue glass envelope. It looks okay now, but what will Montrealers be saying in 50 years?