Star Ferry terminal, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong
West 34th Street near 8th Avenue, New York
Sinan Road near Taikang Road, Luwan, Shanghai
The driver of the S62 bus let me on even though there was no value left on my borrowed Metrocard.
“Just don’t let it happen again,” he said, waving me back.
Twenty minutes later, after a bumpy ride down Victory Boulevard, a narrow commercial street that winds its way across the northern half of Staten Island, New York’s fifth and forgotten borough, we arrive at the best way to get to Manhattan: the Staten Island Ferry. I say it’s the best because, unlike the US$5 express bus, which takes you across the Verrazano-Narrow Bridge and up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Ferry is free and it runs around the clock. It’s also relaxing and picturesque: you can stand on the outside deck, leaning against the railing as the bells on the harbour’s buoys clang and the Statue of Liberty passes by in the distance.
The City of New York eliminated the ferry’s 50-cent fare in 1997. More recently, it has invested millions of dollars in building two pleasant, airy new terminals. These improvements have attracted new riders and made the ferry one of the most democratic forms of transportation in New York: few other kinds of transport—perhaps not even the subway—bring together so many different people into a single space.
After a few days of going to and from Manhattan by ferry, I left New York for Hong Kong, where I re-encountered my favourite ferry service in the world: the Star Ferry, whose weatherworn green boats have crossed Victoria Harbour for more than a century. It’s not a stretch to say that the ferry’s ten-minute journey across the harbour is one of the more awe-inspiring experiences in the world, especially at night, when the choppy water seems to glow in the ambient light of Hong Kong’s skyline.
Corner of Grand and Allen, New York
La Gauchetière near St. Urbain, Montreal
It’s a bit of a paradox — bridges are meant to connect two sides of a gap, to bring them together, but they often act quite intentionally as barriers because the space beneath them is so problematic. There is a tendency to leave it unused and overgrown with weeds, or to give it up for some perfunctory use, like parking.
But there are many creative solutions to dealing with the space underneath a bridge. I came across one of them when I walked under the Manhattan Bridge in New York’s Chinatown. Shops, retail arcades and produce stalls occupy the space beneath its stone arches; a fruit and vegetable market winds its way up the sidewalk along the north side of the bridge. Instead of dividing a neighbourhood in two, the bridge serves as a focal point for Chinatown.
The term “skywalk” conjures up something decidedly modern, and for the most part, the elevated pedestrian bridges linking office buildings in cities around the world really are quite recent. Rare before the 1960s and 70s, they have since become popular as a means of separating high volumes of pedestrians from high volumes of vehicular traffic (like in parts of Hong Kong) or of insulating downtown pedestrians from a harsh winter climate (like in Calgary or Minneapolis). At their best, they are a beautiful in their functionality; at their worst, like when a drab modern skywalk has been built between two historic structures, they are a blemish on the cityscape.
Last week, when I saw this skywalk on West 32nd Street in midtown Manhattan, I was surprised not only by how graceful it was, but how it seemed to have been added quite a long time ago, perhaps only shortly after the construction of the buildings it connects.
Elegant wood-panelled New York subway car with wicker seats from the turn of the twentieth century.
The New York Transit Museum is a paradise for public transportation obsessives. The museum has a chronological collection of turnstiles and subway tokens on display, with detailed descriptions of the minutest changes over the years. This may be a bit much for the average visitor, but everyone gets a kick out of wandering through the old subway trains downstairs, which contain period ads and the original transit maps.
A streamlined subway car from the 1950s…
… and the subways on the tracks today.
Suppose you wrote the names of the largest hundred or so municipalities in the United States on a series of index cards. What’s the logical way to arrange them? By population, land area, age, or density? By the proportions of various ethnic groups?
Now, suppose you arranged the cards by something more qualitative: levels of prestige. At the top, you’ll find the obvious subjects: New York, say, and Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco. You’ll maybe even find St Louis, with its arch, and New Orleans, with its history, and the lot of other American cities which have created some level of mythos around them. And moving toward the end, you’ll find Newark, New Jersey.
Montreal has eight American Apparel locations, more than any other city but New York and LA, but our streets are devoid of the company’s notorious advertisements, except for those on the stores’ façades themselves. (The back pages of our weekly newspapers, however, are another story.)
In New York, though, American Apparel has made a mark with frequently-changing billboards that feature the kinds of ads that have made it so infamous: young-looking hipsters, clad to various degrees in the company’s clothes, shot in unflattering light and in a variety of pseudo-pornographic poses. (If you still haven’t seen any of the ads, American Apparel has some of the tamer ones on its website, along with photo galleries of its models.)
