Archive for the History category
December 27th, 2009
Montreal seen from Mile End, 1840
One of the old Gazette articles I referred to in my post about the revival of the name Mile End also contains a nice description of Mile End in 1840, when it was sparsely-populated farmland a good 20-minute carriage ride from the edge of Montreal. It comes from Joseph Charles, who lived in the area as a boy.
“We moved out to the Mile End and lived for a time in a great big old stone house on Mr. Jacob Wurtele’s farm. It stood far from the road and there was a fine avenue of basswood, elm and poplar trees in front. Here my mother taught school. The children came in from all round.
The Spaulding farm was a fine farm then, run by Mrs. Spaulding though her husband was living, but he was old and feeble. There was one son, Bill, who worked on the farm, and her son James Spaulding kept the Mile End Hotel. There was another large hotel kept by a French family, and there was a large tannery (Blair’s, I think) and Charlton’s market garden, and about a dozen houses formed the Mile End of that day.
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Popularity: 9% [?]
December 27th, 2009
Mile End Station, built in 1878, rebuilt in 1911 and demolished in 1936
The name Mile End might now be associated with Montreal’s trendiest neighbourhood (a distinction that will surely move elsewhere in a few years), but three decades ago, it was in danger of extinction. Though the area north of Mount Royal Avenue was known as Mile End in the first half-century of its development, it became an anachronism after World War II, used only by old-timers and by newspaper journalists who had to explain its past significance.
I was reminded of this when I was browsing through the Gazette’s archives, which were recently digitized and made available by Google News. In a trivia column published on March 15, 1969, a resident of Mount Royal Avenue named Edward McElligott asks about the origin of Mile End’s name, noting that “though few English-speaking people today know much of it, both English-speaking and French-speaking folks of years ago knew it well.
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Popularity: 25% [?]
December 14th, 2009
Queen’s Road, near Noho, in 1930 and today. Photo by HK Man
Noho is Hong Kong’s newest neighbourhood. It’s also one of the oldest. This is, of course, an old part of town that has just recently gentrified and been given a New York-inspired moniker, which stands for North of Hollywood Road and is a counterpoint to the already-trendy enclave of Soho, which as you might guess sits on the other side of Hollywood Road.
Though it might now be known for dining, drinking and shopping, Noho was once associated with a few other things: revolution, prostitution and printing. First developed in the 1850s, shortly after the arrival of the British in Hong Kong, the area around Gough Street was a borderland between the city’s European and Chinese quarters. To the east were the banks, clubs and colonial institutions that served Hong Kong’s elite; to the west was a parallel Chinese city, crowded with migrant workers and merchants from across the harbour.
Living conditions were dire. With the villas and apartments of Central reserved only for whites, space was at a premium, and Chinese families were forced to live seven or eight to a room in squalid tenements.
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Popularity: 5% [?]
December 9th, 2009
Ten years after its handover to the People’s Republic of China, the old Portuguese colony of Macau hardly abounds with the tongue of its former master. Portuguese signs still cling to shops and older buildings, but the language of the streets is unmistakeably Cantonese — with the occasional whiff of Mandarin coming from the direction of mainland tour groups. Macau’s future, its leaders have decided, is as a gambling destination, and increasing numbers of visitors from across Asia pack its Vegas-brand hotels night and day.
But the enclave’s Lusitanian design vocabulary remains remarkably intact, and nowhere is this more evident than in the patterns that swirl beneath its pedestrians’ feet. Calçadas (literally “pavements”), the unique street mosaics that decorate the cities of Portugal and its former colonies from Lisbon to Luanda.
The origins of calçadas are somewhat unclear. The popularity of tiles in Portuguese art first exploded with the introduction of geometrical ceramic arts by the Moors. Decorated tilework, known in Portuguese as azulejo, soon came to cover houses and churches across the country. But the first recorded calçada was not the product of an artist’s whimsy, but as a makework project for prisoners thought up by an army officer.
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Popularity: 7% [?]
December 3rd, 2009
Photo by David Bellis
The best way to learn about a city is to simply wander the streets: eventually, something will catch your attention, like an odd-looking cornice or the way a road curves, and you’ll ask yourself why it is the way it is. Idle curiosity is how I began my research on Montreal’s street signs and Hong Kong’s rooftops. For David Bellis, who runs the Hong Kong heritage website Gwulo, it was an architectural flourish that led him to wonder about three streets in Causeway Bay.
