Arcaded Sidewalks

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Vancouver Decorates Its Sidewalks

Don’t talk to my friend Sam about sidewalk decoration. He’ll snort and expound upon the many ways in which it’s useless. I take a more sympathetic position towards it: I think it enhances the pedestrian experiences, especially if the decoration combines aesthetic or artistic value with practical or historical information. At its best, it creates a sense of place and yet another interesting detail in the urban fabric.

On many downtown Vancouver sidewalks, the shape of leaves have been stamped into the pavement beneath a street tree. There’s something playful and childlike about them; I find it hard to imagine roughneck construction workers actually taking a moment to draw fallen leaves in the wet concrete they just poured. I especially like the fact that a variety of leaves are represented.

Elsewhere around town, twelve mosaics created of Vancouver scenes by local artists have been installed in the sidewalk as part of an Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association initiative. Some of the mosaic images are a bit cliché — no doubt the BIA had a hand in picking the themes — but some are nice homages to overlooked bits of Vancouver heritage, like a collage of Vancouver’s most notable architectural features and a jumble of famous neon signs.

Two more features that caught my eye in Vancouver: in Chinatown, the Chinese versions of the neighbourhood’s street names have been inscribed in gold-plated characters on the sidewalk and on the base of lampposts.

On busy streets like Burrard, the word “LOOK” has been stencilled into the pavement to prevent pedestrians from stepping into curbside traffic. With its green backdrop and owl eyes, it’s far more eye-catching than the “Look Right” signs found throughout London and Hong Kong.

Vancouver Furnishes Its Sidewalks

Downtown Vancouver has an abundance of high-quality new street furniture, thanks in large part to a proactive planning department that gives developers density bonuses in exchange for public amenities. So far, developers have paid for countless water features, a good number of parks, social housing, a permanent home for the Vancouver International Film Festival and even a new elementary school. But they have also shelled out for some small but important pieces of street furniture. Montreal could learn a few lessons.

The strange-looking bike rack above is a nice example. I found it on Davie Street near the corner of Seymour, just outside a large new condo complex. It is both attractive and functional, which is something that cannot be said for the woefully misguided bicycle rack design that is the standard across Montreal.

Like Montreal, Vancouver does not maintain street recycling bins. Unlike Montreal, though, it has come up with an ingeniously simple way to make sure that bottles and cans are recycled nonetheless. Many garbage cans in the city feature a “recycling rack” with room for five containers; put your bottle there and, soon enough, someone will take it to the bottle depot to cash its deposit. Vancouver has a virtual army of men and women who scour garbage cans for anything with a deposit value so these recycling racks are never full for long.

Many newly-developed residential areas in downtown Vancouver include superbly-designed parks and plazas. One of these, George Wayburn Park, includes a row of permanent metal sunchairs that face False Creek and the afternoon sun. It’s a nice touch that adds a bit of playfulness to its surroundings.

There are few legal spaces for postering in Montreal. You can stick a poster onto any construction hoarding, but these are monopolized by an advertising company called Publicité sauvage. There are also a handful of poster boards in the Quartier des spectacles and outlying boroughs like Lachine. In the most heavily trafficked places in town — exactly where legal postering space is needed the most — people are forced to glue their posters illegally to mailboxes, lampposts and other surfaces.

Vancouver is far more accommodating: hundreds of lampposts around the city have been fitted with casts to which anyone can stick a poster. City workers clear them every Tuesday.

The Spots on the Sidewalk

Next time you walk down the street, take a look down. See the spots? That’s gum, pressed into the pavement by thousands of footsteps. I normally don’t pay them much notice but, now that I think of it, they’re a good indication of how busy a particular stretch a sidewalk is. The more pedestrians that use it, the more discarded rubbish and, consequently, the more black spots.

“Hardened gum underfoot is undeniably an urban hallmark,” wrote Deborah Stead in a 2003 article that appeared in the New York Times. (What paper other than the Times would devote space to a 2,250-word article on sidewalk spots?) “The bigger and denser the city, the more the gum, which may make New York the gum splotch capital of the world.” In Montreal, the area with the most gum spots is undoubtedly Ste. Catherine St., especially around the big shopping malls between University and Peel, where people linger on the sidewalk.

But what about other areas? I can’t recall if there are a lot of spots on other busy streets like, say, Côte des Neiges Road, or Mount Royal Avenue. Does Montreal have a spot-cleaning program? The impetus for the Times article was a new service, Gumbusters, hired by the City of New York to “vaporize” gum spots off the sidewalk. With Montreal’s born-again dedication to cleanliness, though, who knows?

Finding Sidewalk Stamps

Matt Blackett is obsessed with sidewalk stamps. He wrote about them in Spacing‘s first issue and his interest was even featured in the Globe and Mail. Last month, when Matt met with a group of fellow public space enthusiasts here in Montreal, he asked us if our sidewalks were stamped too. Everyone shook their heads. “No,” they replied.

But that isn’t true. Montreal doesn’t seem to stamp its sidewalks anymore but it certainly did in the past. I’ve come across a stamp from 1922 on a Villeray sidestreet; a few weeks ago, on a balmy May evening, I noticed a lovely metal stamp embedded in the sidewalk of Park Avenue near the corner of Mount Royal. Shaped like a maple leaf, it testifies to the date of the sidewalk’s construction (1953) and the name of the contractor who built it (Charles Dufranceau).

I have no idea why Montreal abandoned the sidewalk-stamping tradition. It still seems to be practiced in Toronto; in Vancouver, sidewalks are often stamped with decorative elements, like leaves around the base of a tree. But perhaps I’m not looking hard enough: I’ll have to head down to look closely at the new sidewalks that have just been installed on the Main.

Sidewalk Spillover

Open Da Night (Café Olimpico) on the weekend, Montreal

Ripple’s Ice Cream on the Main, Montreal