North Americans and Europeans have an almost natural aversion to Modernist housing projects. They’re very much maligned in our popular culture, often for good reason: generations of official neglect and social marginalization have left many of them in a desperate state. In Hong Kong, though, a large chunk of the population lives in housing estates, either upscale and privately-built or more modest and publicly-funded, and in most cases they are well-appointed, busy and perfectly pleasant.
Tung Tau Estate is one such example. Walking from Kowloon City to San Ko Kong, about 10 minutes away by foot, I passed through Tung Tau, a large public housing project built in the 1970s. I made my entrance through a flight of stairs into a sunken garden, where I came across a large group of poh poh — old women — sitting around a playground, chatting. As we passed through the rest estate, I noticed that everything was well-maintained, all of the public spaces were well-used and there was no shortage of amenities, including supermarkets and restaurants.
For years, the failure of many housing projects in the United States, Great Britain and France has been blamed on design. Their Corbusier-inspired towers-in-the-park, large open spaces and disruption of the surrounding urban fabric have all been blamed for encouraging social dysfunction. While Hong Kong is not immune to those problems — one particularly massive and isolated housing estate, Tin Shui Wai, has been dubbled the “city of sadness” for its high rates of unemployment, social isolation and suicide — most of its housing estates seem to work just as they should.
For allthatI’vewritten about Montreal’s street signs, I haven’t mentioned much about the signs found in Old Montreal, the city’s birthplace and one of its most important tourist attractions. Although the signs here are meant to reflect the red-and-beige colour scheme of the city’s first street signs, they are actually a recent invention, created in the 1980s with a somewhat contrived typeface that is meant to look historic.
For a long time, I had assumed that all of the signs in the old city were homogeneous, but on a recent walk around the neighbourhood a friend pointed out to me that there were two different types: one, mounted on buildings with the street name written in all-caps, and others, mounted on posts and written in an entirely different font. I can’t explain the difference between the two — maybe some of our readers can help.
But I did notice something else that was interesting: at the corner of Le Royer and St. Laurent there is a building with street names engraved into its façade. Just like the street signs of the 1950s, when English signs were place on one side of the street and French signs on the other, the street name on one side of the building was in English (Le Royer Street and St. Lawrence Boulevard) and in French (rue Le Royer and boulevard Saint-Laurent) on the other.
Writers and journalists looking for a quick and easy symbol of Montreal’s political and linguistic divide usually find one in the city’s downtown west end. There, in the shadow of the Montreal Children’s Hospital, René Lévesque Boulevard turns into Dorchester Avenue as it crosses Atwater and passes from Montreal into Westmount, a remnant of the divisive legacy of nationalism in Quebec.
Symbolically, I’ve always thought that this streetcorner did Montreal an injustice. It’s too simple, too obvious. It doesn’t jive with the nuanced reality of the city’s everyday life.
A more representative streetcorner can be found further north, on the border between Montreal and Hampstead. On its west side, in Hampstead, a newish set of street signs marks the corner of Rue Macdonald Road and Rue Fleet Road. Right across the street, in Montreal, two much older signs, dating back to the 1950s, describe the corner simply as Macdonald and Van Horne, their English articles—“Ave.” and “St.”—covered by white tape.
About eight different varieties of street signs can be found within Montreal’s old city limits; that doesn’t include the two dozen other kinds of signs seen in former suburbs like Outremont or de-merged municipalities like Hampstead. As innocuous and quotidian as they might seem, these signs capture the real complexity of its social and political landscape.
“Les peaux de lièvres” is quintessential Tricot Machine. Deliberately innocent but twinged with melancholy, it revels in the simple pleasures of life, like wandering through a snowy, nighttime Montreal. I have to be honest when I say that I probably wouldn’t have remembered it if it weren’t for this music video, which is probably the first stop-motion animation I have seen that uses knitwear as its medium. It also features a nice visual narrative that takes us past Mount Royal and the downtown skyline and up the side of the Olympic Stadium, weaving between the intimacy of personal life and the greater experience of the city.
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.
Westmount is probably the most heavily stereotyped municipality in Quebec. It is the epitome of anglophone privilege and WASP snobbery, a posh district best represented by the “elderly women in pink suits” on Greene Avenue. While there is a grain of truth to that, as with any stereotype, Westmount is far more interesting than its reputation would suggest.
