August 27th, 2010
In most cities of the developed world, mechanical street sweepers are a fact of life. Even New York’s carless commuters are fluent in strategies to use on “alternate-side parking days,” when the scheduled passing of a street sweeper forces all of a block’s parked cars to one side of the street. It’s easy to forget that, before these behemoth, motorized sponges began scrubbing the streets en masse, even the widest boulevards were cleaned by hand. This street sweeper in 1910 New York would have his work cut out for him after his beat — Fifth Avenue — was considerably widened that year. Although the mechanical sweeper had debuted in 1840s Manchester, it took nearly a century to catch on almost everywhere else.
Of course, street cleaners — some wielding handmade brooms — are a common sight in the poorer countries of the so-called Global South. But old photos of individual sweepers toiling to keep dry the rain-soaked streets of currently presently, hypermodern Tokyo come as a bit of a shock. The photo above, from the collection of the Dutch Naational Archief, is dated “circa 1930,” though some commenters think it might have been taken even later, perhaps in the immediate postwar era. Almost nothing here is recognizable as contemporary Tokyo — except maybe the electronics store in the background. Many of the street sweepers are wearing conical hats typical of agricultural field laborers, and some are even sporting a mino, a traditional form of raincoat made from straw.
More
June 19th, 2010
2000
2009
Change is a constant in most cities, and it’s no surprise that a decade can yield dramatic alterations to a specific street or even storefront. Take this slice of San Francisco’s Mission Street, photographed by Eric Fischer, creator of the locals v. tourists photography maps, which he captured in 2000 and again just last year.
In 2000, the block was showing evidence of prosperity. The millennium bug hadn’t shut down “Y2K Furnishings”, despite its ominous name. And the space next door is decorated in retro-50s futurism, reflecting a latent desire to resurrect that decade’s optimistic streak. But what Y2K didn’t do to San Francisco, the dot-com bubble’s burst ultimately did. In 2000, Y2K Furnishings was already having a going out of business sale. Today, save for one floor of the building it formerly occupied, the entire block looks mothballed.
The story of Y2K’s block is fairly rare, but it’s not wholly unique. It demonstrates one way in which cities have defied the narrative arc of unremitting, sometimes totalizing gentrification that U.S. cities have been said to confront throughout much of the 2000s. At worst, the last ten years of gentrification have been more mild, and less sweeping, than many critics have assumed.
More
June 13th, 2010
Kate McDonnell pointed the way to some Flickr photos recently uploaded by Michel Gravel, a photojournalist for La Presse whose career has spanned more than 40 years. Many of the photos are street scenes from Montreal in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. What amazes me is how Montreal’s essential character has remained intact despite the fact that it has changed in so many ways — physically, demographically, linguistically, politically — in the past few decades.
The above photo of people lining up to board a bus in a winter snowstorm is a perfect example. When I noticed that the bus was the 80 — the same bus I took up and down Park Avenue every day for years — I started looking for clues as to where on Park Avenue the photo was taken. None of the signs were familiar, nor were the two buildings on the left. After a few seconds, though, I recognized the building in the middle distance as the block at the corner of Park and Bernard, home to Cheskie’s and the dépanneur where I bought newspapers, beer and monthly transit passes. The buildings on the left have been radically made over, but the three businesses visible in the photo — a hardware store, a restaurant and the corner dep — remain, just with different names and owners.
Gravel captured other scenes that are instantly recognizable today: orthodox Jews walking around Mile End, laundry hanging heavily over a laneway, L. Berson and Son’s tombstone workshop, riots, fires, people sweating it out during a heatwave, the dépanneur tricycle.
More
November 19th, 2009
Curious about what the building his great-great-grandfather lived in was like, ex-Brooklynite Zach van Schouwen was soon researching the history of his entire street. The result is “The Block,” a series pen-and-ink drawings of how the stretch of Eldridge Street, between Stanton and Rivington on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, looked in every year since 1795.
Eldridge turns out to be fairly typical of the neighborhood, which evolved from “Delancey’s Farm” to a series of tall, narrow tenements that start replacing the street’s small rowhouses in the 1850s. Fire escapes begin to appear, in accordance with law, in the 1920s and 30s. The block takes a downward turn just after World War II, when a number of tenements are gradually boarded up, torn down, and replaced with garages and storage facilities. In 1985, the entire block becomes occupied by a single housing project.
More
August 31st, 2009
Hong Kong’s prewar buildings number in the hundreds, yet the few of them that remain continue to be knocked down for mediocre new development. This photo compilation by Lee Chi-man is one of the clearest examples I’ve seen. Just a few years ago (the top photo appears to have been taken in 2003, during the SARS crisis), the northwest corner of Un Chau and Pei Ho streets in Sham Shui Po was occupied by a ramshackle but typically elegant example of early twentieth century Hong Kong architecture. Like many buildings built before World War II, it was in poor condition, but it stood its ground with remarkable grace. It had enormous potential for restoration.
