In the 19th century, Montreal boomed as an industrial railway hub while Quebec City fell into obscurity. Quebec remained poorly connected by rail to the rest of the continent until the 20th century. A grand chateau-style railway station, called Gare du Palais, was built in 1915 to inaugurate the new railway line crossing the recently-completed Quebec Bridge. A small park with a brutalist fountain by Charles Daudelin was added to the front in 1999, and for some strange reason the contrast works. There’s something grand to this area, leaving you with the misleading impression that Quebec is an important railway hub. But the cavernous emptiness of the halls reveal the truth - only four trains come into the station per day.
The driver of the S62 bus let me on even though there was no value left on my borrowed Metrocard.
“Just don’t let it happen again,” he said, waving me back.
Twenty minutes later, after a bumpy ride down Victory Boulevard, a narrow commercial street that winds its way across the northern half of Staten Island, New York’s fifth and forgotten borough, we arrive at the best way to get to Manhattan: the Staten Island Ferry. I say it’s the best because, unlike the US$5 express bus, which takes you across the Verrazano-Narrow Bridge and up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Ferry is free and it runs around the clock. It’s also relaxing and picturesque: you can stand on the outside deck, leaning against the railing as the bells on the harbour’s buoys clang and the Statue of Liberty passes by in the distance.
The City of New York eliminated the ferry’s 50-cent fare in 1997. More recently, it has invested millions of dollars in building two pleasant, airy new terminals. These improvements have attracted new riders and made the ferry one of the most democratic forms of transportation in New York: few other kinds of transport—perhaps not even the subway—bring together so many different people into a single space.
After a few days of going to and from Manhattan by ferry, I left New York for Hong Kong, where I re-encountered my favourite ferry service in the world: the Star Ferry, whose weatherworn green boats have crossed Victoria Harbour for more than a century. It’s not a stretch to say that the ferry’s ten-minute journey across the harbour is one of the more awe-inspiring experiences in the world, especially at night, when the choppy water seems to glow in the ambient light of Hong Kong’s skyline.
Whether it’s Sham Shui Po, Jordan, Sai Ying Pun or Kowloon City, most of Hong Kong’s older neighbourhoods have a similar aesthetic, with the same stained concrete buildings, steel doors, sidewalk altars and worn awnings. It gives the city a remarkably cohesive character despite having such a large population and such varied geography.
The same is true for Hong Kong’s many markets: whether in the street or in a market hall, fish, meat and produce is almost invariably sold under the glow of distinctive red lamps. Like a visual catchphrase, they are an instant and unconscious sign to passersby that fresh food is available.
I’ve seen these red lamps in Macau, too, and as far as I can tell they’re also used in Guangzhou and other Cantonese cities. But I’ll bet that only in Hong Kong have they been used ironically: in the past few days, walking through the trendy streets of Central, I’ve noticed the lamps in a café, an art gallery and in the window display of a high-end shoe store on Wellington Street.
There’s something remarkably honest about the United Steel Workers of Montreal. Far from being a contrivance, their country and bluegrass music feels earnest and appropriate, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the new video for their song “Émile Bertrand.”
This elegy for the lost working-class life of Montreal’s southwest is named in honour of the Émile Bertrand restaurant, a snack bar at Notre-Dame and Mountain that was famous for its home-brewed spruce beer. It closed in 2006 when its owner, Barbara Strudensky, died of cancer, so the USWM filmed their video in Point St. Charles’ Paul Patates, which has inherited Émile Bertrand’s legacy — and spruce beer. “Dreamin’ just comes easy when work is just too hard to bear,” croon the USWM’s vocalists, Felicity Hamer and Sean Beauchamp, as the video cuts between present-day scenes of the Lachine Canal, St. Henri and Point St. Charles and historical photos of Griffintown.
There’s something about this landscape that invites nostalgia. Maybe it’s the unexpected tranquility of the canal and the brooding ghosts of industry along it. Five years ago, when I lived in St. Henri, I lay awake at night listening to the mysterious clanging of trains in the nearby railyards. Those solitary moments, more than anything, are what I remember about living in the city’s southwest.
Montreal did away with a big chunk of its cultural heritage when it started cracking down on street vendors in the 1960s. Food vendors were the first to go and, although City Hall has been easing its restrictions on street vending for a number of years, allowing people to sell art and crafts on Ste. Catherine Street and at the tam tams, it still refuses to allow anyone except mobile ice cream vendors to sell food on the street. This makes us one of the only major cities in the world with a near-total ban on street food.
