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?

Vive la crise!

Montreal doesn’t seem to have been hit terribly hard by this latest crise économique, maybe because it has spent most of the recent past recovering from a string of much more substantial crises. At the very least, it has given us a break from the excesses of the previous years, a time to reflect on what had been going on. Some of the economic victims of the crisis, like the misguided Griffintown redevelopment project, are better off dead.

In any case, I enjoyed seeing the Berlin-based French artist SP-38‘s “Vive la crise!” posters around town. (He’s also responsible for an earlier spate of posters that read “Vive la bourgeoisie!” and “Vive la poésie!”) It’s a childish, contrarian exclamation, but it rings true to our instincts that the current season of change and contemplation is maybe, in some ways, a bit better than the blind exuberance of before.

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Shots and Corners

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Before I left Montreal, my geography geek friend Sam Imberman organized an event for all of the other geography geeks he knew. He called it “Shots and Corners.” For three hours, we walked through Little Italy, Outremont, Mile End and the Plateau to visit everyone’s favourite streetcorners.

We honoured each corner with a toast and a shot of various types of liquor. My corner was the intersection of Groll Avenue and the laneway between Esplanade and Jeanne-Mance, which I picked partly because I like the way it looks and partly because I’m the kind of annoying person who has a preference for the obscure. (My drink, in case you’re curious, was gin.)

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Informal Space, Untouched

Maguire Meadow. Photo from imagine (le) mile-end

I found myself in Kennedy Town yesterday evening, my hair still dripping from swimming at a nearby pool as I walked towards the waterfront, beer in hand. At the small promenade built next to a bus loop, the smell of diesel fumes in the air, I stopped to admire the violet hues of the sunset. But I didn’t stay there — I pressed on to a far nicer part of the waterfront.

By day, the shipping yard that stretches from Kennedy Town to the wholesale food market at Shek Tong Tsui, on the western end of Hong Kong Island, whirs with industrial purpose, as forklifts dart about and shipping containers are unloaded by boat. By night, it becomes a playground for people who live nearby. As I walked along the water last night, I saw kids riding their bikes, old men fishing, middle-aged women stretching and power walking. As the evening wore on, couples emerged, strolling hand in hand. Nobody seemed to mind the signs warned against unauthorized entry.

It reminded me of the Maguire Meadow, a large open field in the old garment district of Mile End, Montreal, which is slated for redevelopment in the coming years. Lately, people have been gardening on the field and using it for neighbourhood gatherings; over the years, it has acquired an impressive collection of flora and fauna, including walnut trees and the squirrels they feed. At the moment, redevelopment plans call for a new road to be built through the meadow, which has elicited quite a bit of protest.

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Manhattanhenge and Montrealhenge

Photo by Arianys León

Twice a year, a few weeks before and after the summer solstice, the setting sun aligns perfectly with the east-west axis of Manhattan’s streets in a phenomenon that has been dubbed “Manhattanhenge,” a reference to the way the sun aligns with Stonehenge during the solstices. It got quite a bit of attention this year, especially around its first instance, on June 1st. Sunday marked its second occurrence and there are Flickr photos to prove it.

Even though Manhattanhenge has been rather grandiosely described as a “unique phenomenon in the world, if not the universe,” it is replicated to some extent in other cities. Last month, Spacing Montreal’s Émile Thomas speculated that Montrealhenge might happen each year on June 12th. But the same effect is achieved almost every day: one of the things I miss most about Montreal is the way the sun sets in alignment with the city’s north-south streets, such as Park Avenue or St. Laurent, which pierces them with long bands of evening light. I would often walk up Park just as the sun was setting, admiring the long shadows and pillowy softness of the light.

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My Old Apartment

Four years ago, on a freakishly cold April day, my girlfriend and I walked up Park Avenue in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, heads pressed against the wind, to check out a third-floor apartment in a typical six-plex, the kind with the steep, curving outdoor staircase leading up from the street to a second-floor balcony.

After meeting with the landlord, a talkative Hasidic Jewish woman whose husband owned a travel agency down the street, we decided to take the place. Over the years, we got to know our neighbours—an increasingly famous DJ, a shy couple from Alberta, an eccentric recluse who once came barging into our apartment at 3am, complaining that our bathroom was leaking—and enjoyed the comfortable intimacy of our surroundings.

