April 11th, 2011
Election signs in Calgary, 2006
Canada is in the midst of yet another federal election, one that will, if the current trends hold steady, result in a third minority government for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. It’s a pretty dismal state of affairs. But even the most delicious truffle looks like a turd, so things might still turn out well, especially if Canadians finally wake up and grow tired of having a petty tyrant as prime minister.
In the meantime, my friend Cedric Sam has created a pretty good way to kill time: Google Maps of 2008 federal election results based on data from each and every polling station in the country. Since each polling station serves no more than a few hundred voters, the level of detail is extraordinarily precise, especially in dense urban areas. You can check it out at the website of the Montreal newspaper La Presse, which has published the maps in English.
Sometimes the maps can be surprising. Who knew that the well-heeled streets of Outremont held so many NDP supporters, while the immigrant-dominated, working-class north end of Côte des Neiges was so heavily Liberal? Other times, it looks exactly the way you would expect: in Edmonton Strathcona, the densely-populated streets around Whyte Avenue and the University of Alberta voted NDP, while more suburban areas to the south and east voted Conservative. (The NDP won in both Outremont and Edmonton Strathcona.)
2008 results in Outremont, Montreal
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April 5th, 2011
Jean-Talon Station’s southwest exit in 2010
Rendering by MileEnd Design
The southwest exit of Montreal’s Jean-Talon metro station — a small but interesting specimen of contemporary architecture — is situated along Jean-Talon Street, at the end of a huge parking lot and between some commercial strips in need of renovation. In that situation, we can hardly tell the difference between the street itself and the parking lot; the sidewalks are invisible.
And yet this is the main exit one uses to reach Jean-Talon Market, one of the most famous landmarks in midtown Montreal. And the area’s density means that Jean-Talon is also a street often densely packed with commuters.
As part of a design exercise, we’ve been thinking about how we could transform this area without investing a significant amount of important resources, and in what way this could be done in the short term.
The simple solution we provide here is an outdoor café and terrace, where people could simply stop by for a drink or have something on their way to the office. The design of the public space suggested, using trees, plants and some furniture, helps structure the street itself. It is, as you can see, a basic concept that we prepared quickly to use as an example.
In light of this solution, do you think Montreal — or other cities — ought to invest resources in some similarly simple transformations ? Could our quality of life be significantly upgraded by little more than such simple urban design?
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March 28th, 2011
This week’s photo — a diptych — comes courtesy of Montreal photographer Jeanine Caron.
Every week, we feature striking images from our Urbanphoto group on Flickr. Want to see your photos here? Join the group.
February 28th, 2011
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Christopher DeWolf
I’ve been looking through my old photos lately and discovered many that have never seen the light of Flickr. These were all taken on cold days in January and February 2005. There’s something about the crisp blue skies that makes me yearn for the sharp, dry chill of winter air, but only for about five minutes.
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February 14th, 2011
Porte ouverte vers le froid, Outremont
C’est l’hivers, dans un Montréal de vent et de glace. Les fenêtres qui craquent, les portes qui claquent.
D’un souffle brusque, les carreaux qui vascillent maladroitement, menaçant d’éclater. Et par bourrasque, cette folle poudrerie qui vient s’agglutiner sur ma terrasse, au troisième niveau d’une sombre demeure outremontoise.
On attend que le ciel termine sa colère et puis, lorsque le calme renaît, j’ouvre lentement cette vieille porte qui me protège de toi.
Je te retrouve, jouant dans la neige, comme à tes six ans. Une boule de glace et quelques branches qui fouettent le ciel, et voilà un maladroit bonhomme, qui demain se dispersera. Comme une poupée qui prend le large, dans cette barque au large mat.
Et je t’entend crier, dans cet infini destin. Bruit sourd de tes pensées lourdes, enterrées par cet hivers qui efface les rires, comme ces pas dans la neige, et ces sourires dans la nuit.
C’est ainsi que l’hivers t’a vu partir, vers un destin qu’on ne connait pas.
Le passant et la neige, Outremont
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February 12th, 2011
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Christopher DeWolf
Ste. Catherine Street
In the middle of winter, when you wake up, look out the window and see brilliant sunshine, it can mean only one thing: it’s really, really cold outside.
