Morning Coffee: Bombay’s Zoroastrian Cafes

Zoroastrian carving, Bombay. Thanks to Toreajade.

Bombay’s Zoroastrian community emigrated from Iran about 1,000 years ago and brought their religion along with them–the oldest living monotheistic faith. They are also known as Parsis, because of their Persian origin. Since they cannot marry outside the community, they have retained a distinct identity and appearance. They worship in Bombay’s towers of silence. where sky burials are also performed–a practice that has come under scrutiny in recent years because of the declining vulture population.

Though Zoroastrians represent a mere 0.005% of India’s population, they have had a considerable impact on the country. In the West, the best known Parsi is probably Queen singer Freddy Mercury, who grew up in Bombay. Indians are more familiar with the Tata family, who seem to own everything–you start your day with a cup of TataTea, pay your TataPower bills, drive to work in your TataCar, and make calls on the TataSky network. In recent years, the Tatas have moved outside of India, acquiring Tetley tea, Ritz Carlton Hotels, and Jaguar.

Kyani Café, Bombay

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Shelter: Life in Habitat 67

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.

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Dep City: Montreal’s Convenience Stores

If Montreal seems saturated with dépanneurs, that’s because it is: 1,127 crowd the island, about one for every 1,500 people. Since they emerged in their current form in the 1970s, the descendants of tobacconists and once-ubiquitous corner grocery stores, dépanneurs have become an inextricable part of life in Montreal.

They also are an important but often overlooked aspect of the city’s economy. For business owners, many of whom are immigrants, dépanneurs represent a rare field of work that poses virtually no barrier to entry, aside from a relatively small amount of capital.

“An immigrant arrives in this country with a degree, with skills, but cannot find a job because he doesn’t have Canadian experience,” said Bakr Ibrahim, a professor at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business who specializes in small business and ethnic entrepreneurship. “For one reason or another, he cannot gain employment in mainstream (fields), so the first thing he knows is to start a business on his own.” Increasingly, however, independent dépanneurs are under pressure from corporate convenience-store chains and from supermarkets, so the independent operators need to be ever more nimble and attuned to the market they serve, which can be as small as a few blocks.

For example, Yodh Ubhi, who owns a dépanneur on Park Ave. in Mile End, has begun selling “heat and eat” Indian food made by Aliments Nutrifresh Ltd., a prepared-food supplier based in St. Laurent. He said the move was based on requests from customers who had travelled to Toronto and noticed many convenience stores there served prepared food.

In some neighbourhoods, dépanneurs have expanded their offering by selling fruits and vegetables, meat and ethnic products. That’s the case in Park Extension, said Ubhi, who has lived there since the early 1980s. “There’s very cutthroat competition” in that area, he said, adding that South Asians who operate dépanneurs know the competition’s prices because “they go to every different store and make their own prices cheaper. They buy bulk and they sell fresh meat, too.”

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A Day in the Life of a Depanneur

Owning a dépanneur has a big impact on your social life, says Yodh Ubhi, standing behind the counter of Dépanneur PMS at the corner of Park Ave. and Villeneuve St.

“You have none,” Ubhi said.

He’s not kidding. Ubhi’s hours—14 hours a day, seven days a week—would make most office workers weep. Every morning, he opens the store at 7 a.m., and works without a break until early afternoon, when his wife arrives with lunch. Ubhi eats in the store’s basement, a former bank vault, before taking a three-hour siesta. At 6 p.m., he trudges back upstairs and takes over from his wife, who returns home to make dinner. The day finally ends at midnight, when Ubhi closes shop and returns home to Park Extension.

“It’s not a one-person job,” he said, adding his 18-year-old daughter and 21-year-old son, both students, often come to help.

Ubhi, who came to Montreal from India’s Punjab state in the early 1970s, bought his dépanneur in 2002, after nearly two decades in the textile business. At $65,000—a little over $100,000 with inventory—the store was a bargain. Spacious and well-stocked, it had already undergone a $150,000 renovation in the 1990s when it was part of a small dépanneur chain that ultimately folded.

“I had no experience whatsoever in the dep business,” Ubhi said. “I saw guys working and thought, ‘Hey, that’s nothing, it’s a piece of cake.’ But it’s not that easy. It’s very demanding. There are long hours. You have to know about your supply, cash flow, customers, your neighbourhood, and on top of that you have to provide good service. If you don’t have even one of these, you’re screwed up. You’re not going to last a year.” At the beginning, Ubhi made mistakes, like offering credit.

