Snowdon’s History Lives Online

Four years ago, on my way home in the aftermath of a tremendous December blizzard, I found myself wandering through Snowdon, a neighbourhood in Montreal’s west end. Trudging past waist-high snowbanks, I noticed stairs leading up to some kind of apartment courtyard. Curious, I ventured in and found an odd collection of shops: a tailor, a Chinese hair salon, a Korean driving school.

Snowdon is a bit of an odd area, amorphous both in form and character, caught between different places without having much sense of place of its own. The main commercial strip on Queen Mary Road is a jumble of Jamaican hairdressers and kosher restaurants, Filipino churches and Chinese groceries. The long, straight sidestreets, unkempt like a grandfather who forgot to comb his hair, are lined by hydro poles, humble duplexes and brick apartment buildings. St. Joseph’s Oratory stares watchfully at the neighbourhood from the east.

One of the reasons for this sense of confusion is the Décarie Expressway, which bullied its way through the heart of Snowdon in the late 1960s, cutting it in half and replacing a lively streetcar terminus with a sunken six-lane autoroute. Though many of the neighbourhood’s icons survived — the Snowdon Theatre, the Snowdon Deli, the sign atop the old Reitmans department store — and were even joined by a metro station in 1985, Snowdon became one of those places that you pass through on your way to somewhere else; just another exit on the highway.

Still, Snowdon’s sense of place never vanished, it just became more obscure. After I came across the strange apartment building courtyard, I posted some photos on Spacing Montreal and urged Snowdon residents to share their experiences of the neighbourhood. The response was underwhelming; just two replies. Then something unexpected happened. Over the next four years, more than 30 people weighed in with their own detailed memories of Snowdon through the years. The most recent response was posted just a few days ago. The comment thread has become, in the words of Spacing’s Alanah Heffez, “a lively reunion among people whose experiences have overlapped in space if not necessarily in time.”

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Seen in Sheung Wan

Though street art is not as pervasive in Hong Kong as it is in European and North American cities, it is very common in certain neighbourhoods. Sheung Wan is one of them. In the district’s many back lanes and quiet streets, just about every spare surface is covered with a tag, stencil or poster.

Last March, I wandered through the area and recorded some of what I saw. It’s very much a reflection of Hong Kong’s current state of mind. One of the pieces depicts a jasmine hawker selling jasmine flowers, a reference to both the Arab Spring and the response of Chinese activists to the increasingly harsh crackdown on mainland China intellectuals, human rights lawyers and dissidents. Another criticizes the Hong Kong government’s aloofness and unaccountability. One pokes fun at the ascendant Chinese art market, which has led to the concentration of major international galleries and auction houses in Hong Kong.

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Airing Your Laundry in Public

When I first came to Hong Kong, one of the most perplexing of park rules was “No hanging of laundry.” Surely that isn’t a problem, I thought. Do people really bring their wet laundry to the park to dry?

As it turns out, they do. Though most people here have a washing machine in their apartments, relatively few have dryers, and Hong Kong’s tiny apartments lack the outdoor space needed to effectively dry freshly-washed clothes. Some people take their laundry up to rooftop clotheslines; those who live in buildings without an accessible roof simply hang their clothes next to an open window, hoping they won’t get that awful damp smell that comes from taking too long to dry. Others take a different approach: they dry their laundry in public space, hanging it on sidewalk railings and chainlink fences.

This happens almost exclusively in public housing estates and working-class neighbourhoods, which is an important point to consider. Outdoor clothes-drying is seen by many of the world’s middle and upper classes to be distasteful and unsightly, from North America, where hundreds of communities ban the practice, to Hong Kong, where affluent people cling very tightly to symbols of affluence and class identity, perhaps because they are only a generation or two removed from poverty. Once, a middle-aged professional man I know was looking outside at a luxury apartment tower when he noticed that some apartments had clothes drying outside, on the building’s small balconies. “They’re rich but they still dry their clothes outside,” he said with evident distaste.

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A Place for Bikes in the Heart of Hong Kong?

Imagine it’s a beautiful autumn day in Hong Kong. The summer’s humidity has vanished and you’re out enjoying the fine weather, bicycling along Victoria Harbour. You pass the Star Ferry pier, the new government headquarters at Tamar, then Victoria Park, all the while gazing out at the jade green water.

That was the vision presented by a group of cycling advocates at the Harbourfront Commission on September 7th. The Hong Kong Cycling Alliance is urging the commission to include a 16-kilometre cycleway in its plans for a continuous public promenade along the shoreline of Victoria Harbour. Its members argue that cycling would enliven the waterfront while also creating an easy way to travel between its different nodes of activity.