Not only does this deprive us of delicious snacks, it eliminates a great source of streetlife. Today, on Coolopolis, Kristian Gravenor posted a bit about the calls of early twentieth century street vendors. He points to an article in the May 19th, 1929 edition of Le Petit Journal:
La corporation des marchands des quatres saisons, ou “colporteurs” comme on les nomme ici, est composée de braves gens qui gagnent honorablement leur vie en vendant de porte en porte, les primeurs, fruits ou légumes. On pouvait autrement classer dans cette catégorie les vendeurs de crême à la glace et les petits marchands de galettes et de blé-d’inde bouilli.
Le marchand de crême à la glace se tenait au coin des rues avec une petite voiture où était installé son bidon d’ice cream qui’il débitait à un sou le cocotier. Celui-là, il va sans dire, était particulièrement l’ami des enfants.
Un autre petit vendeur très populaire était le marchand de petites galettes et de petits pains chauds: “Galettes! Galettes! Madame!” criait-il, “pas trop de beurre dedans! … Cinq pour cinq sous! … Galettes! … Galettes! …”
Puis le marchand de blé-d’inde bouilli qui parcourait les rues avec son haridelle, en criant sans cesse, et en vers, s’il vous plait:
“Bon blé-d’inde bouilli!
Trois sous pour un épi! …”
Et qui ne se rappelle le vendeur de bluets, annoçant sa marchandise avec un trémolo dans la voix, tout comme notre marchand de bananes d’aujourd’hui: “Bluets!… Ah! les beaux bluets du Saguenay!…”
I took the Calgary Tower for granted when I saw it every day. Now I realize what a remarkable monument to late-sixties kitsch it really was. Built in 1967 by Husky Oil to commemorate the centennial of Canada’s confederation, its has no purpose other than as a monument — a really big monument capped by an orangey-red observation deck. It can seem grand, in a space age kind of way, when you look at it from afar, or in the midst of the downtown office district. But from other angles it just seems odd.
Shelter is a weekly Montreal Gazette series that peeks into the lives of ordinary apartment-dwelling Montrealers.
This installment looks at an apartment in Moshe Safdie’s iconic Habitat 67, inhabited by Margaret Somerville, the founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. The apartment consists of four “cubes” covering 2,700 square feet, with an additional 1,800 square feet of outdoor terrace space.
Most apartments in Habitat consist of different cubes stuck together, right?
Right. Most of them are one or two blocks, and this was a three. (Gestures to a corridor leading away from the dining room.) The apartment used to stop here, but the people who owned it before me purchased the next block and turned it into a bedroom wing. It was a originally a one-block apartment, there was a kitchen, a living room, a dining room. You can see how you could have a nice little cozy apartment here.
So how much of the renovation was done by the previous owner and how much was yours?
About half and half. (We wander down the hall and into the bedroom. She gestures to a glass door leading onto a large terrace.) This is the back terrace, which is beautiful in the summer. It actually goes right over to the river. I have a lovely garden there in the summer. You can see the casino.
So you have views on both sides of the apartment, the city at the front and the river at the back.
Every single window has a gorgeous view, it’s amazing. (We head back into the dining room and down a flight of stairs. Most apartments in Habitat are split between two floors.) In the original three-block this was originally the living room, and the bedroom was over there. I took out all of the internal walls, so this is a huge entertaining space. It’s actually one block.
If Chinatown’s Jewish heritage isn’t obvious, it’s probably because it has been erased by time and redevelopment, swept away like Chenneville St. and its quietly imposing synagogue.
Makom: Seeking Sacred Space, an ongoing exhibition at Hampstead’s Dorshei Emet synagogue, examines the historical traces of Montreal’s Jewish community with photos of former synagogues near the Main.
“The exhibition raises some really interesting questions about the way that spaces that are claimed by one group of people or one community are also claimed, in their own way, by other communities,” said Leanore Lieblein, a retired McGill English professor who helped organize the exhibition. Even in a synagogue that has been renovated and used for something else, she added, “you can feel the presence of past lives in that building.”
Chenneville’s synagogue was a case in point. Located on a small street (now shortened and written as Cheneville) between St. Urbain and Jeanne Mance Sts., below Dorchester (now René Lévesque) Blvd. and above Craig (now St. Antoine) St., it was built in 1838 by Montreal’s oldest Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel.