“When you’re new, you believe everyone,” he said, but he soon realized he had lost nearly $7,000 to customers who had scammed him out of cigarettes and alcohol. Now, a cartoon drawing of a gangster with the caption, “No Credit: It’s Time to Pay Up, Sucka!” is displayed prominently at the cash.

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Morning Coffee #10: Café Ekberg, Helsinki

Inside Café Ekberg, Helsinki

Most people don’t think of coffee when you mention Helsinki. The usual things that come to mind are death metal bands, formula one racers, and blonde people. Nevertheless, statistics show that Finns are the biggest coffee drinkers on earth. They drink almost twice as much coffee as the French, and nearly three times more than us. It is no surprise that Helsinki, the capital city, has loads of great coffee shops.

But I don’t drink coffee, though I still like to linger in cafés. So I stopped by the oldest café in town: Café Ekberg, which opened on February 3, 1852. It is small, yet quiet and sophisticated. More importantly, it provided me with the instant shelter from the chilly Finnish winter I was seeking.

I went for a delicious frothy hot chocolate. The place was full of formal Finns in evening attire. But then the sun rose and I remembered it was daytime, 10:00 AM, still somewhat dark, not really helping my jet lag. I looked around at the stiff elderly blond women and quiet gentlemen serving themselves heaping plates at the Nordic breakfast buffet table. I felt surreal, like an extra in a David Lynch movie, or should I say Aki Kaurismäki.

But that’s how I expected to feel in Finland, so there wasn’t any culture shock.

Outside the Bio Rex Cinema café, Helsinki

Sitting at Casa Acoreana

There are a few café terraces I really love, like Caffè Beano at 9th Street and 17th Avenue in Calgary, or Social Club at St. Viateur and Esplanade in Montreal. They’re perfect places to watch the city, but they’re also interesting social spaces in and of themselves, with regular customers and even little cliques that seem to claim sections of the terraces for themselves.

My favourite outdoor café, though, has got to be the Casa Acoreana at the corner of Augusta and Baldwin in Toronto’s Kensington Market. The coffee here is pretty good, and it’s certainly cheap, but what I really like about the place is the way it opens onto the street, becoming a sidewalk café in the truest of senses. With barely more than a dozen seats inside, all of them running along a narrow bar facing open windows that give out onto Augusta, most of Casa Acoreana’s seating space is on benches or at the bar outside. It feels open and accessible in the same way as Kensington as a whole.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so entertained by simply sitting at a café as I did when I was at Casa Acoreana. This part of Toronto has some of the most engaging streetlife I’ve ever encountered, diverse in every possible way. Across the street, I liked to watch people shopping at the Sun Wah Grocery while late morning cyclists rode past.

Shelter: A Home, For Now

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

Well, my first impression is that it’s small but very bright.

Marcus Benigno: It’s very airy, very bright. Bright makes things look bigger.

What appealed to you when you first saw this apartment?

Benigno: The most important part was the location. It’s really close to McGill but it’s not in the ghetto. It’s sort of in the Plateau, and Carré St. Louis is right there. We can hear the fountain at night. Oh, and it’s old. It used to be the maids’ chambers to the house that’s on the square. That’s why this apartment building only has four or five units and it’s connected to the house. So we’re actually living in two maid chambers. There are two doors (to the apartment.) I would prefer that it didn’t open to the kitchen but, you know, the kitchen is the hearth of the home.

That’s a nice table in the living room.

Benigno: That’s Kevin’s grandmother’s table.

Kevin Garneau: Great-grandmother.

So it’s a family heirloom?

Benigno: A lot of the furniture is his great-grandmother’s. But you know, this table shows you that I can’t really have space for a real living room. But I guess it works because the centre of the house is food.

Do you eat most of your meals at home?

Benigno: Oh yes, definitely. We cook a lot. A lot. Trust me. I’ve spent the whole day washing dishes.

The kitchen is small, but is it functional?

Benigno: We have the tiniest kitchen in Montreal! But we do with what we have.

You told me earlier that you both spent the summer away on trips, Marcus in the Middle East and Kevin in Africa. Did you collect anything?

Garneau: This is a box with all my stuff from Africa. I have all of these art objects and posters that I have yet to put on the wall. Otherwise, it’s Marcus that normally takes care of the decoration. The decor isn’t really ready. We put something on the wall, not because it’s beautiful, but because it touches us, because we have a connection with it. It’s a relation d’appartenance.

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An Unusual Ride on the Metro

“Point de fuite.” Photo by MTL Guy on Flickr.

I was going to wait until I’d seen it myself before writing about it, but Fagstein has beat me to the punch: there’s a spooky metro car going around on the orange line.

