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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NDG Evening

Earlier this month I accompanied my friends on a nostalgic walk through NDG, the sprawling west end neighbourhood in which they used to live. Developed in the early twentieth century on some of Montreal’s most fertile land—the famed Montreal Melon once grew there—NDG was for the first part of its history a fairly humdrum suburb home to middle-class WASPs and British immigrants who had moved up from working-class Verdun.

Things changed in the 1970s when many long-time residents left for the suburbs or moved away from Montreal altogether. Some streets fell on hard times, NDG’s population became more varied and the whole area began to take on a more interesting, eclectic character. Sherbrooke Street West, a long commercial artery that runs along the south side of the neighbourhood, is where NDG is revealed in all its bizarre glory, a meeting ground for well-adjusted families, oddball layabouts and members of various different ethnic communities, especially Jamaicans, Koreans and Persians. The shops along the street are remarkably diverse: D.A.D.’s sells takeaway Indian food alongside Montreal-style bagels; Nearly New Books/Livres Presque ’9′ unites two languages with one bad pun; a video store with no apparent name, tucked away discreetly on the first floor of an apartment building, rents nothing but VHS copies of Korean television dramas.

When my friends lived in NDG they were fascinated by one of those odd shops on Sherbrooke: an ice cream parlour at the corner of Harvard. Brightly decorated, with an old-style bar inside, it featured a large banner that advertised 24 flavours of soft serve. But it was never open. Once, when my friends spotted some people working inside, they knocked on the door and asked if they could buy some ice cream. “No,” they were told.

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Two Streets, Two Neighbourhoods

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.