Dusk on High Street

High Street isn’t much of a high street. It’s actually a narrow sidestreet in the Hong Kong neighbourhood of Sai Ying Pun, which was first established in the mid-nineteenth century, shortly after the British took control of Hong Kong Island. Despite the steep hillside location, streets here were laid out in a tight grid, with First, Second, Third and High streets climbing up from Queen’s Road. They were intersected by Western, Centre and Eastern streets.

In this case, Centre Street was the true high street of the neighbourhood; High Street itself was so named simply because it was the highest road in the development. Not coincidentally, it also marked the dividing line between Chinese and European settlement, with members of the latter group allowed to enjoy, quite exclusively, the cooler air and more spacious confines higher up the hill.

Today’s High Street remains a dividing line between the working- and lower-middle-class streets down the hill and the much pricier Mid-Levels further up. It’s an unpretentious strip with a comfortable diversity of businesses (including, as Wikipedia notes, 15 car mechanics, a bakery, a greengrocer, four cafés, a sign maker and an art gallery, among many other things). It’s also a bit of a student ghetto, home to many people who study at the nearby University of Hong Kong.

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.

More

Street Vendor Songs

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!…”

More

The Cavern Quarter

When you mention the name Liverpool to a non-Brit, they are likely to think of one of two things: Liverpool Football Club, whose worldwide brand power is second only to their Premiership rivals Manchester United, or The Beatles (indeed, mention the city’s name to a typical North American and they will likely only make a connection with the latter).

Liverpool, the perennial underdog of British cities and the butt of many jokes from Londoners, is this year’s European Capital of Culture — far from being just a city of football and youth gangs. Large-scale redevelopment projects carrying designs by such ‘Starchitects’ as Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli are flowering up all along its UNESCO World Heritage Site-designated waterfront. Liverpool is hoping that its cultural coronation by the EU will shake the image that many hold of the city — that of a rough-and-tumble, crumbling port town where the locals speak a perplexing dialect, Scouse, which can be best described as a cross between Gaelic and Swedish.

Today’s Liverpool is more akin to the boomtown of the 19th century, when the steamship lines and related merchant industries held great sway in the city. However, despite the attention that Liverpool has recently been receiving for its cultural and economic revitalization, the city will perhaps always be umbilically tied to the fab name of its most famous export.

More

Chinatown’s Jewish History

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.”

More

Nathalie and Denbigh

My hunt for apartment building names has only just begun, but these two photos show exactly why I’m interested in them in the first place. Appartement Nathalie is located on St. Denis near Rachel, right in the middle of the Plateau Mont-Royal. The Denbigh, meanwhile, can be found about five kilometres to the west, at the corner of de Maisonneuve and Elm in Westmount.

Both were built around the same time in the late nineteenth century. Without being too obvious, their names speak a lot to Montreal’s cultural and linguistic divide, between francophones and anglophones, French-Canadians and Anglo-Scots. But they also hint at trends that bridged that divide, like the increasing popularity of apartment buildings among Montreal’s upper middle-class, French and English alike, in the late 1800s.

Public Fire Alarms

Over the weekend, as he ate a slice of pecan pie, my friend Sam teased me for dwelling so much on the minutiae of urban life. “Next you’re going to be writing about doorknobs,” he said, “and you’ll have photos of all the doorknobs in Mile End.”

Not yet. Today, I’m looking at the public fire alarm boxes on the streets of Boston, which you can find throughout the city and its suburbs. “For Fire, Open Then Pull Down Hook,” they read. Pulling the lever activates a machine that sends a signal, by telegraph, to Boston’s fire department. While these boxes were once common across North America, they have almost all been removed or abandoned. Boston, however, has maintained a fully functional system.

Maybe that’s because they were invented there. Boston’s government commissioned the system in 1851, just five years after the invention of the telegraph, and the first box was placed into service in the spring of 1852. Since then, the number of boxes on Boston’s streets has risen from 40 to 1,259 (still down from a peak of nearly 3,000).

Even if the boxes are antiquated, Boston has no plans of getting rid of them. “Fire officials say the wireless world hasn’t negated the system’s value. They point to the Sept. 11 attacks, when cellphone networks became overloaded. And in a blackout, they say, people can’t recharge their cellphones,” reported the Boston Globe in a feature published yesterday. Scrapping the boxes would save about $2 million per year. In fact, Boston nearly did get rid of them in 1983, but ultimately decided that they were worth keeping after all.

I’m glad they did. After all, if the fire alarm boxes were gone, what would I write about?

Past Lives on Milton Street

I’ve always loved this house on Milton Street, between Ste. Famille and Jeanne Mance, in Montreal’s McGill Ghetto. For awhile, I used to eat breakfast across the street at Milton Place, a greasy spoon, and wonder what it would be like to live there.

I’ll probably never know, but at least I can find out who did. According to the city’s property records and Lovell’s Directory, the house was built in 1900 by John Greig and his wife Janet. John was a “commercial traveller” (a euphemism for door-to-door salesman?), which must have been a pretty good job because he and Janet stayed put in their house until 1942.