Halfway between the shopping hubs of Times Square and Sogo, on the corner of Yun Ping and Lan Fong roads, is a smart-looking, vaguely Art Deco building that serves as a hotel. At first glance, it seems to be an older postwar building that was recently restored; its architecture is in the same half-Deco, half-Modernist style that was popular here in the 1950s. This structure, though, is particularly sleek and not as utilitarian as most, with clean lines that curve gracefully around the building’s corner edge.
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Popularity: 4% [?]
November 29th, 2009
Even after seven years of walking its streets, I’m still finding new things in Mile End, the neighbourhood I called home before I left Montreal. Back for a visit last month, I got around mostly by bike, which took me down streets on which I wouldn’t normally walk, like the quiet stretch of Casgrain in the old garment district. That’s where I spotted a laneway with an unusual name: Swiss Lane, according to the street sign, though “lane” has been patched over with white tape and the alley’s official name is now “ruelle Swiss.”
I can’t find any clues as to the origins of Swiss Lane’s name. The city’s otherwise comprehensive Répertoire historique des toponymes montréalais contains no reference to anything Swiss or Suisse. The only mention I can find in the Lovell’s Directory indicates that Swiss Lane was “not built upon.” (Its entry in the 1935 directory is found right under Swastika Avenue, which was apparently a lane off Ste. Famille Street.) So what’s the story behind Swiss Lane?
Popularity: 11% [?]
November 23rd, 2009
Place Gérald-Godin in 1979 and 2009. Compilation by Guillaume St-Jean
Over the past decade, Montreal has invested heavily in big-ticket squares and plazas, including the remarkable Place Jean-Paul Riopelle and redesigned Victoria Square, both completed in 2003, and the surprisingly successful Place des Festivals, which opened earlier this year. But some of the smaller new squares are just as impressive, perhaps doubly so for the fact that they’ve been perfectly integrated into the city’s life without any kind of the fuss or introspection demanded by their bigger counterparts.
Place Gérald-Godin is the best example of these small new squares. It sits just outside the sole entrance to Mont-Royal metro, one of the city’s busiest stations, and as a result it’s busy throughout the day. Until recently, however, it wasn’t so much a square as a patch of grass traversed by a couple of asphalt pathways. A building that housed a caisse populaire (and before that, a bicycle shop) occupied the corner of Berri and Mount Royal, next to the station, making the space in front feel like more like an afterthought than a real place.
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Popularity: 11% [?]
November 19th, 2009
Curious about what the building his great-great-grandfather lived in was like, ex-Brooklynite Zach van Schouwen was soon researching the history of his entire street. The result is “The Block,” a series pen-and-ink drawings of how the stretch of Eldridge Street, between Stanton and Rivington on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, looked in every year since 1795.
Eldridge turns out to be fairly typical of the neighborhood, which evolved from “Delancey’s Farm” to a series of tall, narrow tenements that start replacing the street’s small rowhouses in the 1850s. Fire escapes begin to appear, in accordance with law, in the 1920s and 30s. The block takes a downward turn just after World War II, when a number of tenements are gradually boarded up, torn down, and replaced with garages and storage facilities. In 1985, the entire block becomes occupied by a single housing project.
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Popularity: 3% [?]
November 12th, 2009
Howard Elias, founder of the Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival
There aren’t a lot of Jews in Hong Kong, but that hasn’t stopped the city from becoming the centre of Jewish life in Asia, with one of the continent’s oldest synagogues, an active community centre and the only Jewish film festival on this side of the world.
Hong Kong’s first Jews arrived with the British in 1842 — many had been trading in nearby Canton, now known as Guangzhou — and by the turn of the twentieth century, some of the territory’s most prominent families were Jewish, including the Kadoories and Sassoons, whose names have been enshrined in streets, hills and institutions across the city. (Andy Lau, arguably Hong Kong’s biggest pop star, lives in a mansion on Kadoorie Avenue.) One of Hong Kong’s early governors, Sir Matthew Nathan, was Jewish, and though he wasn’t local — Hong Kong was just one of his many stops in the imperial service — he did provide the community with a certain amount of official attention.
Despite a small influx of Jews from Shanghai, Harbin and Tianjin after the Japanese invasion of China, Hong Kong’s Jewish community remained tiny until quite recently; it numbered 200 in 1968 and 2,500 in 1998. Recently, though, more and more Jewish expatriates have been moving to Hong Kong, and the community numbers somewhere between 6,000 to 10,000 — about the same size as the Jewish communities in Calgary, Frankfurt and pre-Katrina New Orleans.
