Living on the Edge

Rooftop houses in Kwun Tong

By the end of this year, Hong Kong’s Buildings Department plans to finish clearing illegal rooftop structures from single-staircase buildings, marking the end of a clearance programme that began in 2001. But illegal rooftop communities continue to thrive, fed by a shortage of centrally located public housing and perennially high rents in the private sector.

Nine floors above Li Tak Street, in Tai Kok Tsui, more than 100 people live in haphazard shacks on the roof of a large block of flats.

Sam Fong, 23, who studies English at Polytechnic University and is an amateur photographer, moved to the rooftop two years ago, when he left Guangzhou to join his father, mother and sister in Hong Kong. They share a sheet-metal shack with small kitchen, living room and bedroom.

“Hong Kong is just like a jungle. You have to fight for your survival here,” said Fong, who recently started working part-time in a nearby supermarket. His father is a building concierge, his mother is a waitress and his sister works in a clothing store.

Because Fong, his mother and sister have not lived in Hong Kong for seven years, the family cannot apply for public housing, a common problem faced by poor immigrants.

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Rooftop Voyeur

On the roof of Mirador Mansions, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon

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À chacun son toit

Variety of rooftops in Sham Shui Po, Kowloon, Hong Kong

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The Teenage City

“The thing to do on prom night 1998 was to take the rented limo up to the lookout on Mount-Royal after a soirée of underage bar-hopping to see the sun rise,” writes Alanah Heffez on Spacing Montreal. “We didn’t make it. Dizzy on newly-discovered drinks, my date and I watched the sun come up from the rooftop of a grocery store around the corner from home.”

The teenager’s city is one of escape, adventure and a constant search “for something to climb, for a hole in the fence, for an undiscovered place, a final frontier to push against,” she writes. Too old to play at home and shut out from other venues (movies get expensive and bars are for the pleasure of the 18-plus), teenagers begin to see the entire city as a playground. “If my experience was any indication, teenagers rely on public space more than almost any other demographic,” Alanah notes.

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Rooftop Nights

Dusk over the Flower Market

Rooftop BBQ near Prince Edward

Over the rooftops of Sai Ying Pun

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Opening Up the Oratory

It’s the thrill of discovering a new perspective on what you see everyday: that’s why I have such a thirst for finding new vantage points from which to overlook the city. If you ask me, a great night out usually involves some beer and a spot on some apartment building’s rooftop. (That’s no secret to regular readers: check out the new Rooftops and Views from Above tags.) You can pretty much guess what I think of the new plan to create a public observatory inside the dome of St. Joseph’s Oratory, then.

The Oratory, a Catholic basilica, is one of Montreal’s most distinctive landmarks. You can see it from just about any spot in the south or west in the city, its giant copper dome peeking up from above the trees of Mount Royal. In the north, its presence is monumental, lording over the neighbourhoods of Côte des Neiges and Snowdon. You can even see it from the airport in Dorval, where it looks like the nipple of a large, misshapen breast. Every year, the Oratory receives two million visitors, many of them Catholic pilgrims from Korea and Latin America, and it has been looking for ways to attract even more tourists. Opening an observation deck would be a sure-fire way to make the basilica an essential stop for anyone spending time in Montreal.

It could also change way that Montrealers see their own city. Maybe I’m investing too much hope in the transformative power of a good view, but the Oratory’s observation deck would possess an entirely unique perspective Montreal; it would be the only spot in town with a view completely unobstructed by Mount Royal. By extension, it would also be the only place where you could actually look over on Mount Royal. People would be able to get a better sense of how the mountain relates to the city and how its presence has shaped the urban development of Montreal. It would be a spectacular change from the usual vantage points.

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Zzzzzs in the Moonlight

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South West North

Looking south towards Jordan, Tsim Sha Tsui and Hong Kong Island

Looking west towards the Yau Ma Tei typhoon shelter

Looking north towards Mongkok

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The Bagel Shop Roof

Here in Hong Kong, rooftops are very functional, used more or less like an extra room in the house: for storage, laundry, recreation. In the past, rooftops were the cheapest places to live, and multiple families would crowd into shanties built on top of walkups and even highrises. Some of those illegal structures still remain. In March, when I visited Kwun Tong to get a new pair of glasses, I peered down from the open window of the twenty-first floor of the optometrist’s building and saw laundry hanging out to dry on the roof of a large industrial building below.

