Public Perception of Bicycles

The City of Montreal recently began its annual operation of removing on-street bike racks. This year, it seems that they have been particularly bad about putting up warning signs on the bike racks and many people have had their bicycles removed together along with the bike rack that it was attached to. One new resident of Montreal called in to one of the local radio programs to complain about just such an incident at a Mile End bike parking site.

This news item generated a few lively responses which demonstrate the range of emotions around bicycles. On voice mail…

I live in Mile End. On Saturday I was standing on my balcony and I saw a black pick-up truck, with no markings on it, towing a trailer taking away bike racks and throwing entire bike racks, with the bikes attached, into the back of the pickup truck and into the trailer. Now the funny part, and maybe it’s not so funny, was that just moments prior to that I saw people locking their bikes to the bike rack and going into the cafe and coming back and their bikes being gone. You know, there is no respect for bicycles. Bicycles are not toys. Bicycles aren’t just somebody’s hobby. People actually use them for transportation, and I don’t think that Helen Fotopulos [the borough, who is also on Montreal’s executive committee for urban planning] or anybody else at City Hall realizes that.

And by text message…

That bike story — WOW, that’s hard-hitting news. For a small town! What’s next? Little Billy from Dorval got a scout’s badge?

Waiting for Customers

Through the window on St. Viateur Street

Grey Fall Days

Quiet, grey autumn days in Mile End

Reflections on Park Avenue

I’ve already left Montreal, but I still walk down Park Avenue in my mind. I start at Van Horne, the symbolic last street before the Canadian Pacific Railway overpass and the industrial area to the north. On the long block southward to Bernard, I pass a new Hasidic synagogue, a laundromat with Spanish signs owned by an Indian family, Greek social clubs, a mysterious bar called Club Sahara, a cluttered radio-parts shop, and several more hard-to-define stores that survive from year to year despite having no apparent customers.

I was only on the street for five years, but my life on Park Avenue is inseparable from my life in Montreal. I spent the bulk of my time in its shops, its apartments, its restaurants, venturing onto its sidestreets the way a fi sh swims up a river’s tributary. Park Avenue was born in 1883, when a broad road was built along the eastern side of the newly-opened Mount Royal Park, leading north into what was then Montreal’s suburban fringe. Twenty years later, in 1903, the Number 80 streetcar began rumbling up the avenue, past a burgeoning collection of triplexes and apartment buildings, many of them capped by fanciful cornices and decorative elements that often included maple leaves and beavers. Banks, those imposing anchors of middle-class prosperity, stood at nearly every corner.

Initially, middle-class English, Irish and French Canadians called Park home, along with a growing number of Jews. After World War II, however, many of those original inhabitants left for newer, more suburban neighbourhoods, and were replaced by a mix of Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, Chinese and Hasidic Jews. Residential portions of the street became progressively more commercial as carpet shops and souvlaki joints opened on the ground floors of apartment blocks.

After thriving in the 1970s and 80s—one of its nicknames was apparently “Double Park Avenue”—Park fell on hard times in the early 1990s. The Rialto, a gorgeous cinema whose façade was modeled on Garnier’s opera house in Paris, closed down. In the depths of the mid-90s recession, nearly a quarter of all retail spaces on the street were vacant, and drugs and petty crime became a problem. It wasn’t until the end of the decade that the street revived.

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The Bagel Shop Roof

Here in Hong Kong, rooftops are very functional, used more or less like an extra room in the house: for storage, laundry, recreation. In the past, rooftops were the cheapest places to live, and multiple families would crowd into shanties built on top of walkups and even highrises. Some of those illegal structures still remain. In March, when I visited Kwun Tong to get a new pair of glasses, I peered down from the open window of the twenty-first floor of the optometrist’s building and saw laundry hanging out to dry on the roof of a large industrial building below.

New York is another place where rooftops are put to good use. Gardens and terraces are abundant and, in Brooklyn, Rooftop Films fashions makeshift cinemas from the rooftops of old factories and other buildings. Back in 2005, Rooftop Films visited Montreal, and I attended their screening of several short films atop the TÉLUQ building at Henri-Julien and Villeneuve. Watching movies on a roof is a peculiar experience that combines the communal exuberance of an outdoor concert or film with the voyeuristic thrill of lurking about on roofs.