Spacing Montreal contributor Jacob Larsen was the first to tell me, at our last meeting, about his strange experience of riding in a metro car with a dark blue interior and creepy music playing over the PA system. Then, earlier this evening, my friend Mary told me that she too was in dark blue metro car when a woman’s voice could be heard saying, in Mandarin, “I think the next station is Berri-UQAM. It’s such a nice day out! That woman over there is cute. Oh, that other woman looks sad. But it’s such a nice day out!”

(Check out a cell phone video of the car here.)

The spooky metro car is an initiative by the artist Rose-Marie Goulet called Point de fuite. Goulet was interviewed last month on Radio-Canada’s morning show. The goal of the project, she said, was to reach out to “people who don’t necessarily have the opportunity to go to a place where they can see art, like a gallery or a museum. Why not have a work of art in our daily lives that can change attitudes, to provoke discussion amongst people in the metro?” In a nod to Montreal’s multilingualism, the audio clips in “Point de fuite” are in French, English, Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic.

“The ambient sound in the metro is very loud, up to 85 decibels, so we created sound ‘bubbles’ that interfere with our own aural space,” added Goulet. “The idea was to create another voyage, by sound and sight, beyond the trip that we take every day.”

I’d love to experience the installation myself, if only to see how passengers react. Unfortunately, many metro commuters are shoe-gazing zombies, so the effect of the art might be lost, at least at rush hour. “A lot of people on my train turned their heads wondering who was carrying speakers,” observes Fagstein. “The sound is surprisingly clear, and just a little bit louder than the station announcements. Reaction was sadly underwhelming. People coming home from work are amazingly uninterested in things going on around them.”

Point de fuite will ride the rails for another six months, eventually taking the blue and yellow lines as well as the orange. Pretty much the only way to experience it is to encounter it randomly. If you want to hunt it down, though (and I have no idea how that would be possible), you’ll find it in the centre car of the number 78-007 metro train.

Crossposted from Spacing Montreal.

Home Sweet Flophouse

A single-room occupancy hotel in Vancouver

Today’s Guardian features an article on a new generation of Japanese — most of them young men — unable to afford homes. They spend their days either unemployed or working at menial jobs; at night, they float between 24-hour internet cafés and capsule hotels.

“According to a recent government survey of the people the media has dubbed ‘net café refugees’, 5,400 people spend at least half the week living in cafés such as Manga Square, though most have little or no interest in the internet,” the Guardian reports. “Instead, they are attracted by the low cost of a night’s accommodation, an expanding array of services and the sympathetic attitude of café owners.” A night at a net café costs about $8.70 per night — double if you include dinner.

In some ways, living in an internet café is really just a novel take on an old standby: the flophouse. These cheap “cubicle hotels,” along with their slightly more upscale cousins, the single-room occupancy hotel (SRO), have traditonally offered low daily rates for a modest amount of private space. They flourished in North American cities until the 1960s, when they slowly began to disappear, with no tears shed from municipal authorities who saw them as a blight.

New York’s Bowery was especially famous for its flophouses. In the 1930s and 40s, up to 25,000 “Bowery bums” spent their lives on the street, many of them residing in its 100 flophouses. Today, just a few of those hotels remain; the rest were long ago purged by housing reform, urban renewal and gentrification. In Vancouver, an abundance of SROs has been whittled down to a mere handful as they have been converted into hostels, hotels or condos.

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To Market, To Market

There’s a new market in Montreal. For the next two weeks, and then again next spring, a farmer’s market will open outside Frontenac metro every Saturday between 10am and 4pm. It’s great news for one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, Ste. Marie, one that has only recently stepped away from an economic and social precipice.

Montreal already has four permanent, year-round public markets — Jean-Talon, Atwater, Maisonneuve and Lachine — and more than a dozen smaller, seasonal markets, including a few that operate 24 hours in the summer. Between the 1960s and early 1990s, though, Montreal’s markets were deeply unfashionable. A number of markets were closed in the 1960s and even the Jean-Talon and Atwater markets, the jewels in Montreal’s market crown, stagnated.

Things began to change in the late 1990s as people became more concerned about what they ate. Two seemingly contradictory tends — the growing popularity of both local produce and “exotic” imported food — made markets the destination of choice for a diverse range of Montrealers. It was not only food that drew them, either. The social experience of shopping at a market, where you can interact with merchants and producers who know a lot about what they sell, in a lively and sensual environment, was a refreshing antitode to the sterility of big-box supermarkets.

Since 2000, a lot of money has been invested in Montreal’s markets. A new market hall built in 2004 nearly doubled the Jean-Talon Market in size and a newly-expanded market in Lachine has also been making a go of it. The number of small neighbourhood markets has been expanding considerably.

