With the Lunar New Year, a New Vancouver

The God of Fortune. Photo by Ben Johnson

Each year, Vancouver celebrates Chinese New Year like no other city on the continent. People flock to Chinatown for the traditional parade just as businesses are gearing up for one of the busiest spending periods of the year. Festivities large and small erupt across the city with a joyful exuberance otherwise seen only occasionally in this laid-back West Coast metropolis.

The biggest of these parties is thrown by the Chinese Federation of Commerce Canada (CFCC), a non-profit organization that offers business services and helps immigrants integrate into Canadian society. For fifteen years, the CFCC’s Lunar New Year bash has drawn tens of thousands of people to the Pacific National Exhibition grounds—this year they’re expecting up to 150,000 visitors—to shop for New Year goods, take in some entertainment and soak up the convivial atmosphere. The festival’s success is hinted at in its list of sponsors, which range from Rogers Wireless to Toyota to Ikea. Local and national media outlets, English and Chinese alike, have also lent their support. What makes festival organizers proudest, however, is its designation as a “Spirit of Vancouver” event by the Board of Trade in preparation for the 2010 Winter Olympics. “It’s a very exclusive name,” enthuses Edmund Leung, the co-chairman of the CFCC festival.

More

The World Comes to Smallville

Lewiston, Maine. Photos by Samantha Appleton from the New Yorker.

“‘Who authorized this?’ Lewiston officials say that this is the question they heard most often when the Somalis began showing up in town. The answer was: Nobody did. The Somalis had simply decided to come.” So writes William Finnegan in the December 11th edition of the New Yorker. (The article is not available online, but a portion of it can be read here.) Since 2001, about two thousand Somali refugees have left Atlanta and other large cities for Lewiston, a small Maine mill town of 35,000 whose population is almost entirely white and French-Canadian. Their sudden arrival, and the resulting emergence of a large, multifaceted and highly visible Somali community, might seem odd in such an out-of-a-way place. Increasingly, though, many immigrants and refugees in the United States are choosing to settle in small towns, where their presence has been greeted with a mixture of bemusement, wariness and, sometimes, hostility.

More

Après le déluge

Photo by Lee Celano for the New York Times

Like Venice, it has often been said, New Orleans is sinking. It is sinking literally, of course, into the soft south Louisiana mud from whence it came. Yet it is its social decline that may ultimately render it more akin to the proverbial Pearl of the Adriatic—gutted of local life, of indigenous gestalt, with only the quintessence of its streetscapes left behind, ripe for exploitation by blind capital—and the superficiality of sightseers. Unlike the functioning, workaday trade city, New Orleans’ raison d’etre has never been its industriousness nor even its creativity, but its self-preservation: that of its paradoxically dolorous joie de vivre, yet one that could only be nourished by social distress. And yet the city finds itself at somewhat of an unprecedented crossroads: the point at which cultural survivance has finally been disrupted by a far more crucial need for survival; its life-giving cultural paradox unwound and exposed.

More

A Winter’s Day on Victoria Avenue

It was a cold winter night during the holiday season. We were sitting alone in a cavernous, dimly-lit and poorly-heated Indian restaurant. Suddenly, as we were eating, a band of boisterous South Asian men dressed in scarlet Santa Claus uniforms burst into the restaurant, banging drums. They marched towards the restaurant owners, chattering excitedly, brandishing pamphlets. After speaking to the owners for a second, they caught sight of us sitting meekly in the corner, munching quietly on naan and aloo gobi. We stared at them. They stared back. After conferring quietly amongst themselves for a minute, one of the men, holding a pamphlet, came towards us and shyly deposited it on our table. He smiled, turned away and the group left the restaurant just as they entered, shouting and thumping their drums.

We opened the pamphlet: it was written entirely in Tamil.

Such is life on Victoria Avenue, a street on the western edge of Côte-des-Neiges whose inhabitants are, for the most part, immigrants from any number of countries. The most recent figures, drawn from the 2001 census, show that the largest groups come from the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Morocco, but together they account for only a quarter of Victoria Avenue’s residents. This is a neighbourhood of midcentury apartment blocks, duplexes and redbrick housing projects, a quintessential jumping-off point for new immigrants. Eventually, most of them depart for other parts of Montreal, but while they are here, they all share Victoria Avenue, a homely street where Tamil fishmongers sidle up to Jewish bookstores in a procession of kitschy 1950s commercial architecture.

More

What Language Does Your City Speak?

That a metropolis is multilingual is often taken as a given, but multilingualism takes many forms.

Usually, multilingualism comes from recent immigration, as first- and second-generation immigrants continue to speak their ancestral tongue. In that regard, such multilingualism may be seen as a challenge to the existing norm. In Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley, just east of downtown Los Angeles, the population is mostly of Chinese descent and, as one might expect, most commercial signs are in Chinese. Every so often, the language of signs in the valley becomes a political issue, as the area’s longer-established non-Chinese residents wonder whether signs should be required to contain English or even be English-only.

I recently visited Dublin, which was very homogeneous when I grew up there but which has recently received many immigrants from eastern Europe. I was a little surprised, when wandering around, to see café signs advertising IHTEPHET (Russian for “internet”). Clearly, commercial signs follow bottom-up demand from the local inhabitants, since the signs are there to cater to them and to attract their attention.

Vying with this natural use of language is a more top-down form of language planning. This may be done to foster use of an official language seen as being under threat, such as French in Montreal, or Gaelic in Dublin, where, for example, all buses headed downtown bear the sign An Lár (“the centre”), even though nobody would use that in normal English speech. Although I largely support this use of language planning, this may be seen as action by a government which does not trust that the official language can survive commercial competition.

More

Jersey City Omigod!

