A Walk Through the Bairro Português

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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Struggling Against the Snow

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Defrosting Public Space

Sphères polaires at the Place des Festival

By the time February rolls around, Montreal has already been buried in snow for a couple of months and your mental map of the city has changed considerably. Places you’d normally linger — the steps at Place des Arts, the plaza in front of Mont-Royal metro, the giant chess board in Berri Square — have vanished from the landscape, inaccessible under the snow, unpleasant in the sub-zero wind.

Montreal’s seasonal extremes are a challenge to urban planning: how do you create a vibrant place that can function just as well on a frigid January day as on a balmy August night? Some spaces are more adaptable than others. Neighbourhood retail streets will always be lively, since people still need to hit up the supermarket, coffee shop and drug store even when it’s cold. Park lawns make good toboggan slopes and hockey rinks in the winter. But hard-surfaced plazas and squares — those quintessentially urban spaces — have a hard time finding much use between December and April.

For most of the years I lived in Montreal, the only time of the winter when a downtown square came back to life was during February’s Nuit Blanche festival, when performances and light installations take over the snowbound tarmac at Place des Arts. Lately, however, some of the ideas behind that one night of wintertime festivities has been extended throughout the winter. Last year, the recently-built Place des Festivals played host to Champ de pixels, which transformed the square into a giant Lite Brite studded with illuminated “pixels” made from overturned plastic buckets. Each bucket was equipped with motion sensors; when you walked by, the colour of the light shifted from white to red.

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A Contemplative Evening in Villa Freud

Of the two habits in which Argentines surely lead the world — psychotherapy and plastic surgery — it seems peculiar that the first, rather than the second, would boast a dedicated neighborhood in Buenos Aires. After all, the point of cosmetic surgery is to be seen, whereas therapy is a much more private affair. Maybe the answer lies in the sheer prevalence of Argentines in treatment — the country boasts the highest number of psychiatrists per capita on earth, and when documentary filmmakers surveyed Porteños (citizens of Buenos Aires) on their psychoanalytic habits, most were not ashamed to admit they’d spent time on a shrink’s couch.

Or it could just be a matter of convenient real estate. Villa Freud, BA’s psychoanalytic district, began to coalesce in the 70s, when social anxiety — perhaps related to the country’s ongoing military dictatorship, or ever-present economic woes — spiked. Doctors eagerly sought out cheap space near the Recoleta homes of their wealthy clients, and found it mostly around Palermo’s ovular Plaza Güemes. It didn’t hurt that the area looked appropriately Viennese, with the twin gothic spires of Our Lady of Guadeloupe dominating the cafe-ringed square.

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A New Square

When I returned to Montreal last fall, I spent much of my time riding around the city on Bixi bikes, which was the closest I’ve ever felt to complete freedom in a very long time: a bike, a city and nothing holding me back from just riding around aimlessly. It gave me a chance to cover more ground than I ever would have if I had stuck to my own two feet.

I came across this new public square at the corner of McGill and Wellington near the Old Port. When I left Montreal, it was still under construction and there were few indications of how it would turn out. (Considering Montreal’s excellent track record of recent square-building, though, my hopes were high). I wasn’t disappointed. Instead of paving over the entire square, or covering it unimaginatively with turf, wild grass was planted, similar to what was done with the median of Morgan Avenue in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

Montreal is a windy city and wild grass like this looks particularly romantic when it is blowing in a breeze. It softens the square and defines the space without making it feel cloistered, which would have been the case if shrubs had been planted, or overly precious, which would have been the case with flowers. It’s also looks vaguely rural, which works strangely well with the industrial modernism of the condos that have been built next to the square — a subtle evocation of the weedy decay that characterized the neighbourhood just 10 years ago.

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Making of a Square

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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Liberating Hong Kong’s Times Square

Times are a-changin’ and so are the squares. This summer in New York, cars were banned from Broadway between 47th Street and 42nd Street, making Times Square a true gathering place rather than a glorified intersection. Here in Hong Kong, the plaza in front of the Times Square shopping mall has found a new vocation as the city’s go-to spot for anyone wanting to make a public statement.

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Cambridge, Temporarily

One of the beautiful things about an academic planning exercise is that you can indulge in a little flight of fancy. A recent exercise at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design let people imagine a temporary urban intervention in one of Cambridge’s famous squares.

A “square”, in Boston parlance, really just refers to an intersection between two streets, and fittingly, many of them do look like an afterthought. Kendall Square, home to MIT, is one example: when JFK decided it was going to be the headquarters of the US’ future space program, the entire area was cleared of its population. While that didn’t quite pan out, the area gradually became filled with high-tech spin-offs from nearby MIT. That, however, didn’t prevent Kendall Square from being filled with 70s campus-style architecture, which lent it a creepy extermination camp vibe quite at odds with homey (if a little staid) Cambridge.

The following is a little blurb about the proposal:

Kendall Square on a winter evening is bleak, empty, but also potentially atmospheric. Reminiscent of the menacing and enigmatic cityscape in Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, there is a psychological tension to this empty space that we seek to exploit in the installation Phantom City.