Markets can have a remarkably positive effect on their surrounding neighbourhoods for a number of reasons. They’re important public spaces, for one, giving people in the neighbourhood a place to gather and interact. They are economic incubators, giving small merchants, producers and entrepreneurs affordable space to start a business, usually with very low overhead. When those businesses expand, they usually find space in the surrounding area, a trend that can be seen around Jean-Talon.

In a marginal neighbourhood like Ste. Marie, they also give people access to healthy and affordable produce. With that considered, it might be a good thing that the new market at Frontenac metro is a seasonal farmer’s market rather than a less flexible permanent market. When the Lachine Market reopened in 2004, it ignored the everyday grocery needs the surrounding neighbourhood in favour of a more boutique-style approach. It was ultimately reconfigured with a more successful focus on basic fruits and vegetables. Allowing the Frontenac market to evolve gradually might prevent that sort of problem.

On a related note, Le Devoir featured last week two articles on Montreal’s public markets. One, reflecting on the 75th anniversary of the Atwater Market, lamented that farmer’s markets have ceased to be a central part of life in Quebec: “It’s impossible now to a take a photo like the ones made at the beginning of the last century, when you could see Place Jacques-Cartier filled with shoppers, carts and the horses of vegetable producers or cars of growns who had come to town.”

Another takes a close look at the Jean-Talon Market and the changes it has seen since it opened. There’s more variety than in decades past… but no more live chickens.

“It Was Too Funky to Last”

McGill architecture students Jessica Dan (left) and Aurore Paluel-Marmont work at the Architecture Café, which is slated to be replaced by a corporate licensee. Photo by John Kenney

Like all good secrets, the Architecture Café is a bit hard to find, tucked as it is in the basement of McGill University’s School of Architecture.

Most students, unless they have a class in the lecture hall next door, are unlikely to come across it by chance. Yet this non-profit student-run café has long been one of the most popular spaces on campus, filled throughout the day with students and faculty from across the university.

At lunchtime, a line usually bends out the door and down a hallway as customers file in for sandwiches, pastries, zaatar and bargain-priced coffee.

Many see the café, started in 1993, as an alternative to the other cafeterias at McGill, which are run by such corporate licensees as Chartwells, a subsidiary of Compass Group Canada.

As students head back to classes, they might find that the last student-operated café at Montreal’s oldest university is packing up for good: McGill’s administration has ordered it closed.

According to Morton Mendelson, deputy provost of student life and learning, the move reflects the administration’s efforts to centralize food service on campus as a means to ensure health safety.

But since news of the café’s fate broke in early August, students have rallied behind a drive to keep it alive. A Facebook group called Save the Architecture Café, founded by the café’s student operators, drew more than 1,500 current and former McGill students as members within a week.

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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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Finding the Light in Tokyo

On my last trip to Tokyo I could not help but remember how important it was when living there to choose an apartment with sufficient light — something I now take for granted since I moved to Los Angeles. When I first moved to Tokyo, I looked at an apartment in the building on the left, on the second floor, the second apartment in. The balcony, which is barely visible, provided the only real source of light. Needless to say, I did not take that apartment.

But other buildings do more to maximize natural light. In the photo below, which I took from my hotel room on a recent visit to the city, note how the taller buildings have a graduated set back as the floors go up, thereby increasing the amount of light available to those on lower floors. I am not sure if this set back is mandated by planning codes and, if it is, whether that has always been the case.

Airport Space

Welcome to the airport. Photo by Ivan Makarov

Long lines, delays, security hassles. Going to the airport brings to mind a number of things, but art, especially interactive art with a political conscience, is generally not one of them. That’s where Terminal Zero One comes in: A new art project at Pearson International Airport, it hopes to transform one of Toronto’s busiest — yet, because of security concerns, most restrictive— public spaces into a place for open dialogue.

Located on the public departures level of Terminal 1, the exhibition brings together five digital installations that explore the experience of contemporary air travel. Passage oublié is arguably the most ambitious one. It’s a politically charged take on extraordinary rendition, the CIA’s controversial practice of covertly transferring suspected terrorists from Iraq and Afghanistan to secret prisons where it is alleged they are likely to be tortured. Airports around the world are believed to have been used as transfer points for these prisoners.

Passage oublié allows passersby to learn more about extraordinary renditions by interacting with a world map displayed on a large video touch screen. Its real goal, however, is to turn the airport, Toronto’s gateway to the world, into a space for public dialogue. Through the Internet or text message, anyone can send a message to Passage oublié that will be displayed on its virtual map and “flown” — using real-time flight data supplied by the Greater Toronto Airport Authority — to one of the international airports used for rendition flights.

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