January 14th, 2010
Kowloon Walled City
Fagstein has really upped the ante on his Montreal Geography Trivia. For the latest installment (the sixty-fifth!), he posted a map of the Montreal suburb of Côte St. Luc and asked why it has two exclaves, which pretty much stumped everyone, even those who knew about the exclaves. With the help of the Gazette’s archives, which were recently made available on Google News, he was able to chart the political wheeling-and-dealing that led to the two stray bits of CSL.
What might be more interesting than how they came into being is what kind of an impact they’ve had on the city. One of the exclaves encompasses a portion of Macdonald Avenue, right on the border of Montreal and Hampstead. I’d always wondered why Macdonald was lined by big apartment blocks while the streets around it were much lower-density. Now, thanks to Fagstein, I know it’s because CSL saw the exclave as an opportunity to reap the profits from high-density development without making a single one of its suburban citizens upset, because the only people who would object to a bunch of apartment towers sprouting in their backyard lived in Hampstead and Montreal.
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June 11th, 2008
Expo ’58 commemorative display in a Brussels shop window
A decade before the psychedelic euphoria of Montreal’s Expo ’67 was another emblematic World Fair, Brussels’ Expo 58. Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, the fair’s symbolic centrepiece, The Atomium, was restored for the occasion.
The Atomium was intended to represent a giant iron molecule magnified billions of times. As cheesy as this may sound, it is actually a striking piece of architecture that is historic and avant-garde all at once. The interior is full of Expo ’58 paraphernalia and gives an idea of a World Fair that was part “The Jetsons,” and part “Father Knows Best.” Like Expo ’67, the archives that remain from the period exude a similar spirit of naive optimism fronted by the paste-on smiles of Expo hostesses. Whereas the Brussels fair celebrated the dawn of a prosperous post-war era, there was still a zoo of “Live Africans” at the Belgian Congo pavillion, and some USA-USSR Cold War tensions in the air.
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February 1st, 2007
There probably aren’t too many places left in the world like Bruges. Located in Western Flanders, in the northwest of Belgium, Bruges is probably the best-preserved medieval city left in Europe. It’s a classic storybook town, drawn straight out of romance movies and children’s books, the kind of place you’d never imagine a city bus snorting through.
Yet here I am waiting for the bus. The roads here are too small to be anything but one-way, and the road in front of my destination, the hostel where I’m staying, goes the wrong way. I’m not entirely sure where I’ll end up.
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