Five Lives and One Frame

A young couple share a special moment while other passengers exist in their own worlds. Toronto, 2007

Mailboxes

Sai Yee Street, Mongkok, Kowloon

Ding Ding

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.

Dans la ruelle

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.”

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Mongkok People

One of the best places for people-watching in Hong Kong is in Mongkok, in the evening, especially in the artificial daylight of Sai Yeung Choi Street.

A City’s Former Self

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.

Hong Kong Doorways: Cacaphony

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.

Lisboa: Up, Down, Around

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.

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Strip Club Signs

Of all the kitsch that pervades Montreal’s commercial signage, little is more gaudy and outlandish than its strip club signs. In other cities, they’re discreet and euphemistic; here, they employ neon and cartoon illustrations to demonstrate what goes on inside. Nowhere is this more obvious than at Ste. Catherine and the Main, a corner that has been seedy for decades. In the early twentieth century, it was a busy shopping district, but it was also the heart of Montreal’s red light district, with brothels, gambling parlours and bars that flourished during Prohibition, when Quebec was the only place in North America where booze flowed freely.

The queen of the corner is Café Cleopatra, which opened in 1969, one of the first modern-day strip clubs in Montreal. Its ground floor is aimed at straight men; upstairs, a more diverse crowd mingles inside the city’s best-known tranny bar. Cleopatra’s sign, which is cheeky and almost innocent by today’s standards, promises a “unisex disco” with “strip-teaseuses” and “spectacles continuels.” Its best feature is a nude, decidedly robust woman (Cleopatra herself?) lying on her side, red-striped headband tied around her golden locks of hair.

Further west, even more garish strip clubs and peep shows are found right in the heart of the downtown retail district. The most famous is Club Super Sexe, located on Ste. Catherine near the corner of University and likely the best-known strip club in Montreal. A large part of its notoriety comes from its two-storey sign, an orgy of blinking neon and caped, bikini-clad women flying through the nighttime sky. It must be quite an awesome sight for a teenager from upstate New York who has come to Montreal for his first taste of legal debauchery.

Two doors to the east, in a handsome greystone Gothic structure built in 1914, is Super Sexe’s sister club, Super Contact. Its lurid neon signs, which depict two sets of disembodied hands grasping at the body of a busty stripper, are almost comically at odds with the forced sobriety of the building in which they are housed. The maternity store located immediately underneath Super Contact, its windows filled with posters of rosy-cheeked pregnant women, only adds to the irony.

They’re tacky and unabashedly sexist, but the strip clubs along the downtown shopping strip are an essential ingredient in the street’s heterogeneity, which is what makes it so appealing in the first place. Without the incongruous mix of chain clothing stores and strip clubs, their doormen trying to entice passers-by with obscene catchphrases (“Pussies, tits and giggly tits!” yelled one, in a lilting Caribbean accent, as I walked downtown last summer), Ste. Catherine would be just another humdrum high street.

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Street Light

One of the things I love about Hong Kong is the city’s captivation with light. There’s the neon for which Hong Kong is famous, of course, but in recent years it has really taken to dressing up its buildings in LED displays. Here are two examples I came across while wandering around town. Below, a McDonald’s sign backlit by neon, is really nothing exceptional, but it captures how even the most banal of businesses have invested in lighting displays. Above is the new LED-lit façade of the W Hotel in Wan Chai, which fades from one colour to the next between dusk and midnight.

Cité Bourgogne

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. I had just left the rambling lanes of the Taikang Road arts district and was wandering aimlessly through the streets of Shanghai’s former French Concession, each one buzzing with scooters, each lined by perfectly gnarled plane trees and odd, eclectic buildings. The blocks were long but broken by lanes, most of them crowded with hanging laundry, parked bicycles and potted plants. Security guards marked the entrance to each lane, but they seemed nonetheless open to the public, and passersby ambled past me and into the lanes without so much as a glance from the guard.

That’s when I came across a lane marked by an arch with a surprising inscription: “Cité Bourgogne, 1930.” (It really shouldn’t have surprised me, given the colonial history of the surrounding area, but it did.) Two young women stood at the entrance, chatting amiably. I decided that this Burgundian enclave was worth exploring, so I passed through the arch and down a narrow alley. I found myself in a compound of sorts, a small grid of laneways lined by tidy brick rowhouses. At the centre of it was a small square, ringed by houses filled with laundry lines, mostly empty except for a few wet shirts and a worn-looking Winnie the Pooh. Two middle-aged men sat at a table near the edge of the square, eyeing me with benign curiosity.

The Cité Bourgogne, it turns out, is an example of a distinctly Shanghainese form of housing, the shikumen, which takes its name (”stone gate”) from the archways that mark the entrance to each house and laneway. (Shikumen are also known as lilong, which literally means “laneway neighbourhood.”) Shikumen first arose in the nineteenth century when, fleeing the poverty and instability wrought by the Taiping Rebellion, thousands of country-dwellers flooded colonial Shanghai. Property developers scrambled to provide them with housing, and what was built resembled a cross between the traditional Chinese courtyard house and European rowhouses or mews houses.

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Lower Town

On a quiet, cold weekend in Griffintown, the looming skyscrapers of downtown can seem like an illusion, so incongruous a backdrop do they make to the empty streets and dormant industry.

Three Newsstands

Star Ferry terminal, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong

West 34th Street near 8th Avenue, New York

Sinan Road near Taikang Road, Luwan, Shanghai

Wan Chai Ghost Ad

Just off Stone Nullah Lane, in an old and quiet part of Wan Chai above the Queen’s Road, I came across this old advertisement on the side of an apartment building. Duk hau wai cheung tong yue, it reads — “Special Stomach Pills.”