Earlier this week, I interviewed Howard Elias, the Toronto-born founder of the Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival, for CNNGo. Below is a slightly expanded transcript of our conversation.
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Popularity: 11% [?]
November 10th, 2009
Queen’s Pier in 2006. Photo by David Wong
It was bad enough when they tore it down — now there’s the question of where to rebuild it. After the storm that swept through Hong Kong when the government tore down the Central Star Ferry pier in 2007, making way for a land reclamation project that is extending the waterfront by 300 metres, it was careful to avoid the same mistake when it removed the Queen’s Pier in 2008.
Instead of being knocked down, each piece of pier was carefully preserved and put into storage. Though it wasn’t particularly remarkable on its own, the pier was important as a symbol of British colonialism, being the place where British royals and Hong Kong governors landed when they arrived in Hong Kong. Together with City Hall and the Star Ferry pier, it formed part of a trinity of white Modernist structures that represented the straightforward ambition of postwar colonialism.
Now that the land reclamation project is well underway, the question is whether the Queen’s Pier should be rebuilt on the new waterfront, or in its previous location, on the shores of an artificial lagoon. The government is pressing for the former, which would allow the pier to continue functioning as a pier, but heritage activists insist on the latter. Yesterday, a group of them proposed that Edinburgh Place (the collective name for City Hall and its environs) be declared an historic monument, which would legally require the government to put the pier back where it originally stood.
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Popularity: 6% [?]
November 9th, 2009
A city was reunited twenty years ago. There’s plenty to read about the demise of the Berlin Wall, which fell on November 9th, 1989, but what occupies my thoughts is Robin McMorran’s 1985 photo, which I originally posted in 2007. It says a lot about the arbitrariness and absurdity of separation walls, which in the case of Berlin passed right through the middle of streets and neighbourhoods like a clumsy butcher’s cleaver. McMorran returned to photograph that same spot in 1990, and though the wall is gone, the void it created isn’t.
Popularity: unranked [?]
October 8th, 2009
Former camillienne in St. Louis Square
Montreal owes much to two twentieth-century strongmen/mayors: Camillien Houde and Jean Drapeau. Drapeau gave us sleek Modernism, expressways and artificial islands, but Houde was a more populist kind of guy who made his mark with public markets and, just as importantly, public toilets.
Camilliennes, as they came to be known, were Montreal’s answer to the Parisian vespasiennes, only far more elegant.
Washrooms were opened in prominent locations throughout the city, such as Phillips Square, where they were built underground and were accessed by two broad sets of granite stairs. In Viger, Dominion and Cabot squares, the toilets were housed in adorable stone kiosks with big windows and copper roofs.
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Popularity: 5% [?]
August 11th, 2009
Cheung Chau is one of my favourite bits of Hong Kong, but only recently have I strayed outside of its warren of small streets between the beach and harbour and up into the hill just south of town. Earlier this summer, after climbing up a long set of stairs at the end of a narrow lane, I was surprised to come across a long, winding footpath, lined by comfortable-looking houses with large balconies and lush gardens, called the Peak Road. It seemed like a deliberate reference the Hong Kong’s more famous Victoria Peak, the one where houses sell for tens of millions of dollars and the colonial elite built an exclusive hideaway for itself in the days of British control.
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Popularity: unranked [?]
August 3rd, 2009
Pottinger Street, Central, 1955
Then: a row of ornate stone houses graced by balconies and verandas. Now: a parking garage. It’s a sharp contrast typical of the then-and-now images posted by Lee Chi-man on Flickr, a photo-sharing website. For two years, under the alias HK Man, he has taken old photos of Hong Kong street scenes and paired them with new photos shot at the same locations and angles.
Lee’s simple juxtapositions highlight the city’s drastic pace of change over the last century. They reveal enormous differences between Hong Kong’s past and present, including the near-total disappearance of the shantytowns, colonial villas and low-rise shophouses that once dominated the city’s landscape. Plenty of interesting minor changes are also evident. Over the past few decades, sidewalks have been hemmed in by grey metal railings; open, cluttered shopfronts have been glassed-in and tidied up; and flyovers and pedestrian footbridges, once rare, have become ubiquitous.
“Old Hong Kong had such a special feel,” says Lee, a computer animator born in the 1970s. “I can’t understand how change has come so quickly. It actually makes me upset. The old Hong Kong you see in photos has been destroyed.”
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Popularity: 3% [?]
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