For a city with such an abundance of flat roofs, Montreal does remarkably little with them: there’s a smattering of roof decks, the occasional swimming pool and a handful of green roofs. For the most part, though, rooftops in Montreal were not designed to be used in any meaningful way, largely because of the city’s climate. Covered in a layer of gravel, the roofs typically slope inwards to encourage the accumulation of snow, which acts as a kind of insulation during the winter months. There isn’t much up there beyond chimneys, vents and skylights, which allow light to reach rooms with no exterior windows. What Montreal’s rooftops are particularly good for, however, is sneaking around. The iron ladders and spiral staircases of back alley fire escapes are the gateways to a secret world, a playground above the heads of unsuspecting pedestrians where quietude and surprising vistas can be found.

Last November, on a nighttime expedition to acquaint ourselves with our neighbourhood’s roofs, my friend Rossana and girlfriend Laine ended up on top of the St. Viateur Bagel Shop. It didn’t take long for us to decide that it was our favourite rooftop in Montreal: greeted by the silhouette of St. Michael’s Church, we turned around to see the even larger shadow of Mount Royal set against an amber sky. The smell of freshly baked bagels wafted up from a courtyard between the bagel shop roof and the apartment building next door.

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The Corner Phone Booth

Kristian Gravenor is building himself a reputation as Montreal’s foremost expert on phone booths. He explored their history in Montreal in a recent Gazette article, from the first wooden booths installed in hotel lobbies (”Each wooden telephone booth looked like a confessional, your very own downtown cabin — as they say in French — where you could blab all day for just a few cents”) and on city streets.

News of the phone booth’s decline has made it into just about every North American publication at some point or another, but Montreal, which has one of the lowest rates of mobile phone use in Canada, has been slow to shed many of its booths. You can still find a few near most major corners, despite mayor Jean Drapeau’s attempt in the 1970s to rid the city streets of payphones, along with newspaper boxes and mailboxes.

My own corner phone booth stands near Park and Bernard. Back before I had a cell phone, it was a convenient place from which to call when the power was out, or when I failed to pay the phone bill and Bell cut off my service. Ever since Bell raised payphone rates to 50 cents per call, though, there hasn’t been much point in using it. In fact, when I pass by, the only people who seem to use it come from the adjacent “massage” parlour, which is open until 4am daily and employs masseuses who seem to work only in bra and panties.

Comics and Trading Cards

I guess these would fall into the “found objects” category of street art. I came across them nearly across the street from one another: the comics at the entrance of an alley on St. Viateur, between St. Urbain and Waverly, and the soccer cards on the window of a bus shelter at St. Viateur and St. Urbain.

Scenes from Away

Early in 2007, when the city was under cover of snow, somebody stapled pictures of lush gardens and inviting squares onto the wooden hydro poles around Mile End. “This is where we make good on life,” it was written below one of the photos. It was a nice gesture, reminding us that gentler weather was ahead, and perhaps commenting in on the state of our public spaces by showing examples of good urban design.

Last month, the same person (or maybe just an imitator) stapled new photos around Mile End. This time, though, they depict desert landscapes, not urban spaces. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

An Unexplored Alley

For all of the things I’ve written about exploring Montreal’s laneways, and in particular those of Mile End, there are still some alleys close to home that I have never, for reasons that are beyond me, wandered down. In fact, when I walk through the lanes near home I usually take the same ones, probably by habit, and it takes a deliberate effort to step out of my routine into something a little bit out of the ordinary.

Not too long ago, before I left Montreal, I walked down the alley just east of Park Avenue, between Fairmount and Laurier, for the first time. It turned out to be full of all sorts of interesting things: discarded furniture, potted plants on windowsills, vines drooping from hydro lines and an impressive collection of graffiti and street art.

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Following My Father

My father was born in 1919 in a town near Manchester. His parents were both of Irish background, part of a wave of people who had migrated there to find work in the Lancashire mines and mills. He was an only child. By the time he was ten years old his mother had died and his father, for reasons that remain unknown, brought him to Canada and left him with a relative of his wife’s, Margaret Ryan, and her daughter May. They hadn’t been in Canada long before my father joined their household, where he stayed until he married my mother in the late 1950s. Thomas McDonnell returned to England and never saw his son again.

When I found out that the Bibliothèque nationale had digitized Lovell’s street directories, a catalogue of Montreal residents and businesses from 1842 to 1999, I spent a few hours tracing where the Ryan household had lived in Montreal long before I was born. The directories functioned for many years much like a phone book: look up someone’s name and it gives you their occupation and a street address, although not a phone number.

