A Hasidic Exodus from Park Avenue?

The Montreal Gazette reported this weekend that the Hasidic community in Outremont and Mile End is suffering from a housing shortage. In 2002, there were about 4,200 Hasidim in the neighbourhood; today there are more than 6,000. Rising property values mean that many new Hasidic families are finding themselves priced out of their own Montreal heartland. Apparently, the hunt is on to find a new neighbourhood with suitable and affordable housing.

If the Hasidic community does move on, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a Jewish community has come and gone. The entire swath of city from Chinatown right up to Little Italy is littered with former synagogues that were abandoned when the original Jewish community moved west. But it wouldn’t be a good thing if the Hasidim leave.

First of all, a Hasidic exodus would be a disaster for Park Avenue’s economy. Hasidic Jews make up more than 25 percent of Outremont’s population, and even they have their own Yiddish bookstores and kosher eateries, they still rely on non-Hasidic businesses for everything else, like drugs, hardware, stationery and fresh fruits and vegetables. Most of those shops are on Park Avenue; imagine the impact if they lost a quarter of their business.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Goodbye Gutzlaff

Whenever you come across a particularly charming and surprising corner of Hong Kong, you can almost be sure that the Urban Renewal Authority has plans to do away with it. Although its official vision is “to create quality and vibrant urban living in Hong Kong,” most of its developments obliterate tight-knit communities and organic urban growth in favour of shopping malls, office developments and housing estates. Cynical Hong Kongers see the URA as a proxy for the big land developers that control this town; its projects are usually little more than land grabs for Hong Kong’s economic elite. Aside from displacing well-established neighbourhood social networks, they replace small-scale, independent businesses with corporate chain stores, which degrades the entrepreneurial spirit on which this city was built.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Now Showing: Hong Kong

Josh Kim’s 2006 short, The Police Box

Where has Hong Kong gone? Once a world filmmaking capital, it has nearly vanished from the silver screen. Each year, far fewer feature films are made here than in cities such as Vancouver, Seoul and Tehran. What’s more, many recent Hong Kong movies, geared towards the lucrative mainland market, lack the local flavour that once made them so distinctive.

That’s something one of Hong Kong’s newest and most energetic film festivals hopes to change. After a one-year hiatus, I Shot Hong Kong is back, with a programme of 26 proudly local short films, music videos and documentaries.

“Hong Kong has lost its status as a premier filmmaking centre,” laments Craig Leeson, who helped found the festival in 2005. “In the late 1980s and early 90s, we were making 300 films a year here. From the start of 2001 until now, we’ve been making less than 50 a year. I think one of the reasons for that is that there’s no support for independent filmmakers or new talent. We’re not propagating filmmakers at the grass-roots level.”

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Temporary Stores Thrive as Others Fade

Temporary store in Tsim Sha Tsui. Photo by K.Y. Cheng

There’s no mistaking the scene on Jordan Road: people are hunting for bargains. In the hollowed-out remains of an old clothing store, the faded words “In Fashion” still visible above the entrance, a motley crowd looks through boxes of discount Crocs sandals and kitschy plastic jewellery. In the corner, a man hawks vacuum-sealed plastic containers, his amplified voice competing for attention with the shop’s other employees, whose sales pitches are also broadcast through loudspeakers.

The miniature bazaar, which has no name, is the creation of Peter Hui, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who moved to Hong Kong from Fujian in 1996. A little over a decade ago, during the Asian financial crisis, he was working as a door-to-door watch salesman when he noticed temporary variety stores being opened in vacant retail spaces.

“The economy was quite bad and businesses were not very profitable, but we saw some people with these outlet stores and thought, ah yes, that’s a good concept,” said Hui. “Selling things for cheaper, no renovation fees, low expenses and temporary leases. That’s all good for making a profit.”

Hui and his company, Price Killer Shop Group, now own 10 temporary stores around the city. In a way, he embodies Hong Kong’s entrepreneurial energy, which manages to find expression even in the midst of an economic downturn. Even as the recession deepens and consumers dig ever deeper into their pockets, there is money to be made, and discount temporary stores like Hui’s are becoming more and more common.

