August 18th, 2010
My award for the most underlooked gem in Montreal goes to the Jacques Cartier Bridge Building. Built around 1930, it looks like an art deco take on a Moroccan kasbah. The windows are laid out under arches, in straight lines of narrow arrow slits, and some in diagonals. There are even traditional rub el hizb, or Islamic eight-pointed stars, around the circular windows at the top of the four corner towers. All of this is enlivened by the fact that building supports the bridge itself and twisting flyovers jut out from all sides, creating some dramatic panoramas at its base.
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October 4th, 2009
Railroad viaduct, Griffintown
Highway 40, Villeray
February 17th, 2009
The long, arching pathways that carry bicycles and pedestrians over the Williamsburg Bridge feel like New York’s version of the torii leading to Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari shrine: solemn, still, enclosed, and blaring with bold, repetitive red. While the Williamsburg Bridge is not populated by spirits, it speaks — whether in traces of graffiti or in anthropomorphic street art — to lonely passersby.
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March 5th, 2008
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.
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