June 5th, 2011
On a bright summer day in 1996, Kate McDonnell was wandering through an alley in the eastern Plateau when she spotted the remnants of a hand-painted tobacco ad on the wall of an old triplex.
Fifteen years later, Kate ventured down the same alley and, sure enough, the ad was still there, a bit more faded than before but otherwise intact. Unfortunately, the bottom of the ad is now blocked by the tall wood fence of a terrace built on an adjacent garage.
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May 6th, 2011
Jane Jacobs died five years ago and fans of cities and the celebrated, iconclastic urbanist have been remembering her contribution with walks through neighborhoods around the world since 2007.
This coming weekend, May 7 and 8, enthusiastic city lovers in more than 150 cities around the world, from Toronto to São Paulo, will lead Jane’s Walks. The free tours are given by volunteers who love their cities, and want to share their secrets and pleasures. Check out the website for a walk near you.
The above picture of the Parc du Portugal in Montreal’s Plateau district, which was saved from urban renewal by Portuguese immigrants who restored the small houses in the working class area with love, sweat and community financing. It will be the starting point for the walk I’ll be leading, beginning at 11 a.m. on Saturday (in English) and Sunday (in French).
Each bench in the park is decorated with ceramic tiles by Quebec artists of Portuguese origin. The first bench sits on the east side of the Main, near Bagg Street. It commemorates Dom Diniz (1261-1325), the poet monarch of the young kingdom which had just shaken off several centuries of Muslim rule.
From there the series passes through the centuries as it follows St. Lawrence north. Portugal’s bard Luís de Camões (c 1524-1580) is represented with “E se mais mondo houverá, lá chegara”–”if there were another world, they would have found it.” Fitting words from the author of an epic about how the Portuguese led Europeans in the exploration of the world.
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October 6th, 2010
I often groan while looking at then-and-now photos, since the “now” is usually so bland and graceless compared to the “then.” This new compilation by Guillaume St-Jean, which depicts the corner of Sherbrooke Street and St-Laurent in Montreal, leaves me rather more dumbfounded. How on earth did that end up looking like this?
August 2nd, 2010
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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May 6th, 2010
I knew I would like Ho Chi Minh City the minute I had my first cup of coffee. Any city where it’s normal to take a leisurely mid-morning coffee break is fine by me — especially when those coffee breaks take place with birdcages and newspapers in a public park.
Last year, I wrote about the coffee-on-demand service available in one Saigon park, but the city’s parks are home to more conventional cafés, too. One year ago, on a sunny morning in early February, I found myself sitting with two friends in Tao Dan Park, on the west side of the city’s colonial centre, where a concrete terrace is filled with low plastic chairs. We sat and ordered two iced milk coffees and one hot black coffee from a woman who wandered over from a small outdoor kitchen nearby. Around us, middle-aged and elderly men read newspapers or chatted as they slowly nursed their coffee. Some birdcages sat prominently in the middle of the terrace, reminding me of the old Hong Kong cafés I’d seen in films, where men bring their birds out for milk tea.
There’s something plainly civilized about park cafés — they help make public space comfortable, complete and less banal. So I was happy to hear yesterday that in Montreal, the Plateau Mont-Royal’s new Projet Montréal administration wants to introduce a café to Lafontaine Park. As long as the café is affordable and its revenues used to maintain the park around it, I can’t see many downsides to this idea. Maybe Montreal will end up with a bit of Tao Dan on the Plateau.
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March 15th, 2010
French football fans celebrate in 2006 on the Plateau Mont-Royal
Photo by Oliver Lavery
It’s been a long time coming, but the French — in the words of a shop manager on Mount Royal Avenue — “are taking over the Plateau!” French immigrants have been coming to Quebec for decades, but the past few years have seen an especially large influx. This year, Canada will issue 14,000 temporary visas to French people between the ages of 18 and 35, most of them on working holidays. Many choose to live in Montreal, and especially on the Plateau Mont-Royal, where French accents have become common enough to elicit half-joking exclamations like the one above. According to the French consulate, there could be as many as 100,000 French citizens living in Montreal.
In today’s La Presse, Émilie Côté takes a look at the growing community of young French émigrés on the Plateau. Many of the people she encountered say they want to stay in Montreal long-term, but finding permanent employment has been difficult. There’s also some lingering prejudice against “les maudits Français,” though some admit that the animosity could be well-deserved, considering that French people “have a chauvinistic streak” and are “notorious whiners.” In any case, the French influx is beginning to reshape the social fabric of the Plateau in some potentially fascinating ways.
Though Montreal is unique in that it is the only large, economically-developed French-speaking city outside Europe, it is not the only place with a growing French community. More and more French people are moving to Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver; a number of American cities, including Boston, San Francisco and New York, have been popular destinations for quite some time now. According to the French magazine Les Echos, there are 210,000 French expatriates in Canada, 175,000 in the United States and 158,000 in the United Kingdom. But here’s a surprise: the country with the absolute largest number of French expats is China, with 252,000.
