Only the Trams Remain

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.

Some Weeds Grow in Brooklyn

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.

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Lost Boston, Exposed

Boston is one of the most historic cities in the United States, but it’s 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.

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How a Supermarket Shapes the City

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.

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Following My Father

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.

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YMCA vs. YMHA

YMCA, Park Avenue at St. Viateur Street

YMHA, Mount Royal Avenue at Jeanne-Mance Street

In 1936, when these photos were taken, Montreal was just beginning to climb out of the Great Depression, which had hit this industrial city with particularly brute force. Unemployment remained high and thousands of the city’s inhabitants lived in squalour — but not in Mile End. Though far from wealthy, the north end neighbourhood was reasonably prosperous, home to upwardly-mobile Jews, French-Canadians, Irish and immigrants from across Europe.

That diversity was reflected in Mile End’s built fabric. The neighbourhood boasts a particularly impressive collection of churches, synagogues and other institutional structures: there’s the Byzantine mystery of St. Michael’s Church, the florid wedding-cake façade of the Église Saint-Enfant-Jésus and the faux-château styling of the former St. Louis City Hall at Laurier and the Main. In the midst of all this were two buildings that served the neighbourhood’s two major religious and cultural communities: the Young Men’s Christian Association, on Park Avenue, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, on Mount Royal Avenue.

Both institutions were products of the moralistic zeal of the late nineteenth century. Although they differed in faith, their goals were similar, and each offered a network of social services designed to improve the physical, moral and social well-being of young Jews and Christians. The YMHA was particularly successful: in 1948, its members made up half of Canada’s Olympic basketball team.

Eventually, though, the institutions took a divergent path. The Park Avenue YMCA eventually became a secular institution that served the entire community. By the late 1980s, though, its was so decrepit that it was torn down and rebuilt from scratch. The City of Montreal took the opportunity to jointly finance the construction of a new pool in the YMCA, replacing the public St. Michel Bath further east in the neighbourhood. Today, the Y is a focal point for community life in Mile End.

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The Evolution of McGill College Avenue

Yesterday, on Spacing Montreal, I wrote about several elegant synagogues that once graced the streets of downtown Montreal. One of them is the old Shaar Hashomayim 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

*CORRECTION: This post originally misidentified the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue as the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue. Thanks to Shawn for pointing out the error.

Turn on the Red Light

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.

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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Mile End’s Country Hotel

Mile End once had its very own country inn. There was a Mile End hotel and tavern as early as 1815, when one of its regulars, an English businessman and landowner named Stanley Bagg, made a number of references to it in some ads he placed in the Gazette.

It’s likely that the hotel you see above is a descendant of that early inn. Built in 1850 at the corner of what is now St. Laurent and Bernard, I like to imagine that it was one of those out-of-town spots where you could hitch your horse, get a beer and find a room for a night. Whoever built it must have been awfully grateful in 1882 when, less than a block from the hotel, the CPR built Mile End Station. Over the next couple of years, every train heading west to the Prairies passed through Mile End.

I know very little about the history of the hotel in the twentieth century, although its ground floor remained a tavern. Alas, as happens all too often, this unassuming but historically remarkable building burned down sometime in the 1990s. The top photo you see was taken around 1985; the bottom one in 2007. It would be nice if a longtime Mile End resident could share some information about this building.

(Incidentally, does anyone know why the lot has remained vacant for so long?)

The before-and-after photo was created, as usual, by Guillaume St-Jean. I’m happy to say that Guillaume has joined Spacing Montreal as a contributor, so be sure to check it out for regular dispatches from Montreal’s past.

A Window Into Another City

The brothers Gravenor over at Coolopolis recently featured this 1972 photo of a street party on Hutchison Street. What was being celebrated? The success of the Milton Park Citizens’ Coalition, which had banded together to fight the proposed Cité Concordia, a massive development that would have obliterated the McGill Ghetto’s ramshackle Victorian rowhouses and stately apartment buildings in favour of a Modernist’s wet dream. The project was scrapped (although the big La Cité apartment and retail complex was still built at the corner of Park and Prince Arthur) and many of the dwellings in the eastern half of the neighbourhood were incorporated into a giant housing cooperative home to 1,800 people.

More scenes of this party can be seen downtown, along McGill College Avenue between Ste. Catherine and de Maisonneuve, in this year’s installment of the street’s annual late-summer photo exhibition. This year, it features scenes of daily Montreal life drawn from the McCord Museum’s vast photographic archives, many taken in the 1970s. I find these photos particularly fascinating: they are recent enough for everything to seem vaguely familiar but old enough to contain a lot that is foreign and unexpected. One shot shows a close aerial view of Old Montreal when it was still a workaday port neighbourhood, giant grain elevators looming over what is now park space. Another portrays a shop on Marie-Anne Street selling winemaking equipment, its hand-lettered signs written entirely in Portuguese, with nary a French or English word in sight.