More
August 3rd, 2009
Pottinger Street, Central, 1955
Then: a row of ornate stone houses graced by balconies and verandas. Now: a parking garage. It’s a sharp contrast typical of the then-and-now images posted by Lee Chi-man on Flickr, a photo-sharing website. For two years, under the alias HK Man, he has taken old photos of Hong Kong street scenes and paired them with new photos shot at the same locations and angles.
Lee’s simple juxtapositions highlight the city’s drastic pace of change over the last century. They reveal enormous differences between Hong Kong’s past and present, including the near-total disappearance of the shantytowns, colonial villas and low-rise shophouses that once dominated the city’s landscape. Plenty of interesting minor changes are also evident. Over the past few decades, sidewalks have been hemmed in by grey metal railings; open, cluttered shopfronts have been glassed-in and tidied up; and flyovers and pedestrian footbridges, once rare, have become ubiquitous.
“Old Hong Kong had such a special feel,” says Lee, a computer animator born in the 1970s. “I can’t understand how change has come so quickly. It actually makes me upset. The old Hong Kong you see in photos has been destroyed.”
More
July 31st, 2009
Lee Chi-man, Hong Kong’s answer to Guillaume St-Jean, finds old photos of Hong Kong streetscapes and heads to the spot where they were taken to replicate them. So far, he has compiled around 400 scenes, showing just how drastically Hong Kong has changed over the course of the twentieth century.
The photos above illustrate how many of those changes have been for the worse. In the top photo, you see Central in the 1950s, looking down Des Voeux Road towards the bank headquarters. Today, the banks are still there, but their headquarters have morphed into postmodern skyscrapers. The old shophouses that once lined Des Voeux are gone; their graceful arcades and simple signboards have given way to a mess of overbearing corporate storefronts, bland façades and gaudy plastic advertisements.
The worst thing about this is the loss of human scale: whereas Des Voeux was once well-proportioned, with nicely-textured buildings and an understated elegance, it is now an unpleasant concrete canyon. As the street has become more unbearable over the years, footbridges have been built so that people may avoid it altogether, which only adds to the hostile atmosphere. If the effects of that aren’t evident in the photos above, they certain are in Lee’s other Des Voeux scenes.
June 28th, 2009
I photographed this old (and perhaps abandoned) industrial building in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood just a few years ago. At the time, it was a captivating relic — almost entirely ensconced in graffiti, it was sprouting weeds that had either spilled onto the sidewalk, or had climbed up from the sidewalk onto it. The old orange car parked nearby added to the mystique; this was like a slice of 1970s New York.
That’s not entirely coincidental. Gowanus sometimes seems stuck in a time warp, a largely defunct swathe of industrial buildings dividing the homey brownstones of Carroll Gardens from the tony ones of Park Slope — neighborhoods that have been experiencing rapid change. Part of the reason the area is so moribund is its namesake Gowanus Canal, a brackish channel that has become the site of a raging local debate over whether it ought to be designated a Superfund site, allowing it to receive federal money for industrial cleanup.
More
January 30th, 2009
Boston is considered one of the most historic cities in the United States, but it has still managed to lose much more of its architectural past than it retains. Sacrificed to urban experiments from concrete piazzas to towers-in-the-park, generations of honeycombed alleys and densely-crammed pockets of housing have largely disappeared from the city center, their former presence registered only in ancient street plans and ghost-like remains. When I first moved to the area in the late 1990s, I would comb through books of old maps and photographs of the city – such as Jane Holtz Kay‘s Lost Boston – with almost the same enthusiasm with which I set off to explore what was left of the city itself.
The internet has grown to include a wealth of resources to help track down the lost urban fabric of past centuries – not the least of which is the Library of Congress’ vast database of historical photographs. But my interest was piqued this week, when I discovered that the Boston Public Library released its much more intimate, if eclectic, collection on flickr. The photos, prints, and postcards it contains present a city that is both immensely altered and curiously unchanged from its 19th century self, providing the contemporary viewer the opportunity to reconsider just which “history” preserved Boston embodies today.
More
December 11th, 2008
There’s something particularly iconic about supermarkets, especially in North America, where they first emerged in the 1940s and have a good half-century of history behind them. While supermarkets today are an entrenched part of the urban landscape, there was something particularly fresh and innovative about them in the 1950s, which you can see in those that have survived from that era without too many alterations.
But even those that have been altered significantly have left a big imprint on the shape of our streets and neighbourhoods. I never realized just how big of an impact Steinberg’s had on the Montreal landscape until Kate McDonnell pointed me towards a Flickr photostream containing a few dozen then-and-now images of Steinberg’s supermarkets around town.
Steinberg’s was one of those businesses that was more than just a business: in postwar Quebec, it was a cultural phenomenon, a Jewish-owned grocery chain that became an entrenched part of working- and middle-class francophone culture. “Je fais mon Steinberg” became a phrase housewives used to mean they were going out to buy food for dinner. At its height, it was one of the largest and most important food businesses in Canada, with stores throughout Quebec and Ontario and at least one location in each neighbourhood of Montreal.
