The Ghosts of Oil Street

Oil Street. Photo by Eric To

This story was originally published in the November 2010 edition of Muse, the new-defunct review of Hong Kong arts and culture.

It was a hot night when I sat inside the cluttered studios of the pirate radio station FM 101, six floors up inside an industrial building in Kwun Tong. I was speaking to one of the station’s founders, a rock musician named Leung Wing-lai, when the doorbell rang. Leung excused himself to go open the door. Three people walked in, including Ah Kok Wong, a composer who has been working with Kwun Tong’s artists to lobby the government against a new policy that made it easier for the owners of industrial units to convert their space into offices or hotels.

Wong told me about an Arts Development Council survey that was meant to determine exactly how many artists, musicians and other creative people are making use of industrial space. Unfortunately, few artists received the survey, so Wong and several others had taken to distributing it themselves. “I have my own studio, a band room and a studio used by the radio station, and we didn’t get copies at any of these places,” he said. If not enough artists completed the survey, he told me, the government would have no clear picture of the thousands of creative people that work in low-rent, run-down industrial buildings, and its new industrial “revitalization” policy would lead to unchecked property speculation, pushing out a huge chunk of Hong Kong’s artists, musicians and cultural organizations.

Leung returned to his seat. We talked about FM 101, which focuses mainly on arts, culture and music and was set up to protest against regulations that make it nearly impossible for a non-profit, community-based radio station to get a broadcast licence. A recent crackdown on the station’s fundraising efforts has forced its volunteers to pay for its operating expenses out of their own pocket, which has only been possible because the studio’s rent is low. “Without this kind of space, where would we go?” he asked.

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The Industrial City Deconstructed

Détroit: Ville Sauvage (Detroit Wild City), film de Florent Tillon (2010), présente de façon particulièrement poétique et imagée la réversibilité du processus d’urbanisation. Dans le cas très précis de Détroit, il s’agît d’un phénomène directement lié à la baisse de production dans l’industrie automobile américaine et des pertes d’emplois qui sont une conséquence directe des déboires dans cette industrie.

Les quartiers anciens de la ville – ainsi que certaines banlieues – sont laissés à l’abandon, vidés de leurs habitants. Plusieurs tours anciennes du centre-ville sont en attente d’un preneur et d’une nouvelle occupation. D’autres sont simplement détruites… Une attention particulière à été porté aux sonorités ambiantes, ce qui plonge le spectateur dans un environnement sonore particulièrement persistant, qui marque.

Quel est le destin des mégapoles en perte de vitesse? Quel est l’avenir du mode d’urbanisation nord-américain? Peut-on sauver ces témoins de notre passé industriel, lorsque les ressources financières se font rares? Quelle est la valeur – et le sens – de notre banlieue, si la ville centrale disparait?

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Some Weeds Grow in Brooklyn

I photographed this old (and perhaps abandoned) industrial building in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood just a few years ago. At the time, it was a captivating relic — almost entirely ensconced in graffiti, it was sprouting weeds that had either spilled onto the sidewalk, or had climbed up from the sidewalk onto it. The old orange car parked nearby added to the mystique; this was like a slice of 1970s New York.

That’s not entirely coincidental. Gowanus sometimes seems stuck in a time warp, a largely defunct swathe of industrial buildings dividing the homey brownstones of Carroll Gardens from the tony ones of Park Slope — neighborhoods that have been experiencing rapid change. Part of the reason the area is so moribund is its namesake Gowanus Canal, a brackish channel that has become the site of a raging local debate over whether it ought to be designated a Superfund site, allowing it to receive federal money for industrial cleanup.

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Montreal East

Montreal East is a small separate city whose territory is mostly occupied by oil refineries and other industrial installations, some of which are objectively interesting as photographic subjects, whether by day or glittering with lights at night.

There’s always a tang of sulphur in the air from the hydrocarbon cracking. The streets are in poor shape and the sidewalks rudimentary: people mostly don’t walk here, they drive to and from work, and big tanker trucks chew up the roadbed. Even so, Wikipedia says 3,822 people lived here in 2006. There are still some overgrown lots, and plenty of wildflowers in nooks and crannies, and of course there are tracks for freight trains too.

Recent stats show that the refineries in east-end Montreal put out as much greenhouse gas as all its cars do, if not more. Some of it would be for heating oil, asphalt and other products, but most would be for diesel and gasoline.

Touring the Abandoned Croydon Factory

My roommate ML and I decided to accompany our other roommate to her hometown of St. Jean for the weekend. Fully decked out in summer apparel, flip flops notwithstanding, we were on our way to pick strawberries but found ourselves delayed by two hours. Having only been away from Montreal for less than 24 hours, we felt the need to infuse our day with some urban grit, and how better to do that than to take a walk around Usine Croydon, otherwise known as the former home of the Singer sewing machine factory. The gates surrounding the abandoned compound were wide open and welcoming. What followed was a tour through an art gallery of sorts — countless graffiti and paintings, mangled metal objects hanging from the ceiling, and perfect lighting.

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Scaling an Abandoned Silo

Next to the Redpath Lofts, on the Lachine Canal, is an abandoned sugar silo. Somehow, we ended up at the top.

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Illicit Rooftop Views

I took these photos from the roof of an abandoned grain silo on St. Patrick Street in Point St. Charles, right next to the Lachine Canal. I was there, in the company of two Montrealers who have snuck up to dozens of roofs over the past few years, for an article that will appear soon in the Gazette.

To access the roof, we climbed up a series of six metal ladders in a large concrete shaft filled with mysterious black sand. The effort was worth it: there is something serene about being alone on a roof with the city spread out before you. We shared a bottle of port and listened to tinny music on portable speakers.

Savage Beauty

Manufactured Landscapes follows Edward Burtynsky’s photographic exposition of unprecedented human transformation of the landscape.

Edward Burtynsky’s China photos explore what has always been a veritable fount of intriguing images.  Recalling Antonioni’s 1972 Chung Guo China, which in a coolly detached manner examined the ordinary, everyday facet of a society that was nevertheless rife with political tension, his work, with equal detachment, goes underneath the surface of prosperity, and discovers tension of an entirely different kind: us vs. nature.

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