Graffiti Alley

Street art in Hong Kong tends to be limited to specific areas and the scene is dominated by a handful of very prolific artists, like Start from Zero and Graphic Airlines, who work mainly with posters, stencil art and stickers. In a few corners of town, though, it’s possible to find clusters of exuberantly traditional graffiti. One of these can be found along a laneway next to Mong Kok East Station on the former KCR (now East Rail) line. There’s a couple of Graphic Airlines paste-ups but mostly it’s stuff I don’t recognize, which is refreshing.

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Swiss Lane: Still Mysterious

Last year, after returning from Montreal, I posted about a Mile End alley with a strange name that doesn’t appear anywhere in the city’s official toponymical records. Nobody has yet come forward with an answer as to how Swiss Lane got its name, but one Flickr user, DubyDub2009, did a bit of extra research and found that Swiss Lane used to be even longer than it is today.

In a map dated 1949, Swiss Lane is shown running two blocks, from St. Dominique to de Gaspé. Today it runs only between St. Dom and Casgrain. At some point, probably in the 1950s, a small factory was built on the lane’s eastern half. But the street signs were never changed to reflect this fact, so the one sign of Swiss Lane’s existence still points towards the long-vanished eastern part of the alley.

The Many Chinese Words for “Lane”

Suoyi Hutong, Beijing

There’s several different names in English for small, secondary streets that run between blocks or behind major roads. Alley and lane are the words most often used in North America, but there’s significant variation in the UK, where regional words like vennel, chare, wynd, twitten and jigger are common.

It’s a similar story in China. Just about every city has a lu (路), which is the word mostly commonly used to describe important roads. And even though there is a basic word for lane — xiang (巷) — there are also many regional variations. In Beijing, it’s hutong (衚衕); in Shanghai, it’s longtang (弄堂) and in Chengdu, it’s xiangzi (巷子).

I don’t know anything about the exact origins of these different words for alley, but I imagine they have roots in local languages and geography. In Guangzhou, for example, a common name for alley is tung jeun in Cantonese (衕津), which literally means “alley dock” and refers to a lane near the Pearl River. Nobody uses this word in Hong Kong, where two other words are used to refer to alleys: fong (坊) and lei (里), which is a Cantonese transliteration of the English word “lane.”

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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?

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.

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.

Smoke Break

Stanley Street between Ste. Catherine and de Maisonneuve

Oblongs

Central Alley

Laneway off Wellington Street in Central, Hong Kong

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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The Main from Two Angles

St. Laurent Blvd. just below René Lévesque Blvd.

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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