In fact, Westmount is one of my favourite places to wander on a sunny day, and my favourite place in Westmount is below Ste. Catherine, near the CPR tracks, where a procession of little streets contain a world of pleasant rowhouses and quiet dead-end streets. My walks usually start a bit east of Westmount itself, in Shaughnessy Village, where the blocks around Souvenir Street contain a number of surprising buildings and laneways. Heading west across Atwater Avenue, there’s Weredale Park, a strange circle of houses hidden behind Dorchester Boulevard. Beyond that are small, leafy streets with names like Bruce and Blenheim, most running straight into the CPR tracks and the escarpment on which they sit. Walk to the end of these streets and you can peer through a chain-link fence towards the church towers and silos of the city’s southwest.
Strolling around here is nice enough during the day, but it’s even better at night, when it feels like you have the streets all to yourself. Get lost in the laneways and stop by the playground at Stayner Park for a ride on the swings, which offer the perfect vantage point from which to admire the quaint Victorian cottages across the street. Don’t make too much noise, though; it’s Westmount, after all.
Click here for a map of my proposed walking route.
Double-decker trams have crossed Hong Kong Island for more than a century. In Cantonese, people playfully refer to them as ding-ding, which is of course the sound they make as they rattle down the middle of congested streets.
After awhile, even the largest city can shrink to the size of a village. On a good day, this creates a comfortable intimacy; on a bad day, it can impose a banal, oppressive familiarity. Passing through the same streets day after day, it’s easy to lose sight of the things that so charmed you about them in the first place.
I try to avoid that by wandering through Montreal’s laneways, its ruelles, as they’re known in French. To walk through them is to uncover a secret city, a stripped-down, domestic one, the lipstick and blush of its streetscapes removed. The laneway experience is defined by the detritus of everyday life: the flutter of laundry drying on clotheslines, decrepit old sheds, gardens filled with vegetables, doors and gates through which you can glimpse the lives of others.
Laneways first emerged in Montreal in the mid-nineteenth century, but they were usually found only in middle-class and wealthy neighbourhoods. Poorer areas had courtyards accessible by portes cochères, which led to small workers’ homes hidden behind larger buildings. By the dawn of the twentieth century, though, Montreal and most of its suburbs had begun to mandate the construction of laneways in new residential developments, seeing them as a solution to the city’s sanitation problems. Eventually, nearly 500 kilometres of alleyways were built.
Montrealers have made great use of them. Every week, in the warm months, dozens of garage sales and bazaars can be found in the city’s laneways, selling books, furniture and assorted junk. Three years ago, the YMCA in my neighbourhood organized an alleyway art fair that drew inspiration from those alleyway bazaars. Artists hung their paintings on backyard fences, a graffiti crew painted a cinderblock wall and somebody set up a television viewing room in an apartment building courtyard.
What makes laneways so alluring is their ephemeral nature: they change with the rhythm of daily life, never quite the same from one day to the next. There is always a new piece of discarded furniture waiting for someone to claim it; a previously unnoticed view through trees, fences, walls and wires; or a new piece of street art.
The street art, in particular, provides the laneways with ever-changing décor. Over the years, I’ve seen political statements (“25,000 Montrealers call this home” spray-painted on a brick wall, next to a drawing of a homeless man), paste-ups and graffiti and even poetry (“We walked in Lake Ontario / Up to our ankles in sour water / For the feeling of sinking, you said”). My favourite can still be seen in one of the ruelles near my apartment, where somebody has scrawled a succinct message in whimsical cursive to wanderers like myself: “I love you.”
Pierre Burton, the journalist, author and historian, once remarked of Calgary, “The two blocks between the Palliser Hotel and The Bay is the only part of the city that resembles its former self.” While that’s not altogether true (there are parts of town, like Inglewood and Ramsay, that retain the feel of a small prairie town) the area around First Street SW is probably the only part of Calgary with any real historical presence. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is one of the few parts of town with much urban vitality, too.
Whenever I’m walking down the street in Hong Kong I think about all of the information I’m missing because I can’t read Chinese: menus, advertisements, election signs, protest banners. (I’m particularly regretful I can’t read the menus.) Sometimes, though, I wonder if I’m actually being given a break, considering how many thousands of words compete for your attention in the average Hong Kong street. Just look at all of the words written around this single doorway: to me, they’re incomprehensible, but to any literate person they must be the visual equivalent of a screaming match.
The geography of Lisbon bends pespectives - up, down, and around its seven hills. Beyond the occasional slow-swooping streetcar, the dramatic undulations of the city’s streets are broken only by its graffiti, which boldly explodes against pastel-painted houses, or grafts messages - somehow both timely and timeless - deep into centuries-solid walls.
Montreal Apartments