Steinberg’s went under in 1992, the victim of a family dispute, and its assets were divided between Metro and Provigo, its two Quebec competitors. But its legacy lives on in popular culture. Fifteen years after it disappeared, pretty much everyone in Montreal still knows about Steinberg’s; its logo has even become a trendy accessory, thanks to buttons and t-shirts made by Montréalité.
More
August 4th, 2008
My father was born in 1919 in a town near Manchester. His parents were both of Irish background, part of a wave of people who had migrated there to find work in the Lancashire mines and mills. He was an only child. By the time he was ten years old his mother had died and his father, for reasons that remain unknown, brought him to Montreal and left him with a relative of his wife’s, Margaret Ryan, and her daughter May. They hadn’t been in Canada long before my father joined their household, where he stayed until he married my mother in the late 1950s. Thomas McDonnell returned to England and never saw his son again.
When I found out that the Bibliothèque nationale had digitized Lovell’s street directories, a catalogue of Montreal residents and businesses from 1842 to 1999, I spent a few hours tracing where the Ryan household had lived in Montreal long before I was born. The directories functioned for many years much like a phone book: look up someone’s name and it gives you their occupation and a street address, although not a phone number.
I knew that the Ryans had lived in various rented premises over the years and recalled mentions of the street names and parishes. The directories made it easy to find out the exact addresses where my father had lived: 1720 Nicolet, from 1931 to 33; 4354 Fullum, in 1934; 4324 Messier, from 1935-41; 5973 Waverly, from 1942 to 50; and 5352 Park Avenue, from 1951 to 57. So I went to have a look.
More
December 15th, 2007
Yesterday, on Spacing Montreal, I wrote about several elegant synagogues that once graced the streets of downtown Montreal. One of them is the old Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, built in 1886 and destroyed sometime in the 1920s, which stood on McGill College Avenue near Sherbrooke. At the time, the surrounding neighbourhood, near the corner of McGill College and Sherbrooke, right next to McGill University, was an affluent mix of rowhouses and apartment buildings, not unlike Boston’s Back Bay.
In the 1960s, though, most of the area’s old urban fabric was destroyed by new development. Parking lots and office towers eliminated what little residential texture was left. You can see the process underway in the photos below, which were taken on Victoria Street in 1973 and 2007. The two remaining rowhouses on this downtown sidestreet had already been converted into commercial use; a parking lot stands in between them. Office towers, which were built as part of the business district’s post-Place Ville Marie expansion, loom behind.
In the early 1990s, the building housing Café André was replaced by an expanded McCord Museum. Not long before, in the late 1980s, the site of the former Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue was redeveloped with a glass office tower, part of an ambitious renovation that turned McGill College Avenue into something resembling a cross between a boulevard and an office park. It’s pleasant enough, especially on a warm day when outdoor cafés line its sidewalks, but it’s still one of the more anonymous parts of Montreal. Aside from a few lonely rowhouses, little remains in the area around McGill College that would suggest it was ever anything but a humdrum office district.
Photos by Guillaume St-Jean
December 5th, 2007
The video screen of a silhouetted stripper was once a landmark at the corner of Ste. Catherine and the Main. It was a symbol of sorts for Montreal’s rapidly-dwindling red light district, a seedy neighbourhood of cheap bars, diners, peep shows juxtaposed with music venues, theatres and university buildings. It was about the only remarkable thing left on the building it occupied, a hideous, dilapidated, mostly-abandoned structure that was an eyesore even for a scuzzy part of town.
It’s a bit of a surprise to look at the above photos, compiled by Spacing Montreal’s Guillaume St-Jean, only to realize that that ugly building is in fact quite old. When it was built around the turn of the twentieth century, it was solid and elegant, if somewhat unremarkable. Over the course of a century it was brutalized to such an extent as to be all but unrecognizable, save for its distinctively narrow width.
Sometime next year, the building will make way for a landmark that represents a different kind of Montreal. The municipal government has expropriated the two properties at the corner of Ste. Catherine and the Main for a new cultural centre that will be called the Red Light. The name is an awfully cynical appropriation of the area’s often rough-and-tumble history (and I’m sure some might take offence at the way it glorifies the sex trade), but the building itself doesn’t seem too bad. That is, if we can get a clear idea of how it will turn out, because the renderings that have been released are not exactly detailed.
The Red Light will anchor the new Quartier des spectacles, an attempt to reinforce the arts-driven character of the east end of downtown. Last month, $120 million worth of public space improvements were announced, including the creation of new plazas and squares and the part-time pedestrianization of Ste. Catherine St. There’s plenty of things to be wary about in this plan, but as far as the Red Light is concerned, I can think of worse things to build at one of Montreal’s more infamous intersections.
November 21st, 2007
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.
More
