The Mystery of Swiss Lane

Even after seven years of walking its streets, I’m still finding new things in Mile End, the neighbourhood I called home before I left Montreal. Back for a visit last month, I got around mostly by bike, which took me down streets on which I wouldn’t normally walk, like the quiet stretch of Casgrain in the old garment district. That’s where I spotted a laneway with an unusual name: Swiss Lane, according to the street sign, though “lane” has been patched over with white tape and the alley’s official name is now “ruelle Swiss.”

I can’t find any clues as to the origins of Swiss Lane’s name. The city’s otherwise comprehensive Répertoire historique des toponymes montréalais contains no reference to anything Swiss or Suisse. The only mention I can find in the Lovell’s Directory indicates that Swiss Lane was “not built upon.” (Its entry in the 1935 directory is found right under Swastika Avenue, which was apparently a lane off Ste. Famille Street.) So what’s the story behind Swiss Lane?

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Laneway Observations

Unpaved alley, central NDG

Earlier this summer, Susan Semenak, a reporter for the Montreal Gazette, emailed me about a story she was doing on Montreal’s laneways. “I spent a large part of my childhood running around a grassy laneway behind 7th Ave. in LaSalle,” she wrote. “I love the other stories that laneways tell about a city.” She asked me some questions about my own memories of laneways, as well as my thoughts on what make them different from lanes in other cities, and she used some of what I told her in “Hidden Neighbourhoods,” a nice feature that was published early last month.

At the risk of being self-indulgent, I’ve decided to reproduce my long, rambling answer to her questions below.

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Follow the Cat

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Don’t Hate

I first passed by this paste-up late at night in Taipei’s Ximending district. When I happened to be nearby a couple of days later, I was doubly impressed: whoever made it knew that by placing it here, it would illuminated each afternoon by a thin sliver of light, a ready-made art space in an otherwise dark lane.

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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.

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An Unexplored Alley

For all of the things I’ve written about exploring Montreal’s laneways, and in particular those of Mile End, there are still some alleys close to home that I have never, for reasons that are beyond me, wandered down. In fact, when I walk through the lanes near home I usually take the same ones, probably by habit, and it takes a deliberate effort to step out of my routine into something a little bit out of the ordinary.

Not too long ago, before I left Montreal, I walked down the alley just east of Park Avenue, between Fairmount and Laurier, for the first time. It turned out to be full of all sorts of interesting things: discarded furniture, potted plants on windowsills, vines drooping from hydro lines and an impressive collection of graffiti and street art.

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Half-Truths and Reflections on Home

If it hasn’t yet been made clear to my regular readers, I’m on the verge of moving to Hong Kong, maybe for only a year, but likely for much longer than that. What this means, of course, is that I’m going to leave Montreal. (I would take my beloved city with me, but the South China Sea is a poor substitute for the Saint Lawrence.) Lately, as I contemplate my impending move, I have been coming to terms with the memories I will leave behind in the city I have, over the past six years, deliberately fashioned as my home.

At night, when I lie awake, unable to sleep, my mind floats through the laneways I have strolled at night, past the mountain, its cross, the silos on the Lachine Canal, the sign blinking Farine Five Roses and down to the St. Henri bedroom in which I first lived as a new Montrealer. I think of those first nights I spent here, listening, as I lay in bed, to the sound of trains coupling in the distance. I think of the six years of memories and experiences, all of them linked inextricably to the life and landscape of the city around me.

Guy Maddin, the maker of eccentric films best known for his 2003 movie, The Saddest Music in the World, has a somewhat different relationship with his hometown. While I left the city of my birth at the age of 17, in search of a place that better suited my outlook and personality, Maddin has spent all 52 years of his life in Winnipeg, one of the coldest and most isolated cities on the continent. Now he has made a movie—ostensibly a documentary—about the city in which he has spent his life.

“Always winter, always sleepy… Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg. Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg,” he intones in the opening sequence of My Winnipeg, which is currently playing in Montreal at the Cinéma du Parc as well as at various arthouses and small cinemas around North America. In his inimitable style, drawing heavily from the aesthetic of silent films and the kitschy melodrama of b-movies, Maddin creates an image of a city propelled by drowsy inertia, its inhabitants’ attempts at escape foiled by the heavy pull of memory and nostalgia.

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Child’s Play

In the alley between Clark and St. Urbain and St. Viateur and Fairmount, Mile End

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Night Art

Clark Street below St. Joseph Boulevard

In the lane between St. Laurent and Clark, near Mount Royal

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Ruelles With Potential

Montreal is one of the most dynamic and engaging cities in North America, but sometimes I wish that creativity would be reflected in its urban planning. So many corners of this city brim with potential — but much of that potential is being wasted. Consider the case of two downtown laneways: Mount Royal Place and the ruelle Nick Auf der Mar. Each could be transformed into engaging public spaces but, for the time being, they are little more than urban afterthoughts.