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January 21st, 2010
I’m a great fan of Jean Leloup not only because we share a name (though his is made up and mine is real) or because he lived near me and I used to see him on the street every other day. I like him because he’s probably the strangest, most brilliant musician to have ever performed in Quebec.
The video for one of his earliest songs, “Isabelle (J’te déteste)” pokes fun at Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal New Wave film, À bout de souffle, with some great scenes of Montreal and New York in 1991. It also opens with a fantastic cameo by Julien Poulin, the actor who became famous by playing Elvis Gratton.
December 14th, 2009
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Christopher DeWolf
Avenue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville between Roy and Duluth
The first big snow has already fallen on Montreal, but I still picture the city in the midst of autumn, partly because that’s when the city looks its best and partly because I still haven’t worked through the hundreds of photos I took when I was back to visit in October.
December 4th, 2009
A ground floor window, if it’s close enough to the sidewalk, is the perfect vehicle for self-expression. When I was growing up in Calgary, I would walk along 17th Avenue every day, passing by an apartment window that was festooned with anti-war posters, music stickers and various other countercultural emblems. In Montreal, at the corner of Napoleon and Hôtel de Ville, this window is filled with a much more eclectic array of things.
December 1st, 2009
Street art on Duluth and St. Viateur streets, Montreal
November 23rd, 2009
Place Gérald-Godin in 1979 and 2009. Compilation by Guillaume St-Jean
Over the past decade, Montreal has invested heavily in big-ticket squares and plazas, including the remarkable Place Jean-Paul Riopelle and redesigned Victoria Square, both completed in 2003, and the surprisingly successful Place des Festivals, which opened earlier this year. But some of the smaller new squares are just as impressive, perhaps doubly so for the fact that they’ve been perfectly integrated into the city’s life without any kind of the fuss or introspection demanded by their bigger counterparts.
Place Gérald-Godin is the best example of these small new squares. It sits just outside the sole entrance to Mont-Royal metro, one of the city’s busiest stations, and as a result it’s busy throughout the day. Until recently, however, it wasn’t so much a square as a patch of grass traversed by a couple of asphalt pathways. A building that housed a caisse populaire (and before that, a bicycle shop) occupied the corner of Berri and Mount Royal, next to the station, making the space in front feel like more like an afterthought than a real place.
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November 18th, 2009
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August 24th, 2009
Mount Royal Avenue, Montreal
Franck Chambrun seems to have rediscovered my photos. After painting several of them in 2007, he has done the same over the past few weeks, though with a distinct shift in style. Whereas his earlier paintings distilled the streetlife depicted in my photos to its bare essence of form and colour, his new works seem to read the city’s thoughts and emotions. Maybe it’s my own personal bias, but his paintings seem to have a greater impact when you see them in conjunction with the photos on which they were based; you get to peek inside the artist’s own mind, seeing what he saw.
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May 16th, 2008
Increasingly, parking your bike in busy areas like the Plateau is almost as hard as parking a car. This summer, though, the Plateau Mont-Royal borough will be leading the way in giving cyclists more places to rest their two-wheelers. By the time autumn arrives later this year, the Plateau’s 1,500 parking spots will have doubled to more than 3,000.
“The Plateau is the single area with the most cyclists in all of North America. Seven per cent of all movements are made by bike. That’s a lot, but we don’t have enough places for everyone to park their bike,” says Michel Labrecque, city councillor for Mile-End and the man in charge of the Plateau’s new Plan de déplacement urbain, which will guide the borough’s approach to transportation over the next few years.
A big part of that approach is to give priority to “active” modes of transportation like cycling and walking. So far, one way of doing that has been to replace parking spots for cars with on-street bicycle parking areas, several of which have already been implemented on busy retail streets like St-Viateur, Laurier and Mont-Royal, as well as in front of schools, daycares, housing co-ops and the Maison des cyclistes on Rachel.
“When we take away a parking spot, some people think of it as ‘their’ parking space and they might get angry. But that’s what it takes to make a change in the modal split, the way people get around. We can put between five and eight bikes in the amount of space that a single car would occupy,” says Labrecque. “We installed one next to the YMCA because it’s always full of bikes. There’s one on Laurier near Laurier Park, in front of a Metro supermarket, and it’s always full too, so it might be enlarged this year.”
While the on-street parking areas that currently exist can accommodate about 160 bikes, the Plateau plans to add four to six new areas this summer, with room for an additional 56 bikes. This doesn’t include the 14 parking areas, with space for 175 bikes, that will be built on the newly renovated St-Laurent, or the expanded parking area in front of the Plateau library and Maison de la culture, on Mont-Royal, which will be made permanent this year.
Each on-street parking area costs between $4,000 and $6,000 to install, but it’s well worth it, says Michel Tanguy, a Plateau borough spokesman. “The borough has really taken off in a direction that will see the number of spaces for bikes do nothing but increase.”
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