Coffee and a Letter

Woman reading a hand-written letter in the Navarino bakery-café.
Mile End, Montreal, September 25, 2004

Dear Hong Kong: Why I Love Bixi

The following essay appears in the August 2010 issue of Muse, a Hong Kong arts and culture magazine.

I still remember bicycling up Mount Royal. It was a warm summer night and there were five of us riding through the streets of Montreal, looking for something to do. Somebody suggested heading up the mountain that rises like a crouching giant from the middle of the city. The path uphill was surprisingly level but completely dark. Our eyes rendered useless, we relied on our other senses to guide us forward, listening to the gravel under our tires, the wind in the trees. The air smelled damp and earthy. I looked up at the treetops silhouetted against the bright city sky.

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Postering in Montreal: Legal at Last

Stapling a poster to a Saint-Viateur hydro pole

A Quebec Court of Appeal judge has ruled that Montreal’s anti-postering bylaw, which prohibits posters from being stuck to public street furniture, violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Montreal will now have to find a way to legally accommodate posters on public property.

We have local activist Jaggi Singh to thank for this ruling. Ten years ago, he was charged with sticking a poster on municipal property, and with the help of civil rights lawyer Julius Grey, he took his case through the court system. He was finally acquitted last week. The implications for Montreal are profound: independent musicians, artists, community groups and political movements, who have faced thousands of dollars in fines for sticking posters on lampposts and hydro poles, are now free to do what they’ve been doing for years.

Bengali poster, Park Extension

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Summer Soft-Serve

Dairy Queen in the Petite Patrie. Photo by Kate McDonnell

Branded architecture is wrong in so many ways: it’s disposable, it’s a waste of space, it’s vulgar. So then why do I have such a soft spot for Dairy Queen’s little Swiss huts?

It must go back to the Dairy Queen at the corner of Park and Bérubé in Montreal. Red-roofed, fronted by a small parking lot and concrete terrace, it sits next to a row of triplexes in the shadow of an apartment tower — a country bumpkin oblivious to its own incongruousness. Every winter, the small parking lot out front is covered by a mountain of snow, until one day in March when the snow begins to melt and a neon sign is switched on — Ouvert — a harbinger of spring.

On summer nights, when the day’s humid heat settled in my living room, I would jump on my bike and ride south down Hutchison to indulge in a guilty pleasure. Hot fudge sundae, sometimes a Blizzard — these were my indulgences estivales. The pleasure is guilty because I knew I should be spending my money on handcrafted gelato from Havre aux Glaces, but instead I was forking over $3 at a corporate franchise that specializes in junk-food ice cream.

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The View from Above

Part of the brilliance of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window was the way it acknowledged voyeurism as part of urban life. In the city, we’re always being watched and we’re always watching others, be it on the street, from across a café or on the web, through street photography.

I’d be lying if I said that the thrill of spying on others wasn’t part of the reason why I like rooftops. The exchange of glances on the street is replaced by a position that gives you a privileged view of everything around. I’ve never seen anything particularly exciting from a roof — it’s not like I bring a pair of binoculars — but I do enjoy catching the occasional glimpse into the normally sheltered world of somebody’s private life. Not too long ago, while hanging out on a friend’s rooftop, I was able to catch part of a World Cup game being watched on a large high-definition TV in the building next door.

Obviously I’m not alone. Peepers, a new film by Montreal’s Automatic Vaudeville Studios, takes the idea of rooftop voyeurism and builds a movie around it. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m happy to see some of the rooftops I know and love featured in the trailer. At least one of the scenes looks like was filmed on the rooftop where writer/actor Mark Slutsky lives — a rooftop my friends and I have snuck up to many times.

Hey, Rialto!

The Rialto Theatre is located on the corner of rue Bernard and avenue du Parc, in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. It was built in 1924 and was one of thousands of ornate movie theatres built in North America at the turn of the century, at a time when films were first entering the mainstream.

These theatres were called movie palaces — a fitting title as they were defined by an over-the-top ornamental aesthetic that evoked old world grandeur. Think limestone balustrades, wrought iron railings, gold molding and red velvet curtains. Most of the movie palaces in the 1920s were built to pay homage to architectural monuments in Europe. The Rialto itself was styled after the Paris Opera House by Montreal architect Joseph Raoul Gariepy. It has been designated as a heritage site by all three levels of government and is considered by its residents to be as much a part of the fabric of Mile End as its bagel shops, cafes and madcap personalities.

