Two kids try to play a couple more minutes of soccer in a Villeray alley before yet another unexpected rainfall forced them inside.
Photo taken July 20, 2008
Photo du jour: Laneway soccer
By Chris Erb
Read more articles by Chris Erb
6 comments
¡Villeray tropical!
That photo really shows how green the overabundance of rain, usually warm, has kept the city late in July.
I’m looking at this alley right now from my window in my new Villeray apartment (indeed, I have bid Griffintown adieu). I can hardly see down the alley because there is so much greenery. All this rain has certainly brought the trees and other plants alive but is making for a pretty miserable summer!
Chris, I don’t want to know your street address, but can you give me a hint what stretch of Villeray you live in?
Villeray has moved to Brazil! Though we need some sun for the tomatoes, at the market and in Italian and Portuguese residents’ tiny gardens, to ripen properly.
I live on the western end of Everett. It’s a quirky little street, not much going on and populated with quite ugly buildings (except for mine of course). The whole street seems to have been a bit of an afterthought I think! Do you live near me?
I’ve fallen absolutely in love with Villeray though. I like to think I know Montreal quite well, I’ve been told I know it better than many people who have lived here their whole lives, but I had never explored Villeray much. I had been to the neighbourhoods around it quite a few times so it was nice to move somewhere that was all very new to me!
A lot of writers for blogs seem to live here too, I know Steve at Fagstein lives somewhere around here and I’m pretty sure Kate at Montreal City Weblog shares the neighbourhood with us as well.
Yes, and there are a handful of other bloggers who live in Villeray too, but their names escape me now.
After years in Villeray, I actually live in La Petite Patrie now – I lived just north of Jean-Talon market and now I live just south of it. I know pretty much all Villeray though as I’ve long been involved in community associations and was among the people who signaled the slum conditions in the 1960s-era buildings along Christophe-Colomb between Jarry and Crémazie.
Yes, Everett is an odd street, and takes a jag at de Lorimier. The eastern portion goes almost to Pie-IX, in eastern Villeray and St-Michel. There is an Orthodox church on Everett, far less known than the other two (St-Georges, opposite the Jean-Talon métro and …. on Castelnau just north of the Jean-Talon Market and close to the big Catholic church Ste-Cécile. These congregations are Arab Christians (the first two are mostly Lebanese, while St-Marc is an Egyptian Coptic congregation), not Greeks as in Park-Ex to the west.
Rue de Castelnau just south of Everett stops just east of St-Hubert – and mysteriously starts up again a few streets east!
It is an easy bicycle ride for any of us to La Tohu for La Fête bio-paysanne on August 8th, 9th and 10th. There will be many exhibits about sustainable food (and free stuff) and the fête gets an interesting mix of neigbhourhood people and bio-paysan types. It is an interesting occupation of public space, and Iast year I saw many potentially good photo-ops.