I knew that the Ryans had lived in various rented premises over the years and recalled mentions of the street names and parishes. The directories made it easy to find out the exact addresses where my father had lived: 1720 Nicolet, from 1931 to 33; 4354 Fullum, in 1934; 4324 Messier, from 1935-41; 5973 Waverly, from 1942 to 50; and 5352 Park Avenue, from 1951 to 57. So I went to have a look.

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Brisez la vitre open door

Earlier this year, when I marvelled at Boston’s still-functioning system of public fire alarm boxes, Kate McDonnell pointed out that Montreal once had such a system, too. Unlike Boston, though, Montreal removed all of its boxes, but one still stands outside the firefighters’ museum at Laurier and St. Laurent. Naturally enough, it’s bilingual.

Produkt Paints the City

Every year, city officials decry the rising tide of graffiti that is washing over Montreal, vowing to drain it away with ever more haste. In April, $1 million was invested in a crackdown on graffiti, including $340,000 in the downtown area alone.

For the most part, they’re responding to the concerns of the general public, many of whom consider graffiti to be unsightly vandalism and a sign of civic disorder. The reality, however, is that street art—a catch-all term that refers to graffiti, stencils, stickers, posters and any other type of unregulated, unsolicited art found in city streets—is as varied and diverse as the people who create it.

Alex McLean, 27, who goes by the tag name Produkt, is one of those people. For nearly a decade he has wandered the streets, alleys and railyards of Montreal, covering walls and other surfaces with portraits and drawings that blend finely-detailed realism with cartoon fantasy. Whether they realize it or not, many Montrealers have seen his work, and some might recognize his recurring characters, such as an austere eagle or a man on all fours, dressed as a dog.

“I like to create stuff where the cartoon world and the real world interact. Because I’m painting on a lot of walls and surfaces and found objects, I also like working with stains and textures,” he explained, sitting in his airy St. Henri studio on a sunny afternoon.

“There’s something really liberating about it. It’s interacting with the real world. If you do a painting and hang it in the gallery, how many people are going to see it and how many lives is it going to affect? [Street art] is about communication. You want as many people to see it as possible.”

Several years ago, McLean studied art at Dawson College, but he dropped out when he realized that he was learning more from working in the streets than in the classroom. (“I never got into that whole art school mentality of doing a crappy painting and writing a 60-page paper about it,” he said.) His initial medium was spray paint, but after a run-in with the law—he was charged and fined for several thousand dollars—he switched to more discreet paintbrushes and markers, which had the added bonus of allowing him to craft more detailed paintings.

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New Life for a Garment District

Earlier this year, Helen Fotopulos, mayor of the Plateau Mont-Royal borough, stood beaming over a podium as she announced plans to revitalize the old garment district on the eastern edge of Mile End, bounded on the west by St. Laurent, on the east by Henri-Julien, on the south by Maguire and on the north by the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks.

“This no man’s land will be transformed,” she declared, outlining $9-million in infrastructural investments that the city hopes will invite new investment and development in the district. Work will start this summer on widening the sidewalks along St. Viateur between St. Laurent and de Gaspé, burying electrical lines and installing new lampposts. New sidewalks will be built on de Gaspé too, which currently has one only on the east side of the street.

Next year, the city will extend St-Viateur east to Henri-Julien, which could involve the expropriation of one building and two vacant lots. In 2010, a new bridge for pedestrians and cyclists will be built over the CPR tracks, linking the area to nearby Rosemont metro.

The city estimates that its investments will generate $250-million worth of private real estate development as buildings are renovated and vacant lots developed. The only potential snag is that, as post-apocalyptic as it may sometimes seen, the garment district is far from being a no man’s land: thousands of people live and work there, in textile factories, small businesses, design studios and artists’ workshops. In an atmosphere of citywide dissatisfaction over the city’s handling of such major projects as the renovation of the Main and the redevelopment of Griffintown, some are keeping a close eye on how it proceeds in Mile End.

Mile-End’s industrial area owes its existence to the arrival of the railroad in the 1870s. Large warehouses and factories were built around the turn of the century, like the Van Horne Warehouse on St. Laurent, whose water tower has become a landmark in the city’s north end skyline. In the 1950s and ’60s, the area took on its present form when giant garment factories were built along de Gaspé, towering over the surrounding neighbourhood.

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Child’s Play

In the alley between Clark and St. Urbain and St. Viateur and Fairmount, Mile End