The Rialto has stood mostly vacant for the past few years, while its owner, Elias Kalogeras, looked for buyers. Kalogeras had owned the theatre since 1983. During this time it underwent a number of transformations. He purchased the Rialto with hopes of turning it into a mini-Eaton Centre, but the Ministry of Culture intervened and his plans never materialized. Since then it has been a nightclub, a concert venue, a repertory theatre, and a steakhouse. Kalogeras was confronted with many of the problems owners of defunct movie palaces faced: the difficulty of successfully filling such a cavernous space while maintaining the charm of a historic building and keeping it updated to the needs of contemporary society.

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Crossing the Tracks

Lately I’ve been listening to one of my favourite Jean Leloup albums, La Vallée des Réputations, which was released in 2002. It’s folkier than most of his previous albums, a feel captured perfectly by its cover image of Leloup walking down some railroad tracks, guitar slung over his shoulder.

The railway in the photo happens to be the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks that run along the top of Mile End, a few blocks from Leloup’s apartment and a block from where I used to live. The tracks serve as a neat boundary for the neighbourhood, dividing it from Little Italy, the Petite Patrie and the nameless industrial area to the north. To cross them, you have a choice of three underpasses: one on Park Avenue, one on St. Urbain and one on St. Laurent.

Of course, that’s if you decide to cross them legally. Most people don’t bother with that, choosing instead to duck through one of the many holes that have been cut into the chain-link fence along the tracks. It’s quicker, but it’s also a lot more interesting. As the blog Mile Endings puts it so wryly, “If you follow the paths to the chain link fence there’s a hole, and if you step through that, you end up someplace else.”

That “someplace else” is neither here nor there, a parallel universe that exists within the city but is in some ways not a part of it. (Every so often, a deer or some other oblivious animal will wander into the city via the railway, realizing only that it has ventured far away from home when it veers away from the tracks and gets lost in the streets.) Insects buzz in the tall grass growing next to the railroad, the air is sweet with greasy metal and wood railway ties. You can walk along the tracks and feel like a drifter.

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Plus ça change…

Kate McDonnell pointed the way to some Flickr photos recently uploaded by Michel Gravel, a photojournalist for La Presse whose career has spanned more than 40 years. Many of the photos are street scenes from Montreal in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. What amazes me is how Montreal’s essential character has remained intact despite the fact that it has changed in so many ways — physically, demographically, linguistically, politically — in the past few decades.

The above photo of people lining up to board a bus in a winter snowstorm is a perfect example. When I noticed that the bus was the 80 — the same bus I took up and down Park Avenue every day for years — I started looking for clues as to where on Park Avenue the photo was taken. None of the signs were familiar, nor were the two buildings on the left. After a few seconds, though, I recognized the building in the middle distance as the block at the corner of Park and Bernard, home to Cheskie’s and the dépanneur where I bought newspapers, beer and monthly transit passes. The buildings on the left have been radically made over, but the three businesses visible in the photo — a hardware store, a restaurant and the corner dep — remain, just with different names and owners.

Gravel captured other scenes that are instantly recognizable today: orthodox Jews walking around Mile End, laundry hanging heavily over a laneway, L. Berson and Son’s tombstone workshop, riots, fires, people sweating it out during a heatwave, the dépanneur tricycle.

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Hops, Bees and Honey in Mile End

For the last couple of weeks, bees have been buzzing around flowers growing wild in a former industrial space that may become an unusual urban park — or a municipal heavy machinery yard.

The land is located between de Gaspé and Henri-Julien streets, immediately south of the Canadian Pacific rail tracks, with a spur jutting west between the tracks and Bernard Avenue. Its southern boundaries are marked by big buildings put up for light manufacturing in the mid-1950s to 1970s which, for the most part, are no longer used for that purpose. The rail line also gets much less traffic: CP is getting rid of its switching yards to in nearby Outremont, where housing and a new health science campus for the Université de Montréal are scheduled to be built.

For more than 20 years, the vacant land has seen more and more people cross it to get from the Rosemont metro station to the software companies and artisan space now located in the old buildings. The land is also used for dog walking and some late night revelry. Increasingly, too, the wonders of nature in an urban setting have come to the attention of people living in the surrounding area. In the summer time, the overgrown fields are full of blue-flowered chicory, tall clover, Queen Anne’s lace, wild oats and other lovely plants that flourish on the edges of development.