In 1887, when Shearith Israel moved to a much larger home on Stanley St. - following the westward migration of Montreal’s older generations of Canadian-born, anglicized Jews - the synagogue was rented by Beth David, a congregation of Romanian immigrants who arrived in the late 19th century, part of a huge wave of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Over the next three decades, the area around present-day Chinatown - with Bleury St. to the west, Sanguinet St. to the east, Craig to the south and Ontario St. to the north - became the heart of Jewish Montreal, a haven for Yiddish-speaking immigrants who established businesses, synagogues and many of the Jewish institutions that still exist.
Israel Medresh, a journalist for the Kanader Adler, a Yiddish-language daily newspaper, sketched a portrait of the neighbourhood in his 1947 book Montreal Foun Nekhtn, translated into English in 2000 as Montreal of Yesterday.
“The corner of St. Urbain and Dorchester was the very heart of the Jewish neighbourhood,” he wrote. “Nearby was Dufferin Park, then a ‘Jewish park’ where Jewish immigrants went to breathe the fresh air, meet their landslayt (compatriots), hear the latest news, look for work and read the newspapers.”
“What drew me to the Turcot originally was the size of it,” recalls Ken McLaughlin. The Verdun artist maintains Walking Turcot Yards, a blog dedicated to the area around the giant interchange at the junction of highways 15 and 20, built in 1966 in a feat of Modernist ambition. “It’s pretty incredible to look up there and see it all. It’s very sculptural, all the lines and shapes, very smooth,” he says.
Next year, though, the area around the Turcot Yards will be dramatically reshaped by a $1.5-billion reconstruction project. The grandiose swoop and curves of the city’s most iconic interchange will make way for an entirely new structure, its layers of flyovers and elevated highways replaced by a new structure that hugs the ground, surrounded by berms and embankments. Construction is expected to last from 2009 to 2015.
Quebec’s transport minister promises that the new interchange will be safer for motorists and quieter for nearby residents. But people in both NDG and St-Henri are worried that the impact on their neighbourhoods will be severe.
In western St-Henri, residents of the Village des Tanneries, who live right next to the interchange, fear nothing less than the complete disruption of their lives. Jody Negley, leader of the Citizens’ Committee of the Village des Tanneries, worries about having to live with six years of constant construction.
“Years of community effort on the part of residents and non-profit groups to improve quality of life in the area will be for naught,” she says. “Nobody will want to spend any time outside as the noise levels will be deafening, the air quality will be toxic, the newly built community gardens will be covered in grime [and] it will be unsafe for children to play outside, given the traffic and pollution.”
Elegant wood-panelled New York subway car with wicker seats from the turn of the twentieth century.
The New York Transit Museum is a paradise for public transportation obsessives. The museum has a chronological collection of turnstiles and subway tokens on display, with detailed descriptions of the minutest changes over the years. This may be a bit much for the average visitor, but everyone gets a kick out of wandering through the old subway trains downstairs, which contain period ads and the original transit maps.
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.
In the pantheon of public transit, Central-Mid-Levels Escalator is unique. Known in Cantonese as din tai, “or electric ladder, ” it was built in the early 1990s to facilitate travel between Hong Kong’s business district and the fashionable Mid-Levels residential area located above it. The esclator (which is actually a series of several different escalators, connected by various platforms and overpasses) works its way up, for nearly a kilometre, through a procession of steep, narrow streets.
Along the way, it passes through a half-abandoned market, past laneways and courtyards, a mosque shrouded in greenery, and a trendy restaurant and bar district now known as Soho, named because it is located south of Hollywood Road but no doubt meant to steal some glamour from better-known quarters in London and New York.
The best thing about the escalator is that it combines the freedom of the pedestrian experience with the fluid movement of motorized transport. There’s a certain kind of voyeurism that comes with riding the escalator, which puts you eye-level with balconies and apartments as you travel up the hill. “The Mid-Levels Escalator is the one place in town where it’s cool to be batgwa, unabashedly nosy,” wrote Daisann McLane (also responsible for the excellent Learning Cantonese blog) in the New York Times, ten years after the escalator opened.
“Riding the escalator every day, I feel as if I have a personal relationship with the occupants of several apartments along the route, the ones whose second- or third-story windows are so close to the escalator you can practically reach out and touch their flowerpots. As the stairs glide me up the hill, I stare into interiors lighted by the glow of red ancestral altars. On my morning commute, I mull over why the people on Shelley Street have hung fish in their windows to dry and lament the unfortunate sofa cushion pattern chosen by the occupants of the corner apartment by Caine Road.”
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.
Le marchand de crême à la glace se tenait au coin des rues avec une petite voiture où était installé son bidon d’ice cream qui’il débitait à un sou le cocotier. Celui-là, il va sans dire, était particulièrement l’ami des enfants. 
Montreal Apartments