Until now, the city’s retail market seemed to be doing well in spite of the ongoing financial crisis. Sales grew in November, December and January, but recently-unveiled governments statistics show a precipitous drop in February, with sales down 12.6 percent from 2008. Even considering the “New Year effect”—last year’s Lunar New Year fell in February, boosting retail sales in that month—retail is still down by a significant amount.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

Dépanneurs Beyond the Beer Ads

I’ve long been fascinated by dépanneurs, the ubiquitous Montreal convenience store that are usually owner-operated and ramshackle in appearance. They’re an integral part of life in Montreal—most people visit them at least once or twice a day for beer, milk, lotto tickets, cigarettes or a snack—and they occupy a vital place in the social and economic spheres of a neighbourhood. More than that, however, they are a microcosm of much broader trends, including immigration policies and the Quebec government’s attempt to protect homegrown retail.

Dépanneurs are subject to a heavier regulatory load than convenience stores in other parts of North America. Cigarette taxes are high, beer is subject to a minimum price of $2.73 per litre and alcohol cannot be sold after 11pm, for example. There is justification behind these regulations: cigarette taxes line government pockets and ostensibly dissuade people from smoking; minimum beer prices prevent supermarkets from undercutting dépanneurs and laws on store opening hours are meant to protect small retailers from chains. Although the continued abundance of survival of dépanneurs in Montreal is a direct result of government intervention in the retail sector—the law on beer prices is one of many designed to protect neighbourhood deps from supermarkets—some laws and regulations have unintended consequences.

Here’s one example: international cigarette smuggling. As cigarette taxes have risen, Mohawk entrepreneurs have taken advantage of their special right to unrestricted cross-border trade and movement to import large amounts of Mohawk-made cigarettes from the United States to Canada, which are then sold illegally to non-natives through shops on reserves and in Montreal dépanneurs, some of which sell black-market cigarettes despite the risk of harsh penalties. Some brands of American-made Mohawk cigarettes have become so popular that counterfeit versions are now being made on reserves in Quebec.

Similarly, immigration policies have had an unintended impact on Montreal’s dépanneurs. Many professionals who immigrate to Canada from overseas face high barriers to entry into the workforce. Dépanneurs are a popular alternative to menial labour, since they are relatively inexpensive to buy and offer a decent living in exchange for long hours of monotonous, solitary work. The vast majority of Montreal dépanneurs are now run by immigrants, most of them recent arrivals from Asia, which has led to increased competition among deps, but more innovation, too. In immigrant-rich neighbourhoods, many deps now double as ethnic supermarkets, selling Indian spices and Chinese vegetables alongside Quebec beer.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

The Multinational Ding-Ding

The ding-ding, Hong Kong’s 105-year-old tramway is now a multinational asset. Yesterday, local conglomerate Whalf Holdings sold 50 percent of its shares in Hongkong Tramways to the French transportation company Veolia, which retains the option to buy the remaining half. “Operating the light rail system in Hong Kong will give us the knowledge and expertise in mainland China. That’s strategically why we chose to start in Hong Kong,” said the head of Veolia’s new Chinese division. While I’m not sure that’s a very good strategy (what does running a century-old British-style tramway in Hong Kong teach you about operating modern light rail in, say, Chongqing?), it does raise some questions about the future of a beloved piece of Hong Kong transport.

So far, Veolia has promised not to make any changes to the tramway’s current operations. Although they are much slower than the MTR, trams remain extremely popular, largely because they cost just $2 (about 30 Canadian cents) to ride. I’m willing to bet that the experience of rattling through the canyons of Wan Chai or North Point, wind rushing through open windows, has something to do with it too. After all, the tram is the very opposite of the sleek, air-conditioned MTR, and it can often be more enjoyable to ride than the loud, dingy buses that serve local routes on the Hong Kong side of the harbour. Hongkong Tramways makes about $150 million from fares, which hasn’t changed for several years, but the revenue from advertising on trams and tram stations has increased from $20 million to $50 million since 2004. Even considering the poor state of the economy, it seems almost inevitable that advertising will play an ever more prominent part in the tramway’s operation.