Lately, there has been a sort of backlash against American Apparel. Earlier this year, a series of ads at the corner of Allen and Houston, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, raised the ire of some nearby residents. The first, described by one blog as a “leotard-and-knee high socks beaver shot,” came in the early spring. Then, over the summer, it was replaced by a new billboard advertising tights, its topless model visible only from behind, bum thrust outwards. By the end of October, it had been defaced with neon green paint and the inscription: “Gee, I wonder why women get raped?” Shortly thereafter, in early November, a paste-up appeared on a SoHo street lampooning a 2005 American Apparel tube sock ad.
I can’t help but find myself amused by the consternation over American Apparel’s advertising. For the most part, it is no more revealing or exploitative than most other fashion ads; the difference is that American Apparel’s provocation is cheeky and only half-serious. It takes typical fashion advertising and strips it of all pretence and glamour, reducing it to its bare sex-driven essence. American Apparel’s ads are vulgar, and they’re certainly brash, but at least they’re honest in their intentions. They don’t dance around the fact that they are using tits and ass (and other things, too) to sell fabric. At least its models are human-looking, unlike the hairless androids often featured by other companies.
American Apparel’s other, non-sexploitative marketing efforts suggests that the company has a pretty good sense of humour, too. In May, at the corner of Houston and Allen, it took a break from crotch shot billboards to run an ad featuring Woody Allen, from a scene in his 1977 film Annie Hall, dressed as a Hasid. It was accompanied by the Yiddish phrase der heyliker rebe, “the holy rabbi.” When asked about the ad, which only lasted for a few days, American Apparel’s representatives would only say that they view Woody Allen as their “spiritual leader.”
On American Apparel’s website, the company declares its devotion to “people, places and things that surround us” with photos of everyday streetlife in Hong Kong, signs in Montreal and mid-century architecture like Habitat ‘67. (Sound familiar?) This is a company with a heightened awareness of kitsch, and a passion for kitsch is what is driving a large part of our current urban culture. That might explain why, even though many people seem repulsed by American Apparel, even more are attracted to it.
Tobu World Square’s model of New York. Photo by Naoya Hatakeyama
When I was a kid, my grandparents would take me on vacation to Victoria, BC. The highlight of the trip—for me, at least—was always a visit to Miniature World, an odd little museum tucked into the north wing of the Empress Hotel. There, I would race past dozens of dollhouses, castles and spaceships to the museum’s centrepiece, a giant model railroad. I liked it not for the trains, but for the cities: tiny recreations of everything from Victoria to Halifax, strung along the tracks like beads on a necklace.
My curiosity with models was revived last month by Naoya Hatakeyama’s exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Scales, which runs until February 3, 2008. Hatakeyama, a Japanese photographer whose work has dealt in large part with the relationship between nature and cities, was asked by the CCA in 2003 to turn his lens to three different scale models of New York and Tokyo. In the twenty-four photos that came out of the project, Hatakeyama questions, with curiosity and humour, the relationship between architecture, photography and our perceptions of reality.
Two of the models depict New York. One, found in the Windows of the World theme park in Shenzhen, China, is a strange, cartoonish vision of the city, a dilapidated landscape of crooked, colourful buildings. The model seems haphazardly constructed, like the set of a cheap disaster movie. In one photo, an approach to the Brooklyn Bridge abruptly ends in mid-air. The bridge itself is cracked and disjointed, cars scattered across it as if there had been a massive earthquake.
New York in Shenzhen’s Windows of the World
In sharp contrast to this is the model of New York found in Japan’s Tobu World Square—as detailed and realistic as Windows of the World is abstract. If you didn’t look too closely, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was the real New York. Hatakeyama, shooting in black and white, has created the illusion of reality, evoking the strongly-shadowed, iconic Manhattan of the imagination, or at least in the famous early twentieth century photos of Alfred Stieglitz.
The point here, however, is not to fool us, but to give us subtle hints that we are, in fact, looking at a model, an idealized vision of New York. Despite the cars and pedestrians on the streets, even the graffiti painstakingly drawn on the walls, there is a strange lifelessness about these buildings, their windows empty like dead eyes. In one shot, the side wall of the Plaza Hotel is inexplicably blank. In another, we see a ballcap-wearing man looming between skyscrapers like some bizarrely mundane giant.
Hatakeyama’s photos of the third model, an aerial view of a huge and incredibly detailed rendition of Tokyo, are presented as a black-and-white triptych. It’s hard to tell that the city depicted is not, in fact, the real thing.
I’ve written about music here before, and I’ve even posted a couple of music videos that have absolutely nothing to do with cities aside from the fact that they were shot in them. It feels kind of silly, but still, it’s a nice distraction from the dreary November weather.
