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.
Whenever I walk through Westmount I am reminded of Julie Brock’s poem, “Greene Ave.,” from her 1999 book The End of Travel.
Montreal’s blazing in tufts
of acid green and crapapple pink.
Clouds mass at dusk behind
Mount Royal like additional summits,
as my father noted yesterday
from his favourite chair, pleased
as he should be with the rented view.
Framed by my office window,
two elderly women in pink suits
with matching handbags and shoes,
twin iced confections, swirl
across the parking lot to lunch.
It rains, the sun comes out;
a young girl in white begins
her slow, meditative dance
around each parked car.
The pastel ladies reappear, fold
their legs into the Seville.
Alone in their vacant space,
the girl in white spins and spins.
A man pees behind a parking meter,
hails a cab with his free hand.
The cab pulls over, the cab
will wait, and that ring is my rented phone.
Anything to be that girl, turning.
Earlier this week, while walking to a friend’s place on Coloniale Street on the Plateau, I came across an unusual piece of street art. Pasted on an abandoned mattress that was leaning against the side of a building, it depicted the body of a skinny-jeaned, cardiganed hipster topped by the head of a motorized scooter. Its position on the mattress created an interesting optical illusion that gave the scooter-man an extra sense of depth; looking at it head-on, it seemed to be standing up straight in front of me. Later that day, heading home on the 80 bus, I saw a few slightly different versions of the same paste-up on the papered-over windows of a vacant storefront on Park Avenue.
It turns out that the scooter-men, dubbed Antlerheads, are a guerilla marketing campaign for Vespa, which commissioned a well-known street artist, Fauxreel, to promote its new Vespa S scooter in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. His work has already made a big splash in Toronto, where they appeared last month. “Guerilla marketing gone horribly right?” asked blogTO, which admired the fact that they are at once an advertisement and a parody of consumer culture — “the idea that we can exchange our faces and minds with a product.” Strategy Magazine reports that the posters are part of a much larger campaign that will include print advertisements, street teams distributing scooter-head buttons and a giant 40-foot projection.
As advertising in conventional media becomes less and less effective, marketers are turning to guerilla advertising to get the word out about new products. At its worst, guerilla marketing cynically co-opts street art and public space to sell us more crap we don’t really need. But, somehow, the Antlerheads seem different. They are a very oblique form of promotion, since they contain no obvious signs of being sponsored by Vespa. No logos, no web addresses; only someone who is already familiar with the company’s scooters would recognize them as advertising. Artistically speaking, they certainly hold their own against most of the graffiti, stencils and paste-ups found in our streets, and their cultural commentary gives them an added dimension.
Some cities ravaged by war slump into decline and desperation. Others rebound with as much vigour as before. Kabul seems to be the latter, which is not surprising considering its 3,000-year history as a crossroads of culture, commerce and empire. In this clip from documentary film Kabul Transit, the camera floats through the streets of the Afghan capital, past hawkers selling tea, lunch, fabric, chickens. Men dash across the street pushing wheelbarrows or pulling wagons piled high with boxes. People are everywhere. Like turn-of-the-century New York or present-day Shenzhen, it strikes me as being a kind of hustler’s city, where everyone is trying to aggressively make up for time lost to poverty and violence.
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.
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.
On a cold, grey day last December, stir-crazy after more than a week of snow, I took a walk down Decarie Boulevard in Montreal. It’s not the most obvious place for a stroll—a six-lane, sunken expressway runs down the middle of it—but it’s a pretty interesting street nonetheless, taking you through a growing Russian neighbourhood and past old landmarks like the Snowdon Theatre and the Snowdon Deli.
Along the way from Van Horne to Queen Mary, I noticed something else, too: the names of the apartment houses along Decarie. Heading south, I passed a series of boxy 1940s-era buildings with strangely terse names—King, York, Michel—each inscribed very plainly above the main entrance. Some of the more modern buildings along the street had more flamboyant names, like the Decarie Towers, which as far as I could tell consisted of just one tower, and a fairly short one at that.
Historically, property developers have used names to distinguish and define their apartment buildings. They’re a marketing gimmick, in other words. Inadvertently, though, apartment building names can reveal a lot about a city’s character.