After that, a procession of different people occupied the house. The last Lovell’s directory, issued in 1976, reported that it was home to R. Minard and David Brant Reid.

One block west on Milton is another interesting house. It looks like it was converted, at some point in its history, into an apartment building. Its main entrance was bricked over and a new one was built on the west side of the building.

The city, strangely enough, has no record of this building’s address, but it was probably built sometime around 1900. Its early residents, like most of those on Milton Street and in the surrounding neighbourhood, were probably middle-class WASPs. In 1904, for instance, nearly all of Milton’s residents had Anglo-Saxon names, except for a few French-Canadians and a handful of Chinese families.

Montreal’s Lost Expo Opportunity

Expo 67’s 40th anniversary has passed, but there’s one aspect of the world fair that I find strangely overlooked: its transportation system. While the Minirail and pedicabs moved people around the Expo site, more serious transit links were needed to get them to and from Notre Dame and St. Helen’s islands.

That’s where the metro, Expo Express and hovercrafts came into play. Hovercrafts were used to speed people between the South Shore, La Ronde and the Cité du Havre. The metro’s yellow line was built between Montreal and Longueuil because it offered a stop on St. Helen’s Island, right in the middle of the Expo action.

The Expo Express, meanwhile, was an above-ground metro line that ran for 5.7 kilometres between La Ronde and La Cité du Havre, with stops at four stations along the way. In terms of technology, it was essentially the same as the Toronto subway, except for one important difference: it was completely automated. Trains ran every five minutes and carried 1,000 passengers each.

After Expo ended, Expo Express was completely dismantled and the hovercrafts were discarded. It might not seem like such a big deal: they were needed for a fair and, when that fair ended, they were discarded. So what?

Well, it strikes me as awfully short-sighted to have permanently scrapped such an efficient public transportation system. Whereas Expo sites in other cities were intensively reused — after Expo 86, Vancouver redeveloped its fair site as a new residential district with room for 20,000 people — Montreal didn’t do much with its own. Today, we have a casino, a racetrack, a beach and a nice park, but that’s about it.

More

The Isles of Montreal

This map of “The Isles of Montreal as they have been Survey’d By the French Engineers” was drawn in 1761, one year after the British conquest of New France. It depicts most of the Hochelaga Archipelago, including the walled town of Ville-Marie, or Montreal, which at the time was home to about 5,500 people living in 900 dwellings. Montreal was still quite rural in character, consisting mainly of two-storey houses with large gardens, and it was already spreading beyond its walls into the surrounding lands.

Even though this map takes a somewhat liberal interpretation of Montreal’s geography — the mountain does not extend nearly as far west as it would seem to indicate — what strikes me is how many of the island’s natural features have been suppressed over the course of its development. Entire streams, rivers and lakes have been completely done away with, including Otter Lake and the Rivière Saint-Pierre, which ran through the area now known as the Turcot Yards.

Such geographic alterations occurred in every major city. In Boston, they were quite dramatic. Whereas the city was practically an island for the first two centuries of its existence, landfill projects in the early nineteenth century transformed it into a much chunkier peninsula. Beacon Hill was carved up in order to provide the soil that was used to fill Back Bay and the South End.

The Widening of Dorchester

One of the more overlooked stories in the history of Montreal’s urban development is the widening of Dorchester Street. For more than a century, this long street spanned the centre of Montreal, from the working-class neighbourhoods of the Faubourg Sainte Marie to the more cossu quarters of the Golden Square Mile and lower Westmount. It was essentially Victorian in character, lined by nineteenth-century rowhouses, apartment buildings and not a few important landmarks, including Montreal’s Catholic cathedral and general hospital.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Dorchester had become a typical downtown street lined by a ragtag assortment of businesses, tenements and rooming houses. When Jean Drapeau was elected mayor in 1954 he saw in this unassuming artery the potential for a grand thoroughfare. Shortly after he took office, his administration ordered the destruction of hundreds of buildings along Dorchester; in 1955, the street was widened into an eight-lane boulevard.

Drapeau was as straight-edged and zealous in his desire for renewal as Montreal’s previous mayors had been corrupt and satisfied with the city’s disorder. In a way, the new Dorchester reflected his personal character and politicial ambitions: bold, even revolutionary, but also stern, unfriendly and controlling, a prude in a libertine city. The new Dorchester was not just a departure from Montreal’s traditional urbanism, it was a direct rebuke to it. It rejected the homely, intimate streets that have always defined the Montreal landscape, a clutter of mismatched staircases, cornices and odd signs. In part, this was in keeping with the Modernist ideals of the postwar era, but it was also part of Drapeau’s plan to do away with the old Montreal for which he had so much contempt.

More

Tear Down This Wall

I have a hard time conceiving of the Berlin Wall. The above photo, taken in 1985 by Robin McMorran, a visiting British tourist, only adds to my incomprehension. Look at the way it snakes through the city almost arbitrarily, cutting off squares, streets, streetcar tracks. It was absurd and surreal yet it defined the day-to-day reality of Berlin for more than a generation.