So here’s another video, this one by the New York-by-way-of-New Zealand comedy duo Flight of the Conchords. Last year, they landed their own show on HBO. It’s about a pair of New Zealand comedy singers who are trying to make it big on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As with any type of comedy, it doesn’t appeal to everyone, and I have no doubt that some of you will find this song utterly annoying — but I love it.
“Inner City Pressure” is not only a parody of Pet Shop Boys, it pokes fun at the great hipster/artist/creatively-under-employed social substratum that has engulfed large swaths of urban North America. There might even be a bit of a satirical take on Wong Kar Wai in the slow-motion shots of nighttime streets under the elevated rail, which are nothing if not reminiscent of the scenes in the first part of Chungking Express.
Last week, La Presse reported quite breathlessly that the federal government, which owns the Port of Montreal and much of the land along its waterfront, has been lobbying the United Nations to move its headquarters from New York to Montreal. The rationale, apparently, is that the UN’s current headquarters, housed in an iconic complex built in 1949 along the East River, needs nearly $2 billion worth of renovations over the next couple of decades. It would cost a lot less to simply pack up and move to Montreal, where a state-of-the-art new headquarters would be waiting on the site of the Silo No. 5 and on adjacent piers.
You have to admit, as outlandish an idea as this may be, it would be pretty cool to have the United Nations in Montreal. So far, La Presse is the only paper reporting any of this in depth — Montreal’s other media outlets seem to be rolling their eyes in disbelief — but the Gazette’s Henry Aubin came up with a list of reasons why moving the UN to Montreal would be a swell idea. Among the most convincing? The UN would be an enormous boon to the city’s economy, bringing in 20,000 highly-paid workers and creating as many as 60,000 spinoff jobs. The UN’s two working languages are French and English, which would reinforce Montreal’s bilingualism while infusing the city with plenty of new people who speak good French.
Real estate promoters certainly like the idea of moving the world organization: here in Montreal, they’d get a share of multi-billion dollar contracts to design and develop the new headquarters. In New York, they’d get to redevelop the UN’s old headquarters, also worth billions of dollars.
A single-room occupancy hotel in Vancouver
Today’s Guardian features an article on a new generation of Japanese — most of them young men — unable to afford homes. They spend their days either unemployed or working at menial jobs; at night, they float between 24-hour internet cafés and capsule hotels.
“According to a recent government survey of the people the media has dubbed ‘net café refugees’, 5,400 people spend at least half the week living in cafés such as Manga Square, though most have little or no interest in the internet,” the Guardian reports. “Instead, they are attracted by the low cost of a night’s accommodation, an expanding array of services and the sympathetic attitude of café owners.” A night at a net café costs about $8.70 per night — double if you include dinner.
In some ways, living in an internet café is really just a novel take on an old standby: the flophouse. These cheap “cubicle hotels,” along with their slightly more upscale cousins, the single-room occupancy hotel (SRO), have traditonally offered low daily rates for a modest amount of private space. They flourished in North American cities until the 1960s, when they slowly began to disappear, with no tears shed from municipal authorities who saw them as a blight.
New York’s Bowery was especially famous for its flophouses. In the 1930s and 40s, up to 25,000 “Bowery bums” spent their lives on the street, many of them residing in its 100 flophouses. Today, just a few of those hotels remain; the rest were long ago purged by housing reform, urban renewal and gentrification. In Vancouver, an abundance of SROs has been whittled down to a mere handful as they have been converted into hostels, hotels or condos.
Feltly Hats in Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY
Manhattan, April 21, 2007: “My nose is going haywire this morning. Perhaps this is because when I travel I have to put off my morning brew until I can get from my hotel to a decent coffeehouse. Am I ever glad, then, that I discovered Grounded.”
I am a coffee fiend. Each day I venture out from work for an extended lunch break at my local coffeehouse, where I ruminate over a Fair Trade, organically-grown dark roast blend, a newspaper, and a notebook. Naturally, when I travel, I do not like to give up this daily routine. However, since finding a good independent coffeehouse is often left to word-of-mouth recommendation, I am sometimes forced to suffice with below-grade medium roast coffee or to chance it on espressos made by inexperienced baristas.
While my previous coffeehouse experiences in New York have been hit-and-miss, I seem to have stumbled over a great, unpretentious spot to enjoy a brew and gather my thoughts between bouts of aggressive phototouring. Lodged into a fifteen foot-wide crack between Victorian buildings on Jane Street in the West Village, Grounded is difficult to find amidst the brownstone rowhouses that fold over one another in this maze of a neighbourhood. To this travelling Canadian, though, it appeared as an oasis — an independent coffeehouse in the Village that serves fair trade coffee, isn’t overpriced, and hasn’t been overrun by scenesters or stroller moms.
Montreal Apartments
