One Space For Cars, Twelve For Bikes

St. Viateur St. near Waverly

In just the past few years, Montreal has made some pretty big steps forward in developing its bike infrastructure. The new bike lane on Maisonneuve might have caused a crack in the street that threatened to pull the whole of downtown into a giant sinkhole, but it’s otherwise pretty snazzy. The counterflow bike lanes and sharrows in the McGill Ghetto are pretty cool. The new bike racks being installed on parking meters around town are a vast improvement over the old ones.

What I really like the most, though, are the seasonal bicycle parking lots installed on commercial streets in the Ville-Marie and Plateau Mont-Royal boroughs. In busy areas, like on Ste. Catherine St. near UQAM, in front of the Plateau library on Mount Royal Avenue, or next to the Mile End YMCA on Park Avenue, a car parking spot is removed and replaced with space for two-wheeled vehicles. It’s reminiscent of the approach taken in European cities like Paris, where entire blocks of parking space are given over to bikes and mopeds.

Each one of these bicycle parking areas is a reminder that at least a dozen bikes can fit into the space occupied by a single car. That’s twelve people arriving on two wheels instead of one or two arriving on four.

Ste. Catherine St. near St. Denis

The Falling of the Leaves

Posting pictures of autumnal foliage is such a huge cliché — but so what? It’s pretty.

Views From a Park Avenue Rooftop

By now you must know about my love for viewing cities from on high. That’s true even from three storeys up. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Boris took me up to the roof of his building on Park Avenue. This was what we saw.

Mile End’s Country Hotel

Mile End once had its very own country inn. There was a Mile End hotel and tavern as early as 1815, when one of its regulars, an English businessman and landowner named Stanley Bagg, made a number of references to it in some ads he placed in the Gazette.

It’s likely that the hotel you see above is a descendant of that early inn. Built in 1850 at the corner of what is now St. Laurent and Bernard, I like to imagine that it was one of those out-of-town spots where you could hitch your horse, get a beer and find a room for a night. Whoever built it must have been awfully grateful in 1882 when, less than a block from the hotel, the CPR built Mile End Station. Over the next couple of years, every train heading west to the Prairies passed through Mile End.

I know very little about the history of the hotel in the twentieth century, although its ground floor remained a tavern. Alas, as happens all too often, this unassuming but historically remarkable building burned down sometime in the 1990s. The top photo you see was taken around 1985; the bottom one in 2007. It would be nice if a longtime Mile End resident could share some information about this building.

(Incidentally, does anyone know why the lot has remained vacant for so long?)

The before-and-after photo was created, as usual, by Guillaume St-Jean. I’m happy to say that Guillaume has joined Spacing Montreal as a contributor, so be sure to check it out for regular dispatches from Montreal’s past.

Is Civility Just a Mask?

Every so often there is a reminder that Montreal, for all its history as a capital of Jewish culture in North America, still has a problem with anti-Semitism. In the past year alone, a molotov cocktail was thrown at a Jewish school on Van Horne and a bomb exploded outside of a Jewish community centre on Victoria Avenue. It wasn’t so long ago that a Jewish school’s library was destroyed in a vicious firebombing.

Just the other day, a friend told me about this piece of graffiti on Clark Street, between St. Viateur and Fairmount. Someone has scribbled the likeness of a Hasidic Jew with the inscription “Parásit.” It might seem harmless in and of itself, but these thoughtless displays of racism are usually symptoms of a much larger and more insidious problem. If we accept the legitimacy of messages such as this, aren’t we tacitly accepting their message?

Montreal is home to one of the world’s largest communities of Hasidic Jews. Numbering about 15,000, they live mostly within one kilometre of Van Horne Street between Mile End in the east and Côte St. Luc in the west. Historically, since the Hasidic population started growing in the 1980s, there have been some tense moments in the relationship between Outremont’s Hasidim and their mostly French-Canadian neighbours. Some Outremonters have fought against every one of the Hasidic community’s attempts to make a home for themselves by building new schools, synagogues and businesses.

For the most part, though, day-to-day relations between the Hasidim and non-Hasidim are civil. (I wrote about this last winter in “My Heimishe Bakery.”) That’s what makes it so disheartening to see this kind of graffiti. It makes me wonder: is that civility just a mask?

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Fairmount Avenue

Two scenes from Fairmount Avenue in Mile End

Shelter: Moving Out Without Leaving Home

Shelter is a weekly Montreal Gazette series that peeks into the lives of ordinary apartment-dwelling Montrealers.

I was surprised when I came in. It’s not a typical Montreal duplex layout. The front is what I expected, but the back is very open-concept, with no walls between the kitchen and the living room.

Marie-Louis Letendre: Well, what happened is that (the back) is a new extension and the basement is new, too. Where the kitchen is now, that used to be a bedroom. The renovations started about seven years ago and they’ve continued ever since.

So it’s been …

Letendre: A constant thing. Now, my mom, (who lives upstairs,) is doing the upstairs as well. Because renovations cost a lot, we got the basement and the extensions done seven years ago and now we’re doing the entire front of the house.

You have a big backyard.

Letendre: Yeah. Outside used to be all concrete with ridiculous amounts of grapes. They were wine grapes, so you couldn’t eat them. We didn’t really make wine, so they kept spreading until we did the renovations. We had to have the entire yard dug up to build the basement.

So I guess it was a 4 1/2 when you first moved in.

Letendre: Yeah. Now it’s a 7 1/2. We doubled the apartment in size. It looks infinitely nicer. It’ll be nice when it’s done, but I was joking with the contractor, I said: “What happens when it’s done? Do we start again?” And he said, “Probably.” The renovations never completely end. There’s always something that needs to be done.