Habitations Jeanne-Mance
Milton Street
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January 31st, 2011
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January 31st, 2011
Sphères polaires at the Place des Festival
By the time February rolls around, Montreal has already been buried in snow for a couple of months and your mental map of the city has changed considerably. Places you’d normally linger — the steps at Place des Arts, the plaza in front of Mont-Royal metro, the giant chess board in Berri Square — have vanished from the landscape, inaccessible under the snow, unpleasant in the sub-zero wind.
Montreal’s seasonal extremes are a challenge to urban planning: how do you create a vibrant place that can function just as well on a frigid January day as on a balmy August night? Some spaces are more adaptable than others. Neighbourhood retail streets will always be lively, since people still need to hit up the supermarket, coffee shop and drug store even when it’s cold. Park lawns make good toboggan slopes and hockey rinks in the winter. But hard-surfaced plazas and squares — those quintessentially urban spaces — have a hard time finding much use between December and April.
For most of the years I lived in Montreal, the only time of the winter when a downtown square came back to life was during February’s Nuit Blanche festival, when performances and light installations take over the snowbound tarmac at Place des Arts. Lately, however, some of the ideas behind that one night of wintertime festivities has been extended throughout the winter. Last year, the recently-built Place des Festivals played host to Champ de pixels, which transformed the square into a giant Lite Brite studded with illuminated “pixels” made from overturned plastic buckets. Each bucket was equipped with motion sensors; when you walked by, the colour of the light shifted from white to red.
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January 26th, 2011
Rongeurs attendant la fin: rue Charlotte, Montréal
Alors que j’arpente les rues étroites et organiques de la cité coloniale, au sud du quartier latin, je me surprend à escalader lentement la douce pente de la basse-ville jusqu’au tragique Boulevard René-Lévesque – horrible et bruyant – que je trouve en pleine transformation. Tout près, des dizaines de tours d’habitation, modernes. Au loin, ces hautes barres vitrées où s’empilent les bureaux, s’effaçant par ce mélange étrange de lumière jaunâtre et de fumée mécanique : le centre des affaires, que je devine, avec son mouvement et sa confusion.
Je décide d’accélérer le pas et de me retrouver dans un dédale de petites rues rectilignes, agglutinées comme elles le sont, entre les principales artères qui dessinent la carte de Montréal : Saint-Catherine, Sherbrooke, Maisonneuve et René-Lévesque. Puis coincées étrangement entre la cohue estudiantine du Quartier Latin et l’ex Red-Light District que forme la Main – le boulevard Saint-Laurent – et ses théâtres et autres cabarets plus ou moins douteux.
Je sais que bientôt nous ferons table rase de cette zone – comme déjà nous l’avons fait dans les années ’60 en construisant à peine à deux pas l’immense complexe des habitations Jeanne-Mance – pour en faire un lien moderne, propret et sécuritaire et reliant enfin ce nouveau grand ensemble urbain que doit devenir le Quartier des Spectacles.
J’emprunte l’étroite et unique rue Charlotte, microcosme de cette mutation.
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January 20th, 2011
Notre Dame St West, circa 1930-2010
What happened here ? This used to be the north end of Griffintown, right next to the business center of Montreal.
À Montréal, au cours des années 1950 et 1960, notamment suite au rapport Dozois, on identifie des dizaines de quartiers qualifiés d’insalubres, vus comme irrécupérables, et où les taudis menacent la santé publique. Puis ont les rase, un par un, pour faire place à des projets d’ensemble, comme les Habitations Jeanne-Mance ou encore la tour de Radio-Canada, dans l’Est.
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December 25th, 2010
One of my favourite Montreal traditions is the annual onslaught of Christmas kitsch. The official decorations are actually pretty tasteful — the elegant tree at Place Ville-Marie, the demure little wreaths installed on lampposts — so to compensate, people buy the tackiest decorations they can find and install them on balconies and in front yards with all the zeal of a deranged elf. Once, walking along Prince Arthur a few weeks before Christmas, I was started by an animatronic snowman that suddenly started flailing its arms and belting out holiday tunes.
Luckily for me, Hong Kong is crazy about Christmas, and the day after Halloween, the city starts decking itself out in candy canes and tinsel. Inflatable decorations aren’t quite as popular as they are in Montreal, and Christmas decor tends to be more flamboyantly big-budget than in Canada, but local district councils compensate with their own low-budget decorations at neighbourhood streetcorners. In 2008, a few months after I moved to Hong Kong, I was very happy to come across a gang of blow-up snowmen and Santa-hatted pandas at an intersection near my apartment. A bit of home in a faraway place.