Many of these photos come from something called the Milton Park Project. It was an attempt to document the life of what was then a threatened neighbourhood. Today, although the area remains physically recognizable, its texture and character has changed dramatically. I was especially fascinated by a photo taken inside a McGill student’s apartment somewhere in the Ghetto: small, but well-appointed, it had elegant mouldings and an old-style window that opened wide onto the street. The walls were filled with ethnic art and overflowing shelves of books. There was something distinctly bohemian, in that 1970s kind of way, about the place. It made me think of the student life described in Francine Noel’s novel Maryse, set between 1968 and 1975, all naive idealism and pseudo-intellectual conversations held in smoky brasseries and rundown flats.

That kind of student life — the boho grit, basically — has disappeared entirely from the McGill Ghetto. Its rowhouses have been renovated into swanky homes for professionals; its coops have become staid and established; its student apartments are filled with kids who watch YouTube instead of reading Foucault. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — I imagine the political and philosophical rhetoric of the seventies got pretty tiresome — but it does make the Montreal of thirty years ago seem that much more exotic.

The Death and Life of Charlotte Street

Regular readers will know that Guillaume St-Jean is an exceptionally dedicated enthusiast of Montreal history. His growing collection of then-and-now photos is fascinating and informative. Often, the best ones look back not to the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries but to recent decades—the 1970s, 80s and 90s—which offer clues as to what we’ve done wrong and what we’ve done right in recent urban history.

A case in point is the above photo of an early nineteenth century cottage on Charlotte Street, an easily-overlooked downtown sidestreet near the corner of Ste. Catherine and St. Laurent. Sometime after 1985, when the top photo was taken, the house burned down and was never replaced.

Charlotte Street is in the midst of a neighbourhood that has been neglected for decades. It first developed in the eighteenth century as a faubourg strung along the old chemin Saint-Laurent. In the early twentieth century it became an important commercial district, but by the 1930s, it was better-known as Montreal’s red light district, a seedy, seething conglomeration of bars and brothels. Much of the neighbourhood was razed in the 1960s to build the Habitations Jeanne-Mance, a large public housing project in the typical Modernist mould.

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Then and Now #2: Gas Station

This image was created by Guillaume St-Jean, an urban planning student at the Université du Québec à Montréal who has been doing an admirable job of exploring Montreal’s history on Flickr. In the top photo, which was taken in 1929, you see the old Molson house at the corner of St. Laurent and Sherbrooke. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century when Sherbrooke Street marked the edge of the city. By the early twentieth century, though, St. Laurent had become a full-fledged commercial street. Sometime in the 1910s or 20s, when car ownership was still rare enough that it carried with it an air of privilege and distinction, the house was converted into a rather striking gas station.

Alas, as tends to happen all too frequently in Montreal, the house burned down in 1937—but the site retained its vocation as a gas station. The bottom photo reveals its current incarnation: a bland, unremarkable chunk of suburbia marooned at one of Montreal’s most prominent corners. To its credit, the retail portion of the gas station, which contains a depanneur and a Tim Horton’s, faces the corner of Milton and St. Laurent with a streetside entrance and a café terrace. But that doesn’t make up for its profound waste of space in such a bustling neighbourhood. Personally, I’ve always thought that the gas station site, which forms a neat square between Sherbrooke, Milton, Clark and St. Laurent, would make for a beautiful and well-located plaza.

Malmö, Hopelessly Grey Yet Quite Colourful

A dull and hopelessly grey city. That’s how William Burroughs describes Malmö in a short passage in Naked Lunch. This was in the 1950s. At that time, Malmö was a prosperous industrial city and one of the world’s largest shipyards, Kockums, was the main employer. But that wasn’t quite what Burroughs was looking for. When he wasn’t served any liquor on his arrival in the morning, he took the next boat back to Copenhagen.

When I grew up in the 1980’s, in the neighbouring university town of Lund, the constant joke about Malmö was that the best thing about the city was its boat to Copenhagen. That wasn’t just some silly, intercity rivalry talk. At this time Malmö was in a deeply depressing state of unemployment and crisis. The recession in the 1970s had struck hard, and the pride of the city — the shipyard — was closed. My memories of Malmö in the 1980s resemble Burroughs’ from the 50s (except for the part about being unable to find any liquor).

But since the mid 90s, Malmö has managed to change, and is adapting to the post-industrial society. The focus is now on education and culture, and for the last ten years there’s been a university located in the old shipyard area. Malmö is now actually considered quite hip, a city with lots of immigrants and a cosmopolitan feel. I think William Burroughs might have liked it, and, even if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have to wait for the next boat. There’s a bridge to Copenhagen now, and he could just get in a cab and be there in no time. After all, one thing still hasn’t changed: the liquor is still more plentiful in Denmark.

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