“Cycling is the most convenient, efficient mode of transportation known to man — and it’s just right for the harbourfront, which we want to be peaceful and well-connected,” says Martin Turner, a member of the Cycling Alliance. “I can see a family going there and hiring bikes for an afternoon. And commuters won’t have to sit on a bus for 45 minutes at the start of the morning. They can get some fresh air and improve their health.”

Turner and other cycling advocates hope that giving bikes a place on the waterfront could encourage cycling not only as a recreational activity but as a convenient way to get around the city. That would bring Hong Kong into line with cities as diverse as Hangzhou, New York and Paris, where cycling has become increasingly popular — and where local governments enthusiastically promote it as a healthy, ecologically-friendly form of transport.

“Our goal is to make cycling a part of everyday life in Hong Kong,” says Cycling Alliance member Philip Heung. For that to happen, though, cycling advocates must face the mother of all obstacles: changing government policy, which does not consider bicycles a means of transportation, even as cycling appears to grow more popular in both the New Territories and the urban areas of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.

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Tokyo, Two Weeks After the Earthquake

March 2011

I arrive in Tokyo on a clear, crisp afternoon. As my train makes brisk progress from Narita Airport to the city centre, I stare out the window at the country fields giving way to suburbia and then a densely crammed cityscape. The city seems calm. Kids run freely through an asphalt schoolyard. Uniformed boys play softball in a neighbourhood field. Men stand next to the muddy banks of a river, hitting golf balls into the water.

I’ve come here to see how Japan’s capital is bearing up under what has been described as the worst disaster to hit the country since World War II. Two weeks ago, on March 11th, an earthquake stirred up a tsunami that rushed towards the country’s northeast coast. Thirty minutes later, 30-metre waves crushed towns as far as ten kilometres inland. Fishing boats were dropped on top of three-storey buildings. Thousands of people were swept out to sea amidst churning rubble. When the sun set three hours later, tens of thousands were dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

As I write this, another disaster brews. Damaged by the earthquake and flooded by the tsunami, emergency generators at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant failed, causing the cooling system to malfunction. Reactors overheated; a meltdown seemed imminent. Spooked, foreign bankers, English teachers, and even journalists have fled Tokyo en masse. Radioactivity has since been found in vegetables, milk and tap water. Shipping companies are avoiding the port after Fukushima was revealed to be spewing contamination into the sea.

Skyscrapers loom, and, with them, the unknown. Friends are surprised I’m even here. If international headlines are to be believed, the world’s largest city, with 35 million people and an economy 40 percent larger than Canada’s, is on the verge of becoming the next Chernobyl.

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September 11th Street

Between Avenidas Juramento and Olazábal, Calle 11 de Setiembre — September 11th Street — is one of the most beautiful in the upscale Buenos Aires barrio of Belgrano. Its trees arch over the rooflines of multistory apartment buildings, meeting above the middle of the street to form a cavernous, emerald archway that resembles the nave of a cathedral. No wonder visitors to Buenos Aires’ tiny Chinatown, along the congested stretch of Calle Arribeños one block north, often choose to float back to the Subte station on Avenida Cabildo via this pretty street with an improbably weighty name.

The stuff of rote history lessons — caudillos, dates, and battles — makes up many Buenos Aires toponyms, but in this corner of Argentina’s capital, they seem especially heavy with historical references. The next streets south are named 3 de Febrero (the date of a victory in battle over Spanish forces during the Argentine War of Independence) and Calle O’Higgins (for Bernardo O’Higgins, liberator and national hero of Chile). Nearby Calle Cuba, a once surely neutral name, now invites little but political and historical associations. Intersecting each is Calle Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But September 11th Street stands out among them as the most pregnant with meaning. In Latin America, as critics of US foreign policy pointed out in the years after September 11, 2001, the date held sinister connotations long before the attacks: on that day in 1973, a CIA-sponsored coup toppled the elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, ushering in Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. That’s not been forgotten in neighboring Argentina, even if Buenos Aires has its own reasons to recall September 11th — a date of significance more than once in the city’s past.

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The Sounds of Hong Kong

Street performer on Sai Yeung Choi Street, Mongkok

Hong Kong is rich in visual symbols: a glittering skyline, red market lamps, green trams. But when you close your eyes and think of Hong Kong, what do you hear? That’s what Lawal Marafa, a professor of geography at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is trying to figure out by studying Hong Kong’s soundscape.

Together with another CUHK professor, Lam Kin-che, Marafa is trying to chart Hong Kong’s sounds and identify those that people like the most, with the goal of making the city a more tolerable place to live. It all comes down to the issue of noise pollution: the cacophony of roaring buses, endless jackhammering and mobile phone chatter that seems to dominate so much of Hong Kong. Instead of trying to make everything quieter, Marafa hopes that particularly pleasant sounds can be isolated and used to design better parks and urban spaces.

