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.
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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.
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Street art on Duluth and St. Viateur streets, Montreal
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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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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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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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Loin des manifestations chaotiques des années 60/70, aujourd’hui, le militantisme local répond à la complexité de nos milieux urbains avec une sophistication de plus en plus accrue. Dans notre contexte actuel, il faut faire plus que lancer des revendications. Il faut plutôt sensibiliser la population et les instances de pouvoir, soit politique ou économique.
À Montréal, au printemps 2002, dans le Plateau Mont-Royal, un quartier en pleine mutation, un nouveau mouvement populaire de citoyens a vu le jour. Ce groupe s’est inspiré de l’idée de mettre la personne avant la voiture en réponse à l’omniprésence des voitures polluantes en ville. Mais l’enlèvement des voitures ne faisait qu’une partie du plan de ce qui est devenu le Comité de citoyens Mont-Royal Avenue Verte.
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Montreal Apartments