Ground Texture

Hanover Street in the North End

Water meter on a North End sidestreet

Parking lot on Washington Street

Coke Machine Glow

Chinatown was probably the oddest part of central Boston, mostly because it had yet to be scrubbed clean of its grit. This old Coke machine, randomly found in the middle of the sidewalk and stocked not with soft drinks but with Miller Lite and Budweiser, is a prime example.

Public Fire Alarms

Over the weekend, as he ate a slice of pecan pie, my friend Sam teased me for dwelling so much on the minutiae of urban life. “Next you’re going to be writing about doorknobs,” he said, “and you’ll have photos of all the doorknobs in Mile End.”

Not yet. Today, I’m looking at the public fire alarm boxes on the streets of Boston, which you can find throughout the city and its suburbs. “For Fire, Open Then Pull Down Hook,” they read. Pulling the lever activates a machine that sends a signal, by telegraph, to Boston’s fire department. While these boxes were once common across North America, they have almost all been removed or abandoned. Boston, however, has maintained a fully functional system.

Maybe that’s because they were invented there. Boston’s government commissioned the system in 1851, just five years after the invention of the telegraph, and the first box was placed into service in the spring of 1852. Since then, the number of boxes on Boston’s streets has risen from 40 to 1,259 (still down from a peak of nearly 3,000).

Even if the boxes are antiquated, Boston has no plans of getting rid of them. “Fire officials say the wireless world hasn’t negated the system’s value. They point to the Sept. 11 attacks, when cellphone networks became overloaded. And in a blackout, they say, people can’t recharge their cellphones,” reported the Boston Globe in a feature published yesterday. Scrapping the boxes would save about $2 million per year. In fact, Boston nearly did get rid of them in 1983, but ultimately decided that they were worth keeping after all.

I’m glad they did. After all, if the fire alarm boxes were gone, what would I write about?

On the Green Line

The Green Line is Boston’s streetcar-subway combo, running above ground on Commonwealth Ave., Beacon St. and Huntington Ave. west of Massachusetts Ave. and below ground in the city centre.

The Isles of Montreal

This map of “The Isles of Montreal as they have been Survey’d By the French Engineers” was drawn in 1761, one year after the British conquest of New France. It depicts most of the Hochelaga Archipelago, including the walled town of Ville-Marie, or Montreal, which at the time was home to about 5,500 people living in 900 dwellings. Montreal was still quite rural in character, consisting mainly of two-storey houses with large gardens, and it was already spreading beyond its walls into the surrounding lands.

Even though this map takes a somewhat liberal interpretation of Montreal’s geography — the mountain does not extend nearly as far west as it would seem to indicate — what strikes me is how many of the island’s natural features have been suppressed over the course of its development. Entire streams, rivers and lakes have been completely done away with, including Otter Lake and the Rivière Saint-Pierre, which ran through the area now known as the Turcot Yards.

Such geographic alterations occurred in every major city. In Boston, they were quite dramatic. Whereas the city was practically an island for the first two centuries of its existence, landfill projects in the early nineteenth century transformed it into a much chunkier peninsula. Beacon Hill was carved up in order to provide the soil that was used to fill Back Bay and the South End.

Chinatown by Night

In comparison to the increasingly polished neighbourhoods around it, Boston’s Chinatown is an oasis of grit, a place that actually feels comfortable and well-worn, like an old pair of jeans.

Push Button Wait For Walk Signal

I’ve always associated manually-activated crosswalks with suburbia, where pedestrian traffic is light. Here in Montreal, they only exist at mid-block crosswalks; pedestrians have the priority at regular intersections, especially since the city started installing scramble crossings and advance walk signals at many corners.

When I was in Boston last month, my first visit to the city in eight years, I was surprised to find that you needed to push a button to cross legally at nearly every intersection. It seems terribly impractical in a city with such high levels of pedestrian traffic, especially one that prides itself on being so pedestrian-friendly. Since many pedestrians arrive at a light that is already green, they just ignore the “don’t walk” signal and cross against the light.

Woodframe Somerville

Cottage Avenue in Davis Square, Somerville, Boston

Chinese Food Around Corner

Two generations of advertisements in downtown Boston

Signs of the Far East

The topic of old commercial signs is esoteric enough, but I’ve managed to find an even more obscure type of commercial signage: 1960s-era Chinatown signs that use Rickshaw or some other kind of orientalist typeface. Most of them have disappeared, for obvious reasons, but it’s still possible to find traces of them in cities around the continent.

These two examples are from Montreal and Boston. In Montreal, only the shadow — or rust stains, to be more precise — of Restaurant Leo Foo are visible on this aluminum-clad building on St. Laurent. In Boston, I was surprised to see this vintage sign for the See Sun Market (which sells Quality Oriental Food!) on a somewhat dilapidated building on Harrison Avenue.

“Hey Paul!”

North Street, North End, Boston

Ghost Buildings in Boston

Bromfield near Province, Downtown Crossing

Earlier this year on Spacing Montreal, Thomas-Bernard Kenniff wrote about “ghost buildings,” the traces of long-gone buildings visible on the surface of blank walls. I wasn’t a surprised when I spotted a few ghost buildings while wandering around downtown Boston on Saturday. Unlike ghost ads, whose raisons d’être are usually pretty obvious, ghost buildings are surrounded by mystery. What did they look like? When were they demolished? Why?

Oxford and Beach, Chinatown

Between Tyler and Harrison, Chinatown

My Love-Hate Affair With Modernism

I used to hate Montreal’s Place Ville-Marie. I thought it was ugly, overly gigantic and hostile to the city around it. Built on top of an underground shopping mall, it seemed a fitting symbol of the way modernism had turned its back on the streets of the city.

But then something happened. I. M. Pei’s 1962 complex, which includes Montreal’s most iconic skyscraper, began to grow on me. I came to admire its daring, the way it broke from the achingly conservative mainstream of Montreal’s commercial architecture. Its main entrance is clear and graceful, and the lovely terrace is a great place to relax in the midst of the downtown bustle.

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