He points to Diamond Hill’s Nan Lian Garden as an example of how sound can be used to mask noise. Located next to Lung Chung Road, one of Kowloon’s busiest thoroughfares, the Tang Dynasty-style garden makes abundant use of fountains and waterfalls to fight the din of traffic. Even though the environment is still loud, says Marafa, the sound of rushing water puts people at ease, whereas the sound of traffic stresses them out.

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Chinese Gods, Good Fortune and a Waterfall

It was the perfect setting for a picnic. Under the shade of a few trees, next to the sloshing waves of the East Lamma Channel, we set down a blanket, some wine and some snacks and spent an afternoon watching the ships pass by. What more could we ask for?

How about a waterfall? Oh, and some World War II ruins. And a resting spot for Chinese gods. And to be able to get there from Causeway Bay in less than twenty minutes.

Not only does Waterfall Bay have all of this, it’s one of the most peaceful places you can go without venturing more than five minutes from the nearest bus stop, Wellcome or 7-Eleven.

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Measuring Hong Kong’s Cultural Heartbeat

2010 was a good year for Muse magazine. Three years after its launch, its mix of long features, short fiction and cultural criticism had earned it respect as one of Hong Kong’s most insightful cultural journals. It was sponsoring public lectures, film screenings and a search for Hong Kong’s up-and-coming cultural talents. In September, it made its first real foray into the digital world by launching an iPad edition.

So it came as a surprise when publisher Frank Proctor announced, at the end of the year, that the December edition would be Muse’s last.

“I didn’t see it coming,” says Leo Lee Ou-fan, a scholar of modern Chinese literature who wrote a regular column for Muse. “Muse had become Hong Kong’s representative to the outside world, but the sad part is that right at the point where it was being noticed, Frank couldn’t afford to continue.”

Three months later, another well-respected magazine, C for Culture, published its last issue. Both magazines had suffered from the same simple fate: they ran out of money. Loyal readers and cultural observers were left wondering: does Hong Kong have what it takes to support lively coverage of the arts? And without that coverage, can Hong Kong ever develop a mature artistic and intellectual culture?

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Neon’s Slow Exit from Hong Kong

Yue Hwa in 2005. Photo by choco_late

The Yue Hwa Chinese Products department store has stood at the corner of Jordan and Nathan roads for decades — and for decades, so did its big neon sign, a sentinel that marked the passage north into the seedy streets of Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok.

Sometime in 2009, though, without fanfare or even the simplest of announcements, the sign was removed. So was a similar sign further down Nathan Road. Yue Hwa did not respond to inquiries about the signs’ fate. It is not clear why they were taken down or what happened to them.

Heritage activists were nonplussed about the sign’s disappearance. “We put our priority on conserving some historical buildings first due to limited resources,” says Roy Ng, policy officer at the Conservancy Association, which has fought to save numerous historic buildings from destruction.

Katty Law, a heritage activist who successfully lobbied against the redevelopment of the Central Market and Former Married Police Quarters, says she has “never thought about the issue, probably because many of us are upset with the light pollution problem.”

Although neon signs are some of the most characteristic elements of Hong Kong’s streetscape, there has been virtually no effort to research, document or preserve the city’s landmark them. In terms of heritage conservation, they simply aren’t on the radar.

“Neon signs are such a surprisingly under-researched subject,” says Lee Ho-yin, director of the University of Hong Kong’s Architectural Conservation Programme. “We see them every day and yet we don’t know much about them.”

With more and more businesses switching to cheaper, mass-produced forms of signage, neon is steadily disappearing from Hong Kong’s streets. The effect on Hong Kong’s visual identity could be profound. Neon is such an integral part of Hong Kong’s character that the mere mention of the city’s name conjures up images of glowing Chinese characters and streets bathed in a rainbow of light.

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Looking for Life in Puerto Madero

The walk from the Plaza de Mayo, the political heart of Buenos Aires, to Puerto Madero, its redeveloped waterfront, begins inauspiciously. Cars barrel down multilane boulevards devoid of people; a weed-strewn lot slated to become a monument to the country’s deeply-loved former president, Juan Perón, lies unconvincingly fallow.

Then there are the railroad tracks severing most of the city from the streets near the sea: Puerto Madero’s redevelopment was accompanied by the construction of a new light rail line, helping turn this frustrating barrier into a vital transit link. But here, in the hostile borderland between B.A.’s bustling Microcentro and the waterfront, the ominous sight of Puerto Madero Station inspires little confidence, its relatively new platform facing tracks overgrown by weeds.