While there may not be any changes to the current tram line, Veolia will spearhead a proposal to run a spur line along the newly-reclaimed Central waterfront, from the Star Ferry pier to the convention centre in Wan Chai. It’s a great idea, one that could help offset the decline in Star Ferry ridership and give the public better access to waterfront open space. The only problem is that the guiding principle behind the new line would be nostalgia: the rolling stock would consist of custom-made replicas of the various types of trams that have served Hong Kong through the decades. In other words, instead of a proper, serious tram line along the waterfront, we’d have a tram better-suited to running a loop around the perimeter of Hong Kong Disneyland. I can easily envision a Peak Tram-style line that caters to tourists and charges far more than any normal transit user would be willing to pay. Hong Kong’s tramway is nostalgic enough; any new investment should be focused on making it more efficient and useful to the public.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Recession City

Anti-capitalist street art, SoHo, New York

It’s a Saturday evening and the Boston subway is packed. The train is stalled on the platform at Downtown Crossing station, and the car has been filling up for nearly thirty minutes. Tensions are rising. One new arrival finds me slumped in my seat, impatient:

“Aw, look at this!” he announces to the train. “This guy can go wherever he wants, but can I go to his neighborhood? I’m not hating on him. I don’t know anything about him. I’m just saying, I’m angry, and I want to take it out. I want to do something to him. Because times have changed. It’s gonna be like the new 70s.” He is middle-aged, black, bedraggled, carrying a dusty briefcase. He looks like he is struggling, but not destitute. As he begins to be surrounded by more impoverished riders – and more affluent targets – he finishes his rant, asks for the time, and starts wondering, incessantly, when the train will move again.

Cities by their very nature are points of attraction for dense masses of people, compelling exchange, activism, and interaction. But when the world starts to become unpleasant, cities begin to manifest the dark side of these normally positive activities. The shimmering skyline becomes a symbol of excess; public spaces become fora for unrest rather than green lungs or safety valves; begging, crime, protest, and selfishness become more rude, more common, more crude.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Laneway Shops

Electrical appliance store, Causeway Bay

Antique vendor, Sheung Wan

Last year, I wrote a bit about the informal shops and sales that spring up in some of Montreal’s laneways — a junk emporium, a record shop, a bicycle cooperative, just to name a few in Mile End. Here in Hong Kong, where commercial rents are among the most unaffordable in the world, these kinds of tiny, out-of-way shops are especially common. You’ll find locksmiths, barbers, cheap restaurants, mahjong tile vendors, even bookshops.

Popularity: unranked [?]

How a Supermarket Shapes the City

There’s something particularly iconic about supermarkets, especially in North America, where they first emerged in the 1940s and have a good half-century of history behind them. While supermarkets today are an entrenched part of the urban landscape, there was something particularly fresh and innovative about them in the 1950s, which you can see in those that have survived from that era without too many alterations.

But even those that have been altered significantly have left a big imprint on the shape of our streets and neighbourhoods. I never realized just how big of an impact Steinberg’s had on the Montreal landscape until Kate McDonnell pointed me towards a Flickr photostream containing a few dozen then-and-now images of Steinberg’s supermarkets around town.

Steinberg’s was one of those businesses that was more than just a business: in postwar Quebec, it was a cultural phenomenon, a Jewish-owned grocery chain that became an entrenched part of working- and middle-class francophone culture. “Je fais mon Steinberg” became a phrase housewives used to mean they were going out to buy food for dinner. At its height, it was one of the largest and most important food businesses in Canada, with stores throughout Quebec and Ontario and at least one location in each neighbourhood of Montreal.

Steinberg’s went under in 1992, the victim of a family dispute, and its assets were divided between Metro and Provigo, its two Quebec competitors. But its legacy lives on in popular culture. Fifteen years after it disappeared, pretty much everyone in Montreal still knows about Steinberg’s; its logo has even become a trendy accessory, thanks to buttons and t-shirts made by Montréalité.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

NDG Evening

Earlier this month I accompanied my friends on a nostalgic walk through NDG, the sprawling west end neighbourhood in which they used to live. Developed in the early twentieth century on some of Montreal’s most fertile land—the famed Montreal Melon once grew there—NDG was for the first part of its history a fairly humdrum suburb home to middle-class WASPs and British immigrants who had moved up from working-class Verdun.