Sam Imberman, our in-house New Jerseyite-turned-Montrealer- turned-temporary Parisian, might be surprised to hear that New York City’s next hot neighbourhood isn’t in New York at all: it’s in New Jersey. Jersey City, to be precise, that humble municipality of 250,000 across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Actually, I should say it’s the last hot neighbourhood of New York, since that’s what New York magazine has proclaimed it to be in its latest issue.

In “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Cool By Now,” Adam Sternbergh has penned what might be termed an ironic “next hot neighbourhood” article, because it suggests the absurdity of such glib proclamations. Sternbergh’s thesis is that the gentrification or “coolification” of New York neighbourhoods has become such a widespread and all-consuming process that it no longer has any distinct stages. As a cute chart in New York demonstrates, SoHo was “cool” for more than fifteen years; Chelsea was on the cutting edge for a decade. But Dumbo, the Meatpacking District and Red Hook were the darlings of New York’s cultural elite for no more than a few years. Now? Everything’s happening all at once: the luxury condos follow the first artists and the first “edgy” bistros precede the first Whole Foods by mere months.

More

A City Beyond Borders

On Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui, I wander past a proud squat mosque and into the hot, crowded blocks leading to the harbour. Around me is a whirl of humanity. African women in flamboyantly coloured dresses struggle to pull suitcases through the crowd. Black men rest languorously against the fences that guard the sidewalk from speeding buses, surveying the scene. Slick-suited Indian men rush along, yelling into their mobile phones, while other more tackily dressed hawkers accost passersby with cries of “Tailor suit!” and “Copy watch!” Outside the subway entrance a gaggle of Hindu women, saris wrapped carefully around their plump figures, watch a bearded Muslim man walk by on his way to prayer.

I can imagine what the uninformed tourist thinks when emerging from one of Tsim Sha Tsui’s many corporate hotels: “Isn’t Hong Kong supposed to be, you know, Chinese?” And, for the most part, it is—it is estimated that 90 percent of Hong Kongers are ethnic Chinese—but that hardly does justice to just how cosmopolitan this place really is; it is a city that operates beyond the scope of nationality, on a distinctly global level.

More

Upper East Exodus?

The Upper East Side is dying, at least according to New York magazine, in the latest issue of which Jay McInerney tries to convince us that the bastion of the New York elite is heading towards extinction. If such a proclamation is meant to be anything but hubris, however, it ought at least to come with a few caveats.

The first is that the existence of New York itself is partially driven by the very blonde-wigged, fur-wearing gossip mavens of whom McInerney flags the imminent decline; the article’s appearance is akin to those on the covers of political-science tomes asking if the United States’ power will soon be eclipsed. In other words, it has the effect of precipitating panic, demanding defences, and, above all, marketing magazines which contain within the secret signs of this dangerous denouement.

That said, it is hardly surprising that this purported “death” is really the product a soporifically-composed pseudo-sociology. Its greatest fault is this: its author inhabits a small world, one which is a stronghold of the superficial. In its characteristic enchantment with surface baudles and clubby clans it deludes itself–and McInerney–into envsioning an elusively myopic, narrowminded portrait of the city’s social strata. Wherever the diaspora (or whatever the death rate) of its bold-named mainstays, not only the social characteristics of the Upper East Side but, especially, the idea of the neighborhood are stronger than ever- whether or not either are synonymous with the neighborhood’s physical constraints.

More

Quebec City Tour: Saint-Roch

In recent years, Saint Roch has seen more changes than any other neighbourhood in Quebec City. Once a bleak slum/parking lot, it is now home to the second-largest Hugo Boss store in North America (after New York). Needless to say, this has led to some friction between new and old residents.

Fifteen years ago, most of this was a parking lot.

More

The Death of Chinatown?

Apparently, Toronto’s Chinatown is dying. “Most of the good restaurants have gone. Only a few fruit stands remain. Litter swirls around the cold and lonely sidewalks,” proclaimed the Toronto Star last March. As sensational as those claims may be, they merely echo the rumour that has been circulating for years: that the neighbourhood is in its death throes.

More

Quebec City Tour: Saint-Jean-Baptiste

I would have second thoughts about living in Quebec City if it wasn’t for my neighbourhood: Faubourg Saint-Jean-Baptiste.

Located directly outside the old city walls is this very dense area of rickety working-class homes. Most were built between the 1840s and the early 20th century. Saint-Jean-Baptiste has a grit lacking in other parts of the upper city. Power lines are tangled up like clotheslines across the streets, most of which are too narrow for trees. The neighbourhood is laid out in a grid patterrn on a steep hill, and has consequently been used on many occasions as a cheaper alternative to filming in San Francisco.

More

Condo Conversion Done Right?

Storm brewing over the Atwater Market, St. Henri, Montreal

There was a bit of a local controversy last spring over plans to convert Montreal’s former Imperial Tobacco factory and headquarters into condos. The complex, which has stood in the working-class neighbourhood of St. Henri for more than a century, has been empty since 2003 when Imperial shut down the last of its operations, putting several hundred neighbourhood residents out of work. Then, much to the surprise of approximately zero Montrealers, in stepped a developer with ambitious plans to convert the former cancer factory into condos.

One evil replaced by another, right? That was certainly the line of thought propagated by local housing activists, who took an all-or-nothing approach and demanded that the city buy the factory and convert it entirely into social housing. Otherwise, they threatened, they would shut the project down by forcing a local referendum on the issue. (Last May I wrote a Maisonneuve column on the issue, which you can read here.) They failed. The project is going ahead as planned and, soon, St. Henri will be home to nearly a thousand new condo-dwelling residents. Huzzah for gentrification!

But that’s a bit of a simplification. Okay, make that massive oversimplication. Because the Imperial Tobacco project is actually a model of how old brownfield sites should be converted into residential use.

More