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Dear Hong Kong: A Letter from Montreal

The following essay appears in the April 2010 issue of Muse, a Hong Kong arts and culture magazine. The same issue also contains my feature-length profile on Hong Kong’s “tree professor,” Jim Chi-yung. The magazine can be found at major bookstores throughout the city.

In my neighbourhood, I know exactly what language to speak. At Jean-Coutu (the drugstore), Nouveau Palais (the corner diner) and Première Moisson (the upscale bakery), it’s French. At Zoubris (the copy shop), Cheskie (the Jewish bakery) and Club Social (the Italian café), it’s English.

But in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, on the other side of town, I’m lost. I know the neighbourhood is mostly English-speaking, but I don’t want to offend anyone. So before walking into the clothing store, I decide to take the safe route and speak French. Turns out it was the right decision. The owner was francophone.

Nothing is simple when it comes to language in Montreal. The city’s history has made it one of the most linguistically contested places in the world, but far from being a hindrance, it gives it the kind of powerful creative charge that can only come from cultural friction.

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Lepers, Gods & Immortality: L’India di Manganelli

16h45. L’aiguille marque la minute d’un tac dramatique. Sonorité agaçante et répétitive. Je suis assis à la terrasse du Club Social, Mile End, tantôt le nez plongé dans ce bouquin d’importation, déniché à prix fort dans cette librairie opulente de l’Avenue du Parc. Tantôt le regard scrutateur, balayant la masse vivante qui se tortille autour de moi.

Un poilu gratte sa guitare, la barbe qui lui dessine une tête de chèvre.

C’est le titre du livre qui m’a attiré et sitôt convaincu de lui faire voir le soleil : Le gout du voyage. Quatre mots qui raisonnent et déraisonnent dans ma lourde cavité cervicale. D’ailleurs, dès le moment que j’eusse trouvé une chaise libre, j’y plongea tête première. Une, deux, dix pages. Un chapitre.

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Grognons, ronchons & cabotins : les cohues montréalaises

“So..So..So.. Solidarité”

Centre des affaires de Montréal, ce jeudi de brume sèche. Agitation dans la populace : les grognons, les ronchons et autres cabotins s’en donnent à coeur joie, criant et maugréant  à qui veut bien l’entendre que le Québec est à sa fin. Une bande de matamores, ravie d’avoir une cause à défendre : le droit à la richesse, menacé par les hausses de taxes.

Une conviction défendue avec ardeur, peu importe si cette aisance soit prise en dépit de la pauvreté flagrante des trois quarts de l’humanité. C’est désagréable d’y songer, mais mon confort douillet de néo-canadien dépend du sacrifice que les pauvres font de leurs propres vies, dans ces pays aux sonorités amusantes. Combien de Burkinabés, de Guatémaltèques ou d’Azerbaïdjanais devront connaître une mort prématurée pour que je puisse posséder ma tanière, manger du saumon fumé et rouler en VTT climatisé.

C’est que le dernier budget provincial, dont le propos stérile et superficiel ne m’atteint aucunement, fait “mal” à la classe moyenne. Exit la McMansion aux tourelles rigolotes néo-machinchouette. Exit la deuxième bagnole et pas de télévision tridimensionnelle pour 2010. L’horreur, finalement.

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The Future of Canadian Cities

In 2008, Carmine Starnino, poet and now editor of Maisonneuve magazine, asked me to write an essay on the future of Canadian cities for an issue of Canadian Notes and Queries he was guest-editing. Here’s what I came up with.

Some days, on the corner of Clark and de la Gauchetière in Montreal, you’ll find a fortune teller who can read your fate in English, French, Mandarin and Cantonese. It’s a very non-specific kind of fate, which is usually the case with fortune tellers, but I sometimes wonder what he would have to say about larger subjects—like the city that surrounds him, for instance. What will it, and others like it across the country, look like in a generation? I’m no fortune teller, but here are three trends I think might influence the shape of our cities in the near future.

1. Edible cities

I never thought much about my family’s backyard when growing up in Calgary. Wide and shallow, its grassy expanse was eventually surrendered to our two dogs, who used it as their toilet. We were far from exceptional, and what still strikes me when I drive through Canadian suburbs is the sheer amount of empty grass. It’s always seemed like an egregious waste of space.

But things are starting to change. Small efforts are being made to introduce small-scale agriculture and locally-grown food into Canadian cities. Green roofs and backyard gardens have emerged in Vancouver; food co-ops in Toronto. In Montreal, the Minimum-Cost Housing Group has been busy finding ways to marry food production with urban life.

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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.