It was only last winter, however, that I started to wonder who lived in our apartment before us. I knew that our six-plex had been built in 1918, almost a decade after the other buildings on our block, and I knew that the tenant before us had been an artist with a penchant for green-tinted lightbulbs; he left in a hurry to settle his father’s estate in Brazil, leaving behind boxes of old art books, some rubber gloves and a bag of trash.

But who lived here in the years, decades, generations before that? Just how many coats of paint were on these walls? Lovell’s Montreal Directory, which lists Montreal’s residents and businesses from 1842 to 1999, offers me some clues. Scanning the Park Avenue pages, I see that somebody named Chas Larivee lived in my apartment in 1929. Two decades later, there was another Chas, this one from the Axman family. In contrast with the apartment downstairs, where a Mrs. Laurin lived for at least 30 years, ours had high turnover, with a new tenant arriving almost every year. Somehow, knowing the names of the people who once lived in my apartment makes its history more immediate: I’m not the first to have paced its slightly crooked floors.

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Hot Coffee on a Chilly Afternoon

Inside the Social Club café, St. Viateur Street, on a cold November afternoon in 2006

Tuesday Evening

Laneway between Waverly and St. Urbain, Mile End

Pop Art

Posters for Pop Montreal, early October, in an alley near St. Viateur in Mile End

Public Perception of Bicycles

The City of Montreal recently began its annual operation of removing on-street bike racks. This year, it seems that they have been particularly bad about putting up warning signs on the bike racks and many people have had their bicycles removed together along with the bike rack that it was attached to. One new resident of Montreal called in to one of the local radio programs to complain about just such an incident at a Mile End bike parking site.

This news item generated a few lively responses which demonstrate the range of emotions around bicycles. On voice mail…

I live in Mile End. On Saturday I was standing on my balcony and I saw a black pick-up truck, with no markings on it, towing a trailer taking away bike racks and throwing entire bike racks, with the bikes attached, into the back of the pickup truck and into the trailer. Now the funny part, and maybe it’s not so funny, was that just moments prior to that I saw people locking their bikes to the bike rack and going into the cafe and coming back and their bikes being gone. You know, there is no respect for bicycles. Bicycles are not toys. Bicycles aren’t just somebody’s hobby. People actually use them for transportation, and I don’t think that Helen Fotopulos [the borough, who is also on Montreal's executive committee for urban planning] or anybody else at City Hall realizes that.

And by text message…

That bike story — WOW, that’s hard-hitting news. For a small town! What’s next? Little Billy from Dorval got a scout’s badge?

Waiting for Customers

Through the window on St. Viateur Street

Grey Fall Days

Quiet, grey autumn days in Mile End

Underpass

Underpass in Ahuntsic

Reflections on Park Avenue

I’ve already left Montreal, but I still walk down Park Avenue in my mind. I start at Van Horne, the symbolic last street before the Canadian Pacific Railway overpass and the industrial area to the north. On the long block southward to Bernard, I pass a new Hasidic synagogue, a laundromat with Spanish signs owned by an Indian family, Greek social clubs, a mysterious bar called Club Sahara, a cluttered radio-parts shop, and several more hard-to-define stores that survive from year to year despite having no apparent customers.

I was only on the street for five years, but my life on Park Avenue is inseparable from my life in Montreal. I spent the bulk of my time in its shops, its apartments, its restaurants, venturing onto its sidestreets the way a fi sh swims up a river’s tributary. Park Avenue was born in 1883, when a broad road was built along the eastern side of the newly-opened Mount Royal Park, leading north into what was then Montreal’s suburban fringe. Twenty years later, in 1903, the Number 80 streetcar began rumbling up the avenue, past a burgeoning collection of triplexes and apartment buildings, many of them capped by fanciful cornices and decorative elements that often included maple leaves and beavers. Banks, those imposing anchors of middle-class prosperity, stood at nearly every corner.

Initially, middle-class English, Irish and French Canadians called Park home, along with a growing number of Jews. After World War II, however, many of those original inhabitants left for newer, more suburban neighbourhoods, and were replaced by a mix of Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, Chinese and Hasidic Jews. Residential portions of the street became progressively more commercial as carpet shops and souvlaki joints opened on the ground floors of apartment blocks.

After thriving in the 1970s and 80s—one of its nicknames was apparently “Double Park Avenue”—Park fell on hard times in the early 1990s. The Rialto, a gorgeous cinema whose façade was modeled on Garnier’s opera house in Paris, closed down. In the depths of the mid-90s recession, nearly a quarter of all retail spaces on the street were vacant, and drugs and petty crime became a problem. It wasn’t until the end of the decade that the street revived.

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