New York is another place where rooftops are put to good use. Gardens and terraces are abundant and, in Brooklyn, Rooftop Films fashions makeshift cinemas from the rooftops of old factories and other buildings. Back in 2005, Rooftop Films visited Montreal, and I attended their screening of several short films atop the TÉLUQ building at Henri-Julien and Villeneuve. Watching movies on a roof is a peculiar experience that combines the communal exuberance of an outdoor concert or film with the voyeuristic thrill of lurking about on roofs.

For a city with such an abundance of flat roofs, Montreal does remarkably little with them: there’s a smattering of roof decks, the occasional swimming pool and a handful of green roofs. For the most part, though, rooftops in Montreal were not designed to be used in any meaningful way, largely because of the city’s climate. Covered in a layer of gravel, the roofs typically slope inwards to encourage the accumulation of snow, which acts as a kind of insulation during the winter months. There isn’t much up there beyond chimneys, vents and skylights, which allow light to reach rooms with no exterior windows. What Montreal’s rooftops are particularly good for, however, is sneaking around. The iron ladders and spiral staircases of back alley fire escapes are the gateways to a secret world, a playground above the heads of unsuspecting pedestrians where quietude and surprising vistas can be found.

Last November, on a nighttime expedition to acquaint ourselves with our neighbourhood’s roofs, my friend Rossana and girlfriend Laine ended up on top of the St. Viateur Bagel Shop. It didn’t take long for us to decide that it was our favourite rooftop in Montreal: greeted by the silhouette of St. Michael’s Church, we turned around to see the even larger shadow of Mount Royal set against an amber sky. The smell of freshly baked bagels wafted up from a courtyard between the bagel shop roof and the apartment building next door.

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Another Park Avenue Rooftop

In October, I took you up to the roof of my friend’s triplex on Park Avenue. Here’s another roof further up the street. I’m always amazed to see Mount Royal from up there; on the street, it’s invisible, blocked by buildings.

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Views From a Park Avenue Rooftop

By now you must know about my love for viewing cities from on high. That’s true even from three storeys up. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Boris took me up to the roof of his building on Park Avenue. This was what we saw.

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Looking Down on Us

The view from behind the Silo No. 5. Photo by Karl Harrison

On a late July evening, with the last fingers of dusk lingering in the sky, Karl Harrison and Roma Lake were looking for a roof to climb. They headed south to the Lachine Canal, toward the old Silo No. 5.

“We’re going up really soon. I know the way in,” said Harrison, pointing toward the silo.

But not tonight. Instead, they veered west to tackle another abandoned building in Point St. Charles.

Harrison, a photographer who works in IT, and Lake, an event planner, have been sneaking onto rooftops for several years, taking in the view from dozens of buildings around Old Montreal and the Lachine Canal.

“Once you get up there, it’s as if you’ve climbed a mountain,” Harrison said. “There’s this aspect of getting these beautiful views that nobody else is seeing.

To him, the city’s fire escapes and abandoned buildings are gateways to an extra dimension of urban space. They offer a chance to escape the bustle of city streets, but also to see and understand how the different elements of Montreal’s urban landscape fit together, like pieces of a vast toy metropolis.

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Sneaking Up to the Roof

Last week, Owen Rose wrote about rooftop greening, which is an exciting opportunity for any city that has an overabundance of flat gravel roofs. Personally, though, when I think of “rooftop,” I can’t help but imagine something else: the views. Every city has a few well-known points of higher elevation. You’ll see them on postcards, in news reports, in tourist photos — eventually, they become clichéd vistas that are pleasant but entirely predicable.

What you see when you emerge onto some random, out-of-the-way rooftop, however, is entirely surprising. The city takes on a different form; you notice things you never noticed before. The problem is that the vast majority of a city’s rooftops are not accessible to the public, unless you risk climbing up rickety fire escapes. Luckily, there are a few rooftops here and there that are, for less adventurous types like myself, relatively easy to access.

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Les toits verts : profitons d’un territoire sous-exploité !

Les toits plats font partie de la culture de construction à Montréal et dans bien d’autres villes du Québec. Au lieu de maintenir des déserts de goudron et de gravier sur nos toits, nous pouvons y faire pousser des champs, des potagers et des jardins. Au-delà des avantages de climatisation naturelle, de gestion des eaux de pluie et de prolongation de la vie du toit, les toitures végétales sont simplement belles.

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