In Montreal, apartment houses first became fashionable in the late nineteenth century, mostly in the upper-middle-class anglophone neighbourhoods around the Golden Square Mile. That might explain why, in a city that was about half French-speaking, the names of these buildings were strikingly Anglo-Saxon. Some were reliably conservative, like the Waldorf and the Smithsonian. Others traded on imperial glory, like the King Edward and the Majestic. Still others were almost cloyingly quaint, like the Pickwick Arms.
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.
It’s a bit past 3am and I’m sitting with a few friends in the Nouveau Palais, a 24-hour diner just around the corner from my apartment. It’s a classic Quebec casse-croûte with plastic booths and wood-panelled walls, a décor so timeless that, when the restaurant was damaged by fire a few years ago, its interior was painfully reconstructed to look just as it did before.
As we sit down, the waitress, a squat woman with a broad chest, narrow waist and constant frown, hands us our menus. Her skin is always tanned a deep orangey brown, even in the depths of winter, and her mood tends to swing from guardedly friendly to frighteningly surly with only the slightest provocation.
“I hate her so much,” mutters one of my friends, who grew up a few blocks away from the restaurant. She likes to annoy the waitress with snide remarks and passive-aggressive questions.
“Once I asked her how often she went to the tanning salon and she freaked out. She was like, ‘Tu penses-tu que j’ai le temps pour ça?’ But it’s so obvious!”
I open up the menu, a small book of photocopied paper, and try to decide what to get. My choices include all of the casse-croûte standards: hamburgers, poutine, souvlaki, fried rice, pizza, spaghetti and, of course, pizza-ghetti, that unbeatable combo of soggy pizza and overcooked pasta served side-by-side.
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.
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.
I had travelled more than 15,000 kilometres only to stand, once again, at the corner of Peel and Wellington. Of course, it wasn’t the same Peel and Wellington as back home — with a shared colonial past, it shouldn’t be surprising to find some similar street names in both Montreal and Hong Kong.
In Montreal, Peel and Wellington finds itself in the heart of Griffintown, a neighbourhood that was once a centre of industry and working-class Irish life. In Hong Kong, it sits in the middle of a busy market district in Central, an area that was once part of Victoria City, Britain’s nineteenth-century foothold in South China. It seems somehow appropriate that, even halfway across the world from one another, Peel Street and Wellington Street intersect. Peel was named after Robert Peel, a Tory who first elected to Parliament in a “rotten borough” home to just 24 easily-bribed voters, and who served twice as Prime Minister, from 1834-35 and 1841-46. Wellington Street was named after Peel’s longtime ally, the Duke of Wellington, another two-time Prime Minister who served one of his terms immediately after Peel.
There are plenty of other names that will ring familiar to anyone who has spent time in a former outpost of the British Empire: Elgin, Dalhousie, Drake, Drummond, Granville, Argyle. Like shadows left behind by a passing giant, they testify to a kind of globalization that began before the term even existed.
Although Canada has a monarch, Britain’s queen retains very little presence in Canadian culture. The kind of curiosity and adulation that inspired thousands of Montrealers to flood the streets when King George VI visited in 1939 has long since vanished. It’s a bit of a shock, then, to visit Bangkok and realize the exent to which the King of Thailand appears to be adored, with utmost earnesty, by the city’s inhabitants. Shrines to the king are found throughout the city, on streets and in shopping malls. Each Monday, many people in Bangkok—a significant minority, at least—wear yellow shirts in honour of the king.
Of course, it’s easy to forget that, as well-loved as Thailand’s king appears, he is protected by lèse majesté laws that are used to prosecute anyone who dares criticize any of Thailand’s royalty. This despite the fact that the king himself, an American-born, Swiss-educated man named Bhumibol Adulyadej, has admitted that “the king can do wrong,” and that “I must also be criticized.” Nonetheless, accusations of lèse majesté levied against Thailand’s former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, were among the motives behind the 2006 military coup against the country’s democratically-elected government.
Earlier this year, the king’s only sister died; shrines to her have been erected in the city’s metro stations. In one station, the shrine is accompanied by a book in which passersby can write their condolences. If only I could read Thai — what have people written?
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