Things changed in the 1970s when many long-time residents left for the suburbs or moved away from Montreal altogether. Some streets fell on hard times, NDG’s population became more varied and the whole area began to take on a more interesting, eclectic character. Sherbrooke Street West, a long commercial artery that runs along the south side of the neighbourhood, is where NDG is revealed in all its bizarre glory, a meeting ground for well-adjusted families, oddball layabouts and members of various different ethnic communities, especially Jamaicans, Koreans and Persians. The shops along the street are remarkably diverse: D.A.D.’s sells takeaway Indian food alongside Montreal-style bagels; Nearly New Books/Livres Presque ‘9′ unites two languages with one bad pun; a video store with no apparent name, tucked away discreetly on the first floor of an apartment building, rents nothing but VHS copies of Korean television dramas.

When my friends lived in NDG they were fascinated by one of those odd shops on Sherbrooke: an ice cream parlour at the corner of Harvard. Brightly decorated, with an old-style bar inside, it featured a large banner that advertised 24 flavours of soft serve. But it was never open. Once, when my friends spotted some people working inside, they knocked on the door and asked if they could buy some ice cream. “No,” they were told.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Walking Mile End’s Laneways

In many ways, Montreal is a remarkably heterogeneous city, and its built form is no exception. Each individual neighbourhood is distinct enough to provide the aimless walker with enough visual cues to figure out where he or she is.

Alleys, too, vary from one part of the city to the next. In nineteenth-century neighbourhoods, they’re often aimless, terminating in dead ends and unexpected courtyards. Twentieth-century lanes are more standard in their arrangement, but even then, there is a great deal of difference between them. Many of the alleys in the old town of Delorimier, on the Plateau, are surprisingly overrun with vegetation, giving them an almost rural feel; not too far away, the lush streets of Outremont are counterbalanced by narrow, denuded lanes lined by tall brick buildings.

Mile End falls somewhere in between. Compared to many neighbourhoods, its alleys are remarkably narrow, and they tend to be lined by garages and the back ends of buildings, or at least some pretty imposing walls and fences. But there’s no shortage of greenery, either, and all of this has the effect of making the lanes feel remarkably cozy and hemmed-in. Even more interesting is the clutter you find in them: discarded furniture, oddly-painted fences, street art, run-down sheds and garages — sometimes even entire houses that are hidden from the street. It’s fun to walk down the alleys and peek into the backyards and rear balconies, comparing the gardening habits of neighbours or juxtaposing messy, debris-and-laundry-filled backyards (long-time Mile End residents) with others that are immaculately-arranged and well-stocked with expensive patio furniture (finnicky suburban transplants).

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Student Business, Campus Life

It was a quiet, rainy day at McGill when Devin Alfaro, just out of his last exam of the semester, walked into the Caférama on the first floor of the university’s William Shatner student centre.

Two weeks earlier, in early April, the café was at the centre of a battle over campus business. Caférama will not renew its lease this summer, so the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), which manages the space, was faced with a decision: rent it to students, who would operate a non-profit café, or rent it to another private vendor. Although leasing the space to a student-run business would fulfill SSMU’s obligation to prioritize student needs, a privately-operated tenant would provide a reliable cash flow to the student union.

“It was a marathon meeting,” recalled Alfaro, a third-year undergraduate and arts representative on SSMU council. “It started in the early evening and lasted until three in the morning, and the vote was close.”

Ultimately, SSMU voted 13-12 to lease the café space to an outside business. Alfaro was one of the council members who voted against the student proposals, not because he was opposed to the idea of student business on campus, but because the three student proposals that had been submitted were simply unfeasible.

The strongest bid came from Midnight Kitchen, a volunteer-run collective that provides free vegan lunches to students. Along with serving lunch, it would have used the café space to sell coffee and pastries, but this proved too modest for SSMU, which was looking for a full-service café.

