Election Sign Season

Not an election sign, but much more amusing

I arrived in Montreal just in time for the most exciting municipal election campaign in decades. All at once, a bit too early for Halloween, all of City Hall’s skeletons fell out of the closet, with revelations that construction contracts are rigged and accusations that the municipal government works primarily around a system of bribes and kickbacks. From what I saw, though, this year’s campaign posters are not nearly so dramatic.

More

Popularity: 12% [?]

Behind Ste. Catherine

Pigeons, a ghost ad and an old tavern sign in an alley between Mansfield and Metcalfe

More

Popularity: 5% [?]

Reclaiming Public Space

Top left photo by John Batten; others by Christopher DeWolf

The brown leather chesterfield sits incongruously amid the parked buses, concrete paving and grey metal railings at the Tai Hang bus terminus. In the afternoon heat, a cat stretches over the length of the sofam but after sunset, it’s where bus drivers and passers-by sit and relax.

This kind of improvised street furniture is what arts writer and heritage activist John Batten calls vernacular or “nonchalant” art, an umbrella term for the everyday objects, street life and informal interventions in public spaces that are close to the heart of this city’s character.

“Hong Kong is a place that’s open to free expression, which is reflected in the clutter of our public spaces, our footbridges and ferry forecourts,” says Batten. “All of these bits of vernacular art and architecture are part of who we are. People overlook [such] simple things. But if you take them away, what are you left with?”

More

Popularity: unranked [?]

East End, West End, on fume tout de même

This is what makes ghost ads in Montreal more interesting than in most places: more than just a window into the past, they reveal the city’s linguistic geography, past and present. Here we have two examples of early-twentieth-century tobacco ads revealed by recent building demolitions. One, on east-end Masson Street in Rosemont, is in French. The other, on west-end Sherbrooke Street in NDG, is in English. It’s a pretty straightforward illustration of Montreal’s linguistic divisions, which exist to this day — you’re far more likely to hear English spoken in western NDG than French, and the opposite holds true in Rosemont.

Of course, there’s more than just linguistic history that can be gleaned from these old ads. Turret Cigarettes were produced by Imperial Tobacco in St. Henri, about four or five kilometres from the ad in NDG, and they were marketed as the poker-player’s cigarettes of choice. Enough boxes of Turret made you eligible to redeem a deck of playing cards from Imperial Tobacco’s warehouse in the present-day Gay Village — hence the seemingly cryptic slogan, “Save the Poker Hands.”

Old Chum, meanwhile, was a brand of pipe tobacco, also produced by Imperial, that was popular with the tobacco charities run by La Presse and The Gazette. The tobacco charities raised money to provide tobacco to Canadian soldiers fighting in the first world war. After troops complained of being given inferior tobacco, The Gazette commissioned Imperial to produce packages of Old Chum specifically for the troops. Smoking became a patriotic activity promoted by both the French and English press.

Top photo by xbourque; bottom photo by Guillaume St-Jean

Popularity: 2% [?]

Hong Kong Doorways: For Rent

Hong Kong is an entrepreneurial place. Even when a shop goes out of business, it isn’t out of the game: as soon as the shutter comes down, the broker signs go up. In most cities, a landlord might try to rent the space out himself, or hire to a single broker to do the job. Here, brokers compete for the space. Shuttered shops become symbolic battlefields on which brokers fight for a commission equivalent to a month’s rent — no small sum of money in a city where ground-floor shops go for thousands of dollars per square foot.

With retail on just about every street, many neighbourhoods have their fair share of vacant shops, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. On the next street over from my apartment, where this photo was taken, a restaurant found the sidewalk in front of an empty store the perfect place to set up a couple of tables and some stools.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Well-Aged

Street sign on Taipa, Macau

Popularity: 3% [?]

Four Generations

Hong Kong has a wealth of street signs from different eras, but unlike Montreal, political and linguistic tensions are buried far beneath the surface. No matter what the age or style, Hong Kong street signs follow a formula: black text, white background, English above Chinese. There have been some minor variations through the years; in older signs, the Chinese is usually smaller than the English (no doubt reflecting the colonial mindset of the era’s bureaucrats), and the two languages were sometimes differentiated by colour.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Rue Provost

Provost Street, in the working-class borough of Lachine, is not one of Montreal’s much-vaunted main streets. It has no sidewalk cafés, no cool bars and no reason to linger. But it does have a vintage Poulet Frit à la Kentucky.

I took these photos in the spring of 2007. I hope Provost and its fried-chicken joint haven’t undergone any sort of rebranding since then.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Patte de porc

Popularity: unranked [?]

Boarded Up and Postered Over

Left, the Main between Duluth and Rachel in 1988; right, the former Laurier Cinema, now a bookstore, in 1988. Below, posters on a brick wall in 1996

Popularity: 5% [?]

Sammy’s Kitchen

1970s-era restaurant sign, Queen’s Road West, Sai Ying Pun

Popularity: unranked [?]

Pop Art

Posters for Pop Montreal, early October, in an alley near St. Viateur in Mile End

Popularity: unranked [?]

Fighting the Rent Hike

Every so often in Hong Kong, you’ll come across a protest banner like this one, hanging from the window of a decrepit apartment and bearing a message usually related to rents. In this case, tenants in a building near the Central street market are angry that their landlord wants to raise their rent three-fold.

Rents in Hong Kong are expensive, but not quite as outrageous as they’re made out to be — you can easily find a nice apartment in a central area for no more than what you’d pay for an equivalent place in Toronto, let alone London or New York. But what makes things tricky is that rents in Hong Kong are completely unregulated: if your lease is up and your landlord decides to triple your rent, your choice is to either pay up, move out or, in the case of these residents of Central, mount a collective protest.

The only reason this system hasn’t resulted in rampant homelessness is because nearly half of all Hong Kong residents live in some form of public housing. The government here has done an remarkably good job of providing relatively high-quality, affordable homes to those who need them. This becomes less admirable, however, when you realize that the government is largely responsible for perennially high property values. Because the government owns virtually all of the land in Hong Kong, it wields enormous influence over property values: in order to keep prices high, it selectively leases land to a small group of property developers.

It’s a bit alarming to live in a place whose entire political and economic structure rests on something so inequitable. But how to change it when that change would require a complete upheaval of the current system?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Electioneering in Plymouth, Michigan

An Obama sign in Plymouth…

…and a McCain rejoinder

Several days ago, American presidential candidate John McCain announced that he was suspending his campaign in the state of Michigan, and I breathed a sigh of relief. But he also announced that he was canceling a planned event in Plymouth, my hometown, and I was a little disappointed; I’ve been working, on and off, on the Obama campaign here since mid-July, and it would have been very interesting to see the opposition candidate stumping on what I think of as my turf, perhaps only a few blocks from my family’s home.

I grew up in Plymouth, so I think of the town as my turf without a second of hesitation, though I’m constantly reminded that, politically at least, it really isn’t. My neighbors, whose great grandparents actually built the house in which I live, recently picked up a McCain sign (pictured) and stumped it right along the property line, as if it were thumbing its nose at the Obama sign I put in our front yard three weeks ago.

More

Popularity: 1% [?]