The unused station was not meant to serve the light rail line, which blasts past it, but a half-built commuter rail restoration that had never entirely got off the ground. The sight of the overgrown tracks, encapsulating the miserable fate of much of Argentina’s older, conventional rail network — a once sterling, nationwide system now reduced to a few rump lines around the capital — illustrates exactly the sort of broader decline in national prestige that Puerto Madero’s rise was meant to help reverse. However ambitious those intentions, though, they hardly make it less disconcerting that Puerto Madero Station, spotless in its desertion, serves as an appropriate introduction to Buenos Aires’ newly built-up waterfront itself.

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Make Your Own Public Space

No cycling. No ball-playing. No gambling. No remote-controlled vehicles. No walking on the grass. No fun. Hong Kong’s public parks are burdened by so many rules, they end up discouraging the very thing that parks are meant to provide: an escape from the many stresses of urban life.

The same is true for many of the city’s other public spaces, from sidewalks to plazas and the ubiquitous “sitting-out areas” found in every neighbourhood. Caught in a stranglehold of metal fences, filled with concrete and ugly tile walls, they seem to discourage the lingering and spontaneous interaction that is cultivated by good public space.

In response, Hong Kong people make their own public space. Throughout the city, leftover bits of concrete and greenery have been claimed by citizens and transformed, through piecemeal intervention and crafty ingenuity, into lively, informal gathering spots.

Not far from my apartment in jam-packed Mongkok is a place I like to call the Hill With No Name. I call it this because, as far as I can tell, it has been overlooked by the gods of toponymy: it’s simply a small hill that was never developed, save for an underground reservoir and the Tsung Tsin Primary School. Even my friend Olivia, who grew up nearby and who attended the school as a kid, was stumped when I asked her what the hill was called. “I always just call it the hill behind Tsung Tsin,” she said.

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The Robson Street Lawn

Vancouver is working hard to shake off its reputation as a somewhat pious city that values good mountain views over vibrant streetlife. Its architecture has seen a shift away from the back-to-nature style of the 1970s, 80s and 90s towards something bolder and more urban, like the recently-completed Woodwards redevelopment. There seems to be more tolerance for cheeky public art — witness Douglas Coupland’s Digital Orca (which makes up for all the lame whale murals around town) and Ken Lum’s Monument for East Vancouver. And there is more and more playful new street furniture.

Last week, I came across one such piece of furniture in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The stretch of Robson Street in front of the gallery had been closed for construction for several weeks; when it reopened, a kind of undulating fake lawn was installed. It had bright yellow “grass” and was shaded by white umbrellas; it was a bright, sunny afternoon and the lawn was thronged with people. I returned later, after the sun had set, and sat down for awhile. A couple of guys laid down on the grass, holding hands, and one of them wondered aloud, “What is this doing here? This is so weird!” But if others thought it was strange, it didn’t show. A couple of people worked on their laptops, faces lit by the screen’s blue glow. Others sat cross-legged, talking to friends. It was as if it had always been there.

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How to Bike Around Montreal in 1897

The modern bicycle was invented in the 1860s, but it wasn’t until the “safety bicycle” was introduced in the 1890s that cycling really caught on. The new bikes featured chain-drive transmission, pneumatic tires, a metal frame and two small wheels of equal size; they were exponentially more comfortable than the bulky, bone-shaking dandy horses and velocipedes of earlier eras. Their innovation led to cycling’s first episode of mainstream popularity.

More and more city streets were being paved, and with the Model T still a decade away from production, the only things that newly-minted cyclists had to worry about were pedestrians and horse shit. The map above, pulled from the collection of the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec by Spacing Montreal’s Alanah Heffez, shows a collection of bike-friendly streets and roads in turn-of-the-century Montreal. The emphasis is clearly on recreational cycling through the countryside — most of the island was still undeveloped back then — but it suggests the extent to which cycling was seen as an attractive way to get around.

Things changed in the twentieth century, of course. Like most cities, Montreal became more and more oriented around the automobile. Cycling never quite died out the way it did in other cities, and it enjoyed a resurgence in popularity after the 1970s, but it was still a distinctly eccentric way to get around. Even when new cycling infrastructure was built under the Jean Doré administration in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn’t clear whether it was built with the intent to facilitate cycling as recreation or transportation. Plenty of people got around Montreal by bike, but it wasn’t until very recently, when the number of cyclists and cycling infrastructure reached a kind of critical mass, that cycling became a widely accepted way of moving around the city.

Last month, I returned to Montreal for a couple of weeks and I made great use of Bixi, the city’s expansive bike-sharing system. Bixi is now in its third year and the honeymoon it first enjoyed with the public is clearly over; in recent months, the local newspapers have been filled with stories about discontent over broken bikes, a budget shortfall and new advertising panels on each bicycle. Yet the system remains vastly popular: its ridership has grown by 40 percent this year alone, with two million trips taken halfway through the cycling season.

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