The first incarnation of the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, when Soviet and East German leaders agreed that the flow of refugees towards the West needed to be stemmed. Over the next two decades, the wall was rebuilt four times, until it reached its final and most infamous state in 1975. The wall became a backdrop to speeches by Western leaders; it was there, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, that Ronald Reagan uttered his most famous pronouncement: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Despite its rhetoric, though, the West did little to prevent the construction of the wall in the first place. For nearly three decades, it divided families and neighbourhoods. Even Berlin’s complex subway system was cut in two by the wall.

Berlin’s wall was far from unique. Walls have, for centuries, divided cities from their hinterland, but they are increasingly being used to restrict movement within cities themselves. In the early 1980s, the Turkish and Greek halves of the Cypriot capital of Nicosia were separated by a barrier. Jerusalem has long been divided by the border between Israel and Palestine, a border that has been reinforced in recent years by the addition of a tall separation barrier. In Baghdad, military forces have laid the groundwork for a new wall that will separate Shia neighbourhoods from Sunni ones.

In some ways, the walls that exist along many stretches of the US-Mexico border, dividing otherwise contiguous urban areas like Nogales, can be seen in the same light. (Compare this photo of the border, marked by an imposing wall, with this one from 1898 in which there is no barrier whatsoever.) This is especially true as border cities grow larger and even more intertwined, despite the ever more burdensome restrictions on movement.

Andrew Chau, on his blog urban-ism, looked last month at the “(un)intended consequences of building walls. “In our capitalist system, goods and capital are allowed to move freely, but migrants cannot,” he wrote. “For the corporate elite and their companies, this is essential to distance themselves from the growing inequities between the rich and the poor.”

In cities divided, their main effect is to entrench social inequality by restricting free movement, just as the Berlin Wall did for 28 years. That wall was torn down, but in its place have risen many others.

Montreal and its Suburbs… in 1843

Way back in 1843, Montreal, population 50,000, was big enough to have six whole suburbs to its name. On the west, there was the Recollet Suburb, St. Ann’s Suburb, St. Joseph’s Suburb and the St. Antoine Suburb. On the north, the St. Lawrence Suburb followed the path of St. Lawrence Street, already the city’s main north-south axis. To the east, finally, was the Quebec Suburb, strung along St. Mary Street, the eastern extension of Notre Dame and the main road down river to Quebec City.

Traces of these old extra-muros neighbourhoods are still visible — to an extent. In the early 1970s, nearly all of the Faubourg Québec, commonly known as the Faubourg à m’lasse, thanks to the pervasive odour of molasses from one of its sugar refineries, was demolished for the Maison Radio-Canada, a vast complex home to the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. Around the same time, most of the rest of it was razed for the east end of the Ville-Marie Expressway. Since the late 1990s, what was left has been redeveloped as a residential area known, naturally enough, as the Faubourg Québec. Wholly uninspired in its architecture and design, one of the only remarkable aspects is a reconstructed viaduct and a small plaza that retraces the old rail line that once ran through the area.

Now, a large part of the old Quebec Suburb is set to be transformed into a high-density, mixed-used neighbourhood centered around the old Viger Station, the Canadian Pacific Railway’s first railroad station/hotel combo. Nearby, the giant CHUM hospital complex is set to be built on the remains of the old neighbourhood that emerged on lower St. Denis after a fire devastated most of the Quebec and St. Lawrence suburbs in 1852. Among the buildings slated to be demolished is the St. Sauveur Church, one of the first buildings to emerge after the fire.

Across town, meanwhile, in the remains of the old St. Ann’s Suburb, better known as Griffintown, the stage is being set for an even more massive redevelopment. Today, details were announced for a $1.3 billion retail, residential, office and entertainment district that will contain at least 3,800 housing units, a theatre, a cinema, office space, two hotels, plenty of retail, a tramway connection to downtown, new parks and plenty of parking.

This area was already decimated in the 1960s and 70s, when much of its old industry and housing stock was demolished, as well as St. Ann’s Church, the focus of its large Irish community, so this redevelopment is almost working with a blank slate. At least it will respect the area’s existing street pattern and incorporate many of its surviving historic structures. It looks like, in both east and west, Montreal’s first suburbs are being remade once again — hopefully this time with a bit more sensitivity than before.

St. Louis Square’s Old Basin

St. Louis Square, often known as Carré St-Louis (though this is, to the surprise of many, actually an anglicism), is one of Montreal’s greatest public spaces. A traditional Victorian park, ringed by beautiful old greystone rowhouses and villas, it first came into existence as a reservoir in 1851. In 1880, the reservoir was drained and the square as we now know it was built, complete with walking paths and a fountain.

Except that wasn’t entirely the case. The beautiful fountain that now stands in the middle of the square, serving as a central focus for all of its activity, once found itself in the middle of a much larger basin of water. In one newspaper illustration from 1902, the basin appears to cover the entire central section of the park. It has been converted into a summer wading pool for children, who frolic in the water as their mothers, dressed in long dark frocks, promenade around the square under the shade of parasols.

I’m not sure when the basin was redeveloped, but it continued to exist as recently as 1943, according to one photo showing workers improving the basin’s drainage system.

More