Ghost sign behind East Hastings near Gore
Posters behind Pender near Seymour
Graffiti behind West Hastings near Richards
Every year, I head down to Just for Laughs. Not for the comedy, but for the festival site, which takes over the entire Latin Quarter and makes brilliant use of its meandering laneways and hidden corners. For two weeks in July, the Latin Quarter becomes a mysterious village, an amiable place where crowds wander through a surreal landscape of street theatre and shadows. Outdoor cafés, bars and stages emerge in the normally quiet alleys behind St. Denis Street. Space that is normally left to cars and garbage is given over to the crowds.
Just for Laughs reveals the potential of the Latin Quarter’s urban space. The network of Victorian-era laneways that crisscrosses the neighbourhood — Joly Avenue, Terrasse St. Denis, Savoie Avenue and Place Paul-Émile-Borduas — is one of Montreal’s best-kept secrets. So why haven’t these laneways been turned into bona fide public spaces? Where are the trees, the benches, the quiet plazas in which you sit reading on a hot summer afternoon?
(Over the past couple of months, two of these alleys have been redeveloped. Place Borduas and Savoie Avenue, both of which lead to the Grande Bibliothèque, have been resurfaced with granite paving stones, though I have yet to see any benches or other types of street furniture. For the most part, the potential of these hidden streets is being squandered.)
Just for Laughs might be an exercise in urban imagination but, like too many of Montreal’s other large festivals, it is also an exercise in urban intimidation. While I am happy to see the Latin Quarter reimagined every summer, I am less thrilled to witness the temporary privatization of an entire city neighbourhood. Just for Laughs opens the streets and alleys of the Latin Quarter to the public, but it does so in the same manner as an amusement park. Access and behaviour is restricted: the festival’s security staff has the right to bar anyone from the festival site, even if it exists on public space.
By midweek, the first signs appear, advertising garage sales, yard sales, sidewalk sales, moving sales. They chart the vast outdoor flea market that is Montreal on so many sunny weekends.
Most of these sales are infrequent, but, in some cases, they have evolved into regular, quasi-permanent bazaars, run by people who have taken it upon themselves to provide the city with a source of affordable recycled goods. In this era of green politics and community involvement, they are examples of the most local, sustainable forms of commerce.
On a recent Sunday in Mile End, posters on St. Viateur St. advertised half a dozen of them. Nearby, on Waverly St., a Portuguese couple sat on their porch, overlooking a front garden filled with clothes, books, furniture and knick-knacks.
“It’s all of the things we’ve collected over the years. Look at how full the table is,” said one of the pair. “There’s lots of places around here that do this,” so people stroll around the neighbourhood and browse, he said.
A couple of blocks away, at the corner of St. Viateur and Esplanade, a grey-haired woman was selling things on the sidewalk next to the Social Club cafe terrasse.
“We’re having a garage sale to share with others what we have. I’m keeping nothing but my toothbrush and my underwear!”
Most of the people who organize these kinds of sales do so just once or twice a year, when they move or get fed up with all the junk that has been accumulating in closets. A handful, however, have devoted a large part of their lives to maintaining regular sidewalk or alley sales.
The laneway running between Esplanade Avenue and St. Urbain Street, just above Villenueve, does not have a name, but it is home to several dwellings, including the duplex on the left of the above photo. (It has an address on Esplanade.) This laneway developed in the first decade of the twentieth century when today’s Mile End was under the jurisdiction of a burgeoning suburb known as the City of St. Louis. Inspired by a City of Montreal building code passed in 1901, St. Louis’ building regulations required, among other things, the construction of laneways to remove some more unsightly activities from the streets. They quickly became hubs of neighbourhood life and occasionally the site of laneway houses.
Today, most of these old laneways are far too narrow to serve their original purposes, so garbage collection and other unsavoury services are performed once again in the street. At the same time, their newfound quietude must make them a nice place to live.
Walkley Avenue, like many NDG streets, was built in the early twentieth century by developers eager to transform the area’s farmland into lucrative middle-class housing. Its name reflects the bourgeois anglophone character of the new suburb; nearby streets are called King Edward, Mayfair, Coronation and Park Row. Like Mile End, NDG was an independent suburb until it was annexed to Montreal in 1907. Unlike Mile End, it wanted to emulate its more upscale neighbour, Westmount. Although multifamily housing was standard even among middle-class Montrealers, NDG did all that it could to disguise its walkup plexes as single-family houses. Many eastern NDG streets are lined by homogenous rows of semi-detached fourplexes built in the 1910s and 20s.
Like most streets in western NDG, however, Walkley has a more heterogenous appearance. Near Sherbrooke Street, it contains a mix of detached houses, duplexes and the occasional apartment building.
Laneway in Toronto. Photo by Jeremy K.
They are the spaces we ignore: Toronto’s alleyways and awkward corners, where the urban fabric droops like a gangly teenager’s ill-fitting shirt. Recently though, new ideas have emerged to deal with two of the city’s most overlooked spaces: its 300 kilometres of laneways and the underside of its infamous Gardiner Expressway.
When architects Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe were looking to build a house in the early 1990s, they wanted something modern but affordable. This combination, however, is virtually unheard of in Toronto, where high land values and restrictive architectural guidelines (essentially, new houses are required to look like their neighbours) make it hard to build unusual houses in established neighbourhoods. Their solution? Build something out of sight, in a back alley. After finding a piece of property in the city’s east end that was used mainly for storing abandoned cars, they applied to the Ontario Municipal Board for permission to build a laneway house. At first, neighbours were alarmed and some protested against the project. Despite the complaints, however, Shim and her husband got the go-ahead from the OMB, and their concrete-block house was completed in 1993. “Part of the design is that it really protected everyone’s privacy,” says Shim. “Everything is really unobtrusive.”