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Hijacking Public Spaces

Bench at Times Square. Photo by Ox Lee

It was a balmy, late March evening in Hong Kong. Times Square, tourist hot-spot and the island city’s largest shopping mall, thronged as usual with people basking in the artificial daylight of the surrounding billboards and video screens. But something was different.

I looked closely: the “railings” that normally stood in the square—awkwardly-shaped seats designed to give people the illusion that they had a place to rest, but so uncomfortable that few bothered to sit in them—had been replaced by real benches. The “No Lingering” signs normally seen on the square’s flower planters now had a friendlier message: “Love the Plants.”

Although the open area around Times Square is legally considered public space, it is privately managed by the shopping mall’s owners, who will rent it out to promotional events and commercial activities for up to $19,000 CAD per day. Security guards often shoo away undesirables, such as the Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers who gather in Hong Kong’s parks and squares every weekend.

But in public debates about these practices, questions emerged about whether the mall’s management actually had the right to exert this level of control over its open space. Turns out it didn’t. When Times Square was first proposed in 1987, the government awarded its developers extra density in exchange for the construction of a plaza that would be used exclusively for public, non-commercial activities. After Times Square opened, the government failed to enforce those requirements. This essentially gave the mall’s management free reign to do with the space as it wished, a situation that ended only when Hong Kong’s media broke the story at the beginning of last year. In March, angry citizens staged a protest, demanding access to Times Square. The following week, it was goodbye uncomfortable railings disappeared, hello “Love the Plants.”

The Times Square controversy is part of a much greater debate raging over Hong Kong’s public spaces, the redevelopment of old neighbourhoods, loss of heritage and the health of the city’s cultural life.

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Less is More: New Public Spaces

Movable tables and chairs in a plaza at Broadway and 66th, New York

Montreal is in the midst of a great public space building boom. Plenty of new squares, plazas and open spaces have been created over the past six or seven years, most notably in the Quartier international, but also throughout the city. With the redevelopment of Griffintown, Viger Square and the area around Rosemont metro, along with the construction of the CHUM superhospital and the reconstruction of Place d’Armes and the Pine/Park interchange, ensuring that our new public spaces are well-designed is particularly important.

So how have we been doing until now? In the latest issue of Canadian Architect, Gavin Affleck offers a review of some of our newest public spaces. “In many ways the story of recent public space design in Montreal has been a story of moving from more to less,” he writes. “The city core boasts an impressive inventory of public spaces ranging in age from colonial squares to contemporary corporate plazas. During the last 20 years, the design of both historic refurbishment schemes and contemporary projects has been marked by a gradual shift towards a more minimal expression. The most successful of recent projects are evidence that well designed urban space is simple, flexible and free of physical encumbrances.”

By that standard, many of the spaces built in the 60s and 70s are abject failures, with Viger Square a particularly apt example. Designed by a team of highway engineers and visual artists, the resulting square is a “seemingly endless plethora of concrete park pavilions, pergolas, retaining walls, fountains, planters and outdoor sculpture” that is too crowded with architectural objects to be of any practical use. Many newer projects stand in contrast to this unsuccessful approach, including the early 1990s redevelopment of the Old Port, the renovation of Place des Arts and, most recently, the Quartier International, which is produced a revamped Victoria Square and the new Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle, two of Montreal’s most interesting squares.

The key lesson that Montreal’s designers have applied in recent years is that simplicity and flexibility make the best public spaces. Beyond those two attributes, though, they also need activity, which is something that good design cannot create, but only facilitate. Affleck recognizes this: “What public space is about is human activity; what it is not about is architectural objects. The great urban spaces of European cities are precisely that: spaces. What fills them is the ebb and flow of life–events, experiences, activities. Rather than aesthetic, formal or visual concerns, the measure of success of a public space is the degree of vitality it achieves as a support for human activity,” he writes.

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St. Louis Square’s Old Basin

St. Louis Square, often known as Carré St-Louis (though this is, to the surprise of many, actually an anglicism), is one of Montreal’s greatest public spaces. A traditional Victorian park, ringed by beautiful old greystone rowhouses and villas, it first came into existence as a reservoir in 1851. In 1880, the reservoir was drained and the square as we now know it was built, complete with walking paths and a fountain.

Except that wasn’t entirely the case. The beautiful fountain that now stands in the middle of the square, serving as a central focus for all of its activity, once found itself in the middle of a much larger basin of water. In one newspaper illustration from 1902, the basin appears to cover the entire central section of the park. It has been converted into a summer wading pool for children, who frolic in the water as their mothers, dressed in long dark frocks, promenade around the square under the shade of parasols.

I’m not sure when the basin was redeveloped, but it continued to exist as recently as 1943, according to one photo showing workers improving the basin’s drainage system.

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Place Monseigneur Charbonneau

Montreal’s office district, running between Dorchester Square in the northwest and Victoria Square in the southeast, is not terribly exciting. Compared to Midtown Manhattan, or even Bay Street, it lacks a certain high-stakes punch, the relentless energy of money being made in vast amounts, of high-stress streetlife scurrying from one meeting to the next. It feels provincial. But at least it’s pretty: over the past four years, this section of downtown Montreal has seen some huge improvements to its urban environment.