Food services and other businesses at Canadian universities are becoming increasingly centralized. Every year, new undergraduate students are being met with restaurants, cafeterias and bookstores run by corporate franchisees, and many complain of high prices and a lack of choice in product offering. This is especially true at McGill, Montreal’s oldest university, which has systematically closed many of its student-operated businesses over the past several years.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Street Vendor Songs

Montreal did away with a big chunk of its cultural heritage when it started cracking down on street vendors in the 1960s. Food vendors were the first to go and, although City Hall has been easing its restrictions on street vending for a number of years, allowing people to sell art and crafts on Ste. Catherine Street and at the tam tams, it still refuses to allow anyone except mobile ice cream vendors to sell food on the street. This makes us one of the only major cities in the world with a near-total ban on street food.

Not only does this deprive us of delicious snacks, it eliminates a great source of streetlife. Today, on Coolopolis, Kristian Gravenor posted a bit about the calls of early twentieth century street vendors. He points to an article in the May 19th, 1929 edition of Le Petit Journal:

La corporation des marchands des quatres saisons, ou “colporteurs” comme on les nomme ici, est composée de braves gens qui gagnent honorablement leur vie en vendant de porte en porte, les primeurs, fruits ou légumes. On pouvait autrement classer dans cette catégorie les vendeurs de crême à la glace et les petits marchands de galettes et de blé-d’inde bouilli.

Le marchand de crême à la glace se tenait au coin des rues avec une petite voiture où était installé son bidon d’ice cream qui’il débitait à un sou le cocotier. Celui-là, il va sans dire, était particulièrement l’ami des enfants.

Un autre petit vendeur très populaire était le marchand de petites galettes et de petits pains chauds: “Galettes! Galettes! Madame!” criait-il, “pas trop de beurre dedans! … Cinq pour cinq sous! … Galettes! … Galettes! …”

Puis le marchand de blé-d’inde bouilli qui parcourait les rues avec son haridelle, en criant sans cesse, et en vers, s’il vous plait:

“Bon blé-d’inde bouilli!
Trois sous pour un épi! …”

Et qui ne se rappelle le vendeur de bluets, annoçant sa marchandise avec un trémolo dans la voix, tout comme notre marchand de bananes d’aujourd’hui: “Bluets!… Ah! les beaux bluets du Saguenay!…”

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Dep City: Montreal’s Convenience Stores

If Montreal seems saturated with dépanneurs, that’s because it is: 1,127 crowd the island, about one for every 1,500 people. Since they emerged in their current form in the 1970s, the descendants of tobacconists and once-ubiquitous corner grocery stores, dépanneurs have become an inextricable part of life in Montreal.

They also are an important but often overlooked aspect of the city’s economy. For business owners, many of whom are immigrants, dépanneurs represent a rare field of work that poses virtually no barrier to entry, aside from a relatively small amount of capital.

“An immigrant arrives in this country with a degree, with skills, but cannot find a job because he doesn’t have Canadian experience,” said Bakr Ibrahim, a professor at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business who specializes in small business and ethnic entrepreneurship. “For one reason or another, he cannot gain employment in mainstream (fields), so the first thing he knows is to start a business on his own.” Increasingly, however, independent dépanneurs are under pressure from corporate convenience-store chains and from supermarkets, so the independent operators need to be ever more nimble and attuned to the market they serve, which can be as small as a few blocks.

For example, Yodh Ubhi, who owns a dépanneur on Park Ave. in Mile End, has begun selling “heat and eat” Indian food made by Aliments Nutrifresh Ltd., a prepared-food supplier based in St. Laurent. He said the move was based on requests from customers who had travelled to Toronto and noticed many convenience stores there served prepared food.

In some neighbourhoods, dépanneurs have expanded their offering by selling fruits and vegetables, meat and ethnic products. That’s the case in Park Extension, said Ubhi, who has lived there since the early 1980s. “There’s very cutthroat competition” in that area, he said, adding that South Asians who operate dépanneurs know the competition’s prices because “they go to every different store and make their own prices cheaper. They buy bulk and they sell fresh meat, too.”

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Popularity: unranked [?]