How long have you lived here?

Letendre: Since Grade 3. About 12 years. I lived here with my mom, my brother and many foreign exchange students. We constantly had students staying here and renting out one of the two front bedrooms. I kind of got used to random people in my house all the time.

But now your mom is living upstairs and you have three roommates.

Letendre: She’s in the process of moving upstairs. I really like it. It’s comfortable because I don’t have to go through the process of actually moving and relocating and creating a new home.

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Grey Day Near Van Horne

Sunset in Mile End, near the Van Horne Viaduct

Who is Painting the Manhole Covers?

I’m not just asking — I really want to know. Over the past month, somebody has painted dozens of manhole covers around Mile End, on Park Avenue, Bernard Street and St. Viateur Street. It’s quite a lovely endeavour, adding a bit of colour to the sidewalk while drawing attention to an overlooked but essential piece of civic infrastructure.

Green City: Montreal in the Summer

On the left, a good way to start a summer day
On the right, the Mile End community garden sits next to old factories

You can get hungry for green in Montreal in the winter, but in the summer the city abounds in greenery. Walking around this city got me started thinking a few years ago about the way individuals go out of their way to create green surroundings, and ultimately led to my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2006). Montreal isn’t featured — the eleven cities I talk about range from Babylon through Chicago to São Paulo and back to Babylon — but a walk this week through my neighborhood showed me that the drive for green is still there.

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My Dep

My depanneur is shy, hiding under a staircase on the long block of Park Avenue between Bernard and Van Horne, about five seconds from my front door. A large Coke sign (joined more recently by a few sandwich boards) advertises its existence. Inside, all of the dep staples — lotto machine, cigarettes, chocolate bars, soda, packaged food and beer — are crammed into a tiny space not even half the size of my four-room apartment.

When my girlfriend and I moved into our apartment three years ago, the dep was owned by an odd, talkative man from Guangdong province in China. Small, bald and skinny, he spent his days watching Radio-Canada on a small TV — not, I suspect, out of enthusiasm for Canada’s public broadcaster, but simply because that was the only channel his television’s rabbit-ear antennae received.

One evening, while buying a can of coke, my girlfriend chatted with him for a bit in Cantonese. Rather abruptly, he lectured her: what was nice Chinese girl doing in such a crummy neighbourhood? Why not move downtown?

She didn’t go back to the dep very often after that. It was with a tinge of relief, then, that we noticed one winter day two and a half years ago that the bald man had sold the depanneur. In his place was a fresh-faced couple from northern China. Where, exactly? I asked one evening. “Near Beijing,” said the new owner, shyly. His wife beamed and rubbed her pregnant belly. Their baby was born that summer. They named her Zoey.

The depanneur’s new owner is as sincere and shy as the old one was smarmy and condescending. Over the past couple of years, he has earnestly rearranged the store and installed new fridges. A selection of Hollywood movies is available to rent.

It wasn’t long before he discarded the old television set, too, replacing it with a new one that featured a built-in DVD player. Now, when I step in every so often to buy a case of beer, I find him sitting behind the counter, watching historical epics or episodes of 24 subtitled in Chinese.

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Jeanne Mance Street

Does anyone read Yiddish?

The United Neighbourhoods of Mile End

Mile End underground station. Photo by Nicobobinus

There are at least three Mile Ends around the world: one in Montreal, one in London and one in Adelaide. All three share some intriguing similarities. As their name would suggest, they are all located fairly close to the centre of their respective cities: Montreal’s Mile End is about three miles north of Place d’Armes, London’s is nearly four miles east of Charing Cross and Adelaide’s is about two miles west of Victoria Square. But what else do they share? Is there some secret Mile End connection between two former colonies and Mother England?

Maybe. Each one began life as a suburb only to evolve into a decidedly inner-city sort of neighbourhood. Each is culturally diverse. Most importantly, though, each of these neighbourhoods were named for perfectly logical local reasons—but it seems clear that their names are all directly related.

To understand the origin of Mile End, you must first turn to the British capital, home to what is, undeniably, the ur-Mile End. Here, the neighbourhood took its name at least seven centuries ago from a milestone marking the spot one mile east of Aldgate, the eastern entrance into the walled City of London. In 1381, this area played host to a peasant’s revolt. Four hundred years later, at the end of the eighteenth century, it had become the Mile End New Town, a bona fide suburb of Georgian London.

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Finding Sidewalk Stamps

Matt Blackett is obsessed with sidewalk stamps. He wrote about them in Spacing’s first issue and his interest was even featured in the Globe and Mail. Last month, when Matt met with a group of fellow public space enthusiasts here in Montreal, he asked us if our sidewalks were stamped too. Everyone shook their heads. “No,” they replied.

But that isn’t true. Montreal doesn’t seem to stamp its sidewalks anymore but it certainly did in the past. I’ve come across a stamp from 1922 on a Villeray sidestreet; a few weeks ago, on a balmy May evening, I noticed a lovely metal stamp embedded in the sidewalk of Park Avenue near the corner of Mount Royal. Shaped like a maple leaf, it testifies to the date of the sidewalk’s construction (1953) and the name of the contractor who built it (Charles Dufranceau).

I have no idea why Montreal abandoned the sidewalk-stamping tradition. It still seems to be practiced in Toronto; in Vancouver, sidewalks are often stamped with decorative elements, like leaves around the base of a tree. But perhaps I’m not looking hard enough: I’ll have to head down to look closely at the new sidewalks that have just been installed on the Main.