The change started with the overhaul of the so-called Quartier international, which included the construction of Place Jean-Paul Riopelle and the transformation of Victoria Square into a public space as refined and elegant as it had been, just a few years earlier, ratty and forgotten. A couple of blocks away, a series of luminescent pillars were installed in the median of University Street. Throughout the area, sidewalks were widened and furnished with attractive new light standards, traffic lights, benches, trash cans and bike racks.

One of the overlooked changes in the area, though, was the renovation of Place Monseigneur-Charbonneau, a small square at the corner of University and René Lévesque, right in front of 1 Place Ville-Marie, Montreal’s most iconic skyscraper. In 2005, it was reconfigured and nearly doubled in size. Granite and concrete were used to create an eye-catching pavement design and vegetation was arranged simply and effectively, creating a canopy above the square while keeping the views of the surrounding streets open. The same sleek, comfortable benches that are used in the Quartier international were installed here.

Like the redone Victoria Square, or the new Place Jean-Paul Riopelle, Place Monseigneur-Charbonneau manages to be both stylish and functional. I wasn’t even aware of the square until recently; before the renovations, it appeared to be nothing more than an overgrown mass of greenery marooned in a sea of traffic. Now, though, it has been well-used every time I have visited. Office workers eat lunch and chat on its benches, cabbies hang out near the taxi stand at the north side of the square, and its central location ensures a constant flow of pedestrians, at least during the day.

Place Falun Gong

Place Sun Yat Sen, a small square in the heart of Montreal’s Chinatown, is almost perenially occupied by members of Falun Gong, a psuedo-religious spiritual movement that originated in 1992 in China. Banned seven years later by the Chinese government, which insisted that it was a cult and devoted itself rather heavy-handedly to crushing it, Falun Gong has earned supporters and followers worldwide.

Here in Montreal, its members are a common sight on downtown streets, where they hand out pamplets explaining the movement’s philosophy and outlining the tactics used against it by the Chinese government, which allegedly include arrest, torture and systematic organ harvesting. In Sun Yat Sen Square, a diverse collection of Falun Gong followers can usually be found practicing meditation exercises next to posters that outline their group’s persecution in China.

It’s common for advocacy groups to lay claim to specific bits of public space. I’m reminded of the bizarre protester who picketed McGill University’s Roddick Gates every day for more than a year, hosting signs with messages that many considered to be anti-Semitic. (His goal, he said, was to protest his “wrongful dismissal” from the Jewish General Hospital and to “enlighten the global Jewish community of the virtues of Christianity.”) In Vancouver, the wall of the Chinese consulate is home to a perennial protest against China’s control of Tibet.

These kinds of permanent protests might seem a nuisance to some, but I think they are perfectly legitimate, no matter how strange or unsavoury their message. After all, the beauty of public space is that it’s public.

The Falun Gong people in Chinatown seem especially mindful of that. They never interfere with the many special events that take place there, they pack up their stuff at sundown every evening and they even lent a hand during last month’s Chinatown Clean Up.

Norman Bethune Square

Norman Bethune Square, a tiny triangle wedged between the intersection of Guy St. and de Maisonneuve Blvd., is Montreal’s shittiest square. I mean that literally: it quite possibly has more pigeon shit per square inch than any other public space in the whole of Greater Montreal. I have no idea why pigeons like this place so much, but it’s almost like an homage to Trafalgar Square, filled as it is with twitchy flocks of little grey birds.

This small square also has the distinction of being the only square in Montreal named after a Communist. Born in 1890 and raised in small town Ontario, Norman Bethune moved to Montreal to join the faculty of McGill University as a thoracic surgeon. During his time here, Bethune was known for his support of free health care, and his leftist sympathies eventually took him to the civil war in Spain, where he provided medical assistance to the Republicans, and to China, where, in 1938 and 1939, he worked alongside Communists fighting the Japanese invasion. Bethune died of blood poisoning in 1939 when he was cut while performing surgery.

Bethune remained largely anonymous until his work was praised by Mao Zedong in an essay entitled In Memory of Norman Bethune. Bethune was one of the few foreigners revered in Maoist China, and statues of his likeness can be found throughout the country. Even today, Bethune’s name holds a certain resonance in China.

But what about his square in Montreal? Well, to be blunt, it doesn’t do the man justice. Although Norman Bethune Square is easily one of the busiest spots downtown, located in the midst Concordia’s bustling downtown campus, next to bus stops and Guy-Concordia metro, and surrounded by tall apartment towers, it is ratty and weather-beaten. Its pavement consists of cracked concrete and packed gravel, and the handful of benches that surround Bethune’s statue are of the most dilapidated and crummy variety possible. Crude wooden boards have been nailed to their seats to prevent people from sleeping on them. On the far east corner of the square, a single sickly pine tree struggles to survive amidst the constant buzz of traffic.

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