May 10th, 2007
Photo by Kate McDonnell
A few years ago, the City of Montreal installed a new set of street signs at the corner of University Street and René Lévesque Boulevard, in the heart of the business district, kitty-corner to Place Ville Marie. They’re part of a pilot project that will eventually determine the appearance of signs at major intersections across the city. Unlike other Montreal street signs, of which the most recent design dates to 1987, these new signs are displayed more prominently and they are extremely large: obviously designed to be visible to motorists travelling at high speeds.
There are actually two different types of signs on display at University and René Lévesque. Both feature capitalized text in the Univers typeface and both have relegated the city’s flower logo to a small panel above the sign itself. The difference is that one type of sign is white with black text; the other is green with white text, a colour scheme common to many North American cities, including New York, Boston and Chicago. Personally, I dislike the green signs, simply because they symbolize the kind of car-dominant vision that sees city streets in the same light as interstate highways.
Other people seem to disagree with me, according to Sylvie Tremblay, a conseillère en aménagement urbain with the city. “Opinion is very mixed,” she told me. “There’s no consensus. Some people like the green, others the white.” Still more have suggested a blue background, but Tremblay said this might cause confusion with tourist information signs, which are also blue.
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April 6th, 2007
Rue Groll St., reads the street sign, jutting out from a wood hydro pole. This isn’t a sign in officially bilingual Ottawa: it is found in officially French Montreal, on a tiny lane in Mile End. The original sign was in English, but some time ago a sticker reading “Rue” was added, in a rather haphazard fashion, at the top of the sign.
Lost in the clutter of the urban landscape, street signs go largely unnoticed, but small details like this speak volumes about Montreal’s past and present. They convey more than just the names of streets. They are part of what is known as our “living heritage,” the everyday things we take for granted but are nonetheless a vital part of who we are. They tell us about Montreal’s complicated relationship with language and place.
Street signs did not appear in Montreal until 1818, when crude wood planks bearing the names of streets were erected on buildings adjacent to squares and intersections. In 1851, the system was refined when bilingual wood signs were used to identify all streets and parks.
Today, dozens of different types of street signs can be found across the city, from the red-and-beige ones in Old Montreal, which maintain the colour scheme and typeface of Montreal’s first 19th-century signs, to the bulbous, oval-shaped plaques de rue of Outremont and St. Laurent.
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January 29th, 2007
Lately I have become fascinated by street signs. Not only does their ubiquity place them at the centre of the city’s visual landscape, you can read a lot into the signs themselves. Their design, for instance, speaks to the image a city tries to project of itself. The content of the signs—names and language—sheds light the city’s history, politics and demographics. (Our contributor Donal Hanley wrote a bit about this in his December post, “What Language Does Your City Speak?“) Some cities even have many different types of street signs, depending on age and area, which gives them yet another layer of complexity.
A case in point is Montreal. All of the island’s municipalities and formerly independent boroughs have their own distinct street signs, including Westmount’s restrained and elegant pressed-metal signs, the Town of Mount Royal’s basic bilingual black signs and, of course, Outremont’s somewhat pompous oval-shaped signs. Within the old city of Montreal are three different types of signs. Old Montreal streets are marked by cloying faux-historic red signs, designed to appeal to tourists, while modern white signs bearing Montreal’s distinctive flower logo are found in the downtown area. To find my favourite Montreal street signs, however, you must venture into more out-of-the-way areas.
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