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December 5th, 2010
It started with the new white curtains my girlfriend and I bought for our bedroom in Hong Kong. They’re opaque enough to block any potential embarrassment but shear enough to let light through, because there’s nothing I hate more than waking up in a dark room. After we installed them, they had an unintended effect. Sitting in the living room in the afternoon, my eye would wander to the bedroom, where for a second the slightly transparent curtains would trick me into thinking the window was iced over.
Later, lying in bed one sleepless night, I heard the sound of a shovel being scraped across pavement. My mind drifted to snowy nights in Montreal, when neighbours would get a head start on the falling snow by clearing their steps and front walks before going to bed. It created a peculiar chorus to the muffled hymn of car tires and footsteps trudging through the snow.
Recently, I’ve come to appreciate the seasonality of Canadian weather, which I took for granted until I moved to Hong Kong two and a half years ago. Hong Kong does have distinct seasons — I never realized 12 degrees could feel so cold until I experienced my first winter monsoon, when a chilly, dry wind blows from the north — but the differences between them are subtle. Only a small proportion of trees here lose their leaves in the winter; the best way to tell what season it is is by which tree flowers are blooming.
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November 24th, 2010
“Sauvons l’église Saint-Sauveur!” I wrote three years ago on Spacing Montreal. And for three years, it seemed vaguely possible that the 145-year-old church on lower Saint-Denis Street wouldn’t be demolished. The huge hospital for which it was supposed to make way, the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montreal (CHUM), has been stalled for years, and for awhile it would have been reasonable to guess that it would eventually crawl into the back room where tired, abandoned Montreal megaprojects go to die.
Alas, that wasn’t the case. Kristian Gravenor broke the news in yesterday’s Gazette that Montreal’s city council has issued a demolition permit for the church, which has sat empty and abandoned for years. It isn’t in the best shape — its prized stained glass windows, designed by the renowned Guido Nincheri, were stolen in 2006 — but its bones are strong. More importantly, it remains a testament to the city’s history.
Saint-Sauveur was built thirteen years after a fire swept through the Faubourg Saint-Laurent in 1852, its greystone façade, neo-Gothic architecture and tin steeple a testament to the fashion of the era. In the beginning, it was actually an Anglican church named Holy Trinity. It didn’t become Catholic until the 1920s, when Holy Trinity moved west to NDG and the church was sold to a Syrian congregation.
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November 14th, 2010
“Caffe latte, please !”, Caffe Della Via, Villeray, Montreal
Un matin à l’aurore, j’étire mes jambes jusqu’au bus 80 Nord, en direction de la bonne vieille gare Jean-Talon, frontière industrielle – le Mile-Ex comme certains le surnomment désormais – où se termine allègrement la longue Avenue du Parc. Nous sommes en novembre et déjà, les feuilles trainent au long des rues, amassées en amas aux pieds de ces arbres dès lors nus et ballotés par un vent frais.
Intensité glaciale.
La lumière timide du soleil traverse par l’oblique cette brume si commune à l’approche de l’hivers. J’ai un frisson qui me parcourt le corps, des pieds à la tête et qui se finit par me faire tressaillir maladroitement au débarcadère de la station.
Des métros Parc à Castelneau, deux courtes minutes qui me propulsent à la frontière Nord de la Petite Italie, et puis je poursuis mon chemin vers l’Est. La rue Castelneau forme un bel ensemble de plex en briques rouges ou brunes, avec au rez-de-chaussée quelques commerces agréables – affichant parfois des noms aux sonorités maghrébines – et à l’offre hétéroclite. Quelques pas de plus, et puis une imposante église, au coeur de ce qui semble être un de ces milliers de petits villages-quartiers qui forment un Montréal cohérent et diversifié.
Face au balourd monument néoclassique, ce café.
Étroite vitrine à l’angle de la rue Henri-Julien, lumières tamisées en ce levé de soleil. Promesse d’intimité.
L’enseigne réclame le Caffe della Via. Trois mots qui parlent des évidences: ce lieu est définitivement le café du quartier.
8h37: une foule se bagarre au comptoir, afin de réclamer un de ces déjà si bien réputés espresso.
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