Mount Royal Place is named for the old Mount Royal Hotel, once the largest in Canada, which was converted into the Cours Mont-Royal shopping mall in the late 1980s. (You can tell it was named for the hotel and not the mountain because its official name, place Mount-Royal, maintains the English spelling.) It runs along the south side of the mall, between Peel and Metcalfe, just behind a row of buildings that front Ste. Catherine Street.

What makes this particular lane so interesting is that the Cours Mont-Royal faces it with terraces and retail spaces; when the mall was built, Mount Royal Place was renovated with brick paving, planters and new street furniture. It almost seemed as if the mall intended to line the alley with cafés, restaurants and shops, but this plan must have fallen through, because the terraces are empty and retail spaces are closed, occupied with shops that open only into the mall’s interior.

I’m not sure what happened back in the 80s but it’s not too late to make up for past mistakes: the city could encourage the Cours Mont-Royal and other property owners to open up new shops, install café terraces and make this a real downtown destination.

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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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Back Alley Forest

Laneway between Jeanne-Mance and Esplanade, Mile End, Montreal

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Dans la ruelle

After awhile, even the largest city can shrink to the size of a village. On a good day, this creates a comfortable intimacy; on a bad day, it can impose a banal, oppressive familiarity. Passing through the same streets day after day, it’s easy to lose sight of the things that so charmed you about them in the first place.

I try to avoid that by wandering through Montreal’s laneways, its ruelles, as they’re known in French. To walk through them is to uncover a secret city, a stripped-down, domestic one, the lipstick and blush of its streetscapes removed. The laneway experience is defined by the detritus of everyday life: the flutter of laundry drying on clotheslines, decrepit old sheds, gardens filled with vegetables, doors and gates through which you can glimpse the lives of others.

Laneways first emerged in Montreal in the mid-nineteenth century, but they were usually found only in middle-class and wealthy neighbourhoods. Poorer areas had courtyards accessible by portes cochères, which led to small workers’ homes hidden behind larger buildings. By the dawn of the twentieth century, though, Montreal and most of its suburbs had begun to mandate the construction of laneways in new residential developments, seeing them as a solution to the city’s sanitation problems. Eventually, nearly 500 kilometres of alleyways were built.

Montrealers have made great use of them. Every week, in the warm months, dozens of garage sales and bazaars can be found in the city’s laneways, selling books, furniture and assorted junk. Three years ago, the YMCA in my neighbourhood organized an alleyway art fair that drew inspiration from those alleyway bazaars. Artists hung their paintings on backyard fences, a graffiti crew painted a cinderblock wall and somebody set up a television viewing room in an apartment building courtyard.

What makes laneways so alluring is their ephemeral nature: they change with the rhythm of daily life, never quite the same from one day to the next. There is always a new piece of discarded furniture waiting for someone to claim it; a previously unnoticed view through trees, fences, walls and wires; or a new piece of street art.

The street art, in particular, provides the laneways with ever-changing décor. Over the years, I’ve seen political statements (“25,000 Montrealers call this home” spray-painted on a brick wall, next to a drawing of a homeless man), paste-ups and graffiti and even poetry (“We walked in Lake Ontario / Up to our ankles in sour water / For the feeling of sinking, you said”). My favourite can still be seen in one of the ruelles near my apartment, where somebody has scrawled a succinct message in whimsical cursive to wanderers like myself: “I love you.”

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Three Strange Streets

Back in October, on one of the unseasonably warm and humid days Montreal had towards the end of fall, I was on the 129 bus heading west to Victoria Avenue when I noticed three odd streets on the south side of Côte Ste. Catherine. Unusually for streets in Côte des Neiges, which tend to be very wide, they appeared to consist of nothing more than a simple pathway surrounded by greenery.

Later, I returned to investigate and discovered that the streets I had seen were Beaminster Place, Bradford Place and Campden Place, a trio of block-long passages tucked behind Côte-Sainte-Catherine metro. Lined by relatively modern four-plexes, they were open only to pedestrians, with a single narrow strip of pavement running between lush front yards. Residents parked their cars in the exceptionally wide laneways that ran between the streets.

In Côte des Neiges, a patchwork of different neighbourhoods built at different times throughout the twentieth century, I’ve come to expect urban planning oddities. But these three “places” were unlike anything I’d seen in Montreal before. According to the city’s property records, the houses along Beaminster, Bradford and Campden were all built between 1936 and 1951. Architecturally, they’re pretty much indistinguishable from any of the 1930s- and 40s-era houses in the west end; it’s their setting that makes them so unique.

The City of Montreal’s toponymy database reports that Beaminster, Bradford and Campden places were built in 1936 by the Terrace Construction Company, part of a 48-duplex development called Cotswald Village. If these names sound twee, it’s because they were taken from villages and towns in England’s Dorset, Gloucestershire and Yorkshire counties.

This still doesn’t shed any light on the motives of the developer. Why only three streets? Were they part of a failed plan to transform Côte des Neiges into a vast English-style Garden City? Or did the Terrace Construction Company simply have modest ambitions?

Click here to see more photos of the three “places.” Thanks to Martin Bérubé for referring me to the place names database.

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