Last fall, I had a friend visit from Rimouski. I knew he wasn’t a city boy, and yet I was convinced that when he saw my spacious old NDG flat, when he discovered the joys of biking across town for live music in the Mile End, once he’d tasted midnight bagels and greasy breakfast at Cosmos, he couldn’t help but be seduced by urban living.
While we were out walking one day, we passed along the stretch of road pictured above. I mentioned that was thankful not to live in the apartment whose front door practically opens into the intersection of Saint-Jacques and Décarie. My friend laughed and said that, to be honest, he didn’t see much difference my place and this one.
I was dumbfounded. I live on a tree-lined residential street where kids build snow forts in tiny front yards during the winter and play street-hockey in the spring. I’m half a block from fairly lively main street with a great diversity of restaurants, groceries store and services.
To me, the contrast could not be more obvious, but to a guy from Rimouski it made no difference: the traffic was bad, the parking was worse, and you couldn’t see the stars at night.
The Inuit famously have 29 different words for snow, when most of us can probably only differentiate between the powder and the wet stuff. Of course, when snow is your construction material, transportation infrastructure, and weather report, when it regulates your food supply and daily work load, it stands to reason that you’d develop a keen awareness about the stuff.
By the same logic, city dwellers – at least those who pay attention – have an acute awareness of subtle differences in the urban form. Aside from those who specialize in urban planning, most of our knowledge about the city is informal. Many of us have a feeling for what works – what elements of neighbourhood design are practical, interesting, safe, and aesthetic, but few would consider this an expertise.
My friend from Rimouski is an intelligent, university-educated guy. Seeing the city through his eyes made me realize to what extent this understanding is neither innate nor obvious. The difference between an ideal neighbourhood and a desolate wasteland is, in the end, a very fine line – so subtle that to some people it is imperceptible. Learning the vocabulary to express these distinctions is empowering, but words alone will not build a neighbourhood.
I can imagine suburban-bred developers scratching their heads about what these urban folks want. Pedestrian-oriented development? Does that mean sidewalks? Local commerces? Ok, throw in a Club Price or something… And residents getting increasingly frustrated with “evil” developers who lack an experience with the urban form that would allow them to respond to citizen’s requests in a meaningful way.
We have all seen the result: buzz-words like smart-growth, human-scale, and mixed-use, get picked up by developers and applied as marketing tools rather than first principles.
What is the solution? Jane Jacobs wrote “No one can find what will work for our cities by looking at … suburban garden cities, manipulating scale models, or inventing dream cities. You’ve got to get out and walk.
There has been a strong push for environmental education lately – what about the urban environment? It is as complex, and as crucial in terms of sustainability, as the rural environment and the hinterland that supports it. How do we implement it? That will have to be a question for a whole other post.
In the meantime, feedback on these Sunday-afternoon musings would be much appreciated…
30 comments
Not that I realistically expect more, but parroting the widely-debunked ‘Eskimo-snow’ cliché can make even a trivial write-up look positively foolish.
Refer: here, and here.
@ X: The precise number of words is not the point. What is important is that there is a collective local knowledge in northern communities that is able distinguish between and name snow phonemena which most English speakers have not experienced and thus are hard-pressed to describe. Furthermore, incorporating this traditional knowledge has enhanced westerners’ understanding of northern ecology. eg:
“Boreal ecologists deal with aspects of nature, particularly snow and ice phenomena for which there are no precise English words. Consequently our writings and speech are larded with Inuit, Athapaskan, Lappish and Tungus words, not in any attempt to erudite but to aid in the precision of our speech and thoughts.”
– Pruit (1978), quoted in F. Berkes “Traditional ecological knowledge: Concepts and cases”, IDRC, 1993
Unsupportable mushy thinking. Why would you even cite a number at all if it wasn’t relevant? “29”? What’s your source for that? It’s a totally random number. This is my point.
If you want to pursue a line of rhetoric that flies in the face of both modern linguistics and logic, you are welcome to it. You’ll still have a few burned out anthropologists in your camp. They love urban legends and folk mythology. Plus they smoke out. I realize the more thoughtful, deductive approach provides a complex (and, therefore, unappealing) explanation. So I don’t blame you for shying away from it. Too taxing!
In addition to the informative links I’ve provided above, I refer anyone else to Pinker’s The Language Instinct, Pullum’s The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, another wiki here, and this list.
I think your post shows how people need to spend months in any urban environment in order to appreciate the subtle distinctions. It works the other way too. I know many well-educated, intelligent urban dwellers who have no understanding of the rural/agricultural landscape.
What a needlessly mean and irrelevant criticism.
I agree with David Reevely. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the snow thing (I mean, it was clearly supposed to be a light touch, and the piece isn’t about Inuit linguistics anyway!), this is still a well-conceived and thoughtful short piece, in keeping with the extraordinarily high quality of the contributions to this blog. I always enjoy your contributions, Ms Heffez, so keep up the good work!
The point about urban education is a good one. I often feel like asking the writers of this blog how they got into this stuff (formal education, or other routes).
One thing that always gets me when I’m showing the city to people from small towns or, especially, the suburbs is how different their perception of distance on foot is from mine. One time, a friend of mine brought a couple of her friends from a small town in Ontario (where she was staying for the summer) to Montreal for a night of partying (the drinking age of 18ish was a draw as well). We got off at Berri-UQAM and walked east to about Plessis. Yes, I know it would have been less of a walk to get off at Beaudry and walk from there but it was a nice night and I thought they might enjoy the walking down the pedestrianised Ste-Catherine. The 15-20 minute walk was absolute hell because the two small town girls in our company spent the entire time, after about five minutes of walking, complaining about how long it was taking to get there. I literally thought they were going to drop dead from exhaustion after about ten minutes of walking. It was really quite sad actually but I learned that night that for people used to driving two blocks to the store, thirteen blocks really would be quite the hike!
One of the best things for me about this blog is the lively and interesting community of comment leavers that participate in the posts here. It’s pretty cool!
So I agree that some comments above are needless and irrelevant.
I used to know a guy in Verdun who would risk a parking space right in front of his door to avoid the 10 minute round trip to the depanneur.
Cities are full of under appreciated and unrecognized talent. Just go and and talk to people who have lived in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve or Point Saint Charles for 40 or more years. Ask them what works, what doesn’t. People tend to be experts on the places they live. But, sadly, there is a old school of urban development that to this day believes it knows what is good for neighborhoods. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Ce n’est pas pour rien que les gens de la campagne ont la réputation d’être ignorants…
I visited London once with a friend who had only lived in small towns, which was my education in how much I simply understood about how cities are put together, and he didn’t. I remember walking along a street that had that “behind the big institution” feel, and him saying he was thirsty:
“We’re right near a main road, we can get something to drink there.”
“You’ve never been here before, how do you know that?”
I didn’t know how I knew, but we obviously had to be – it wasn’t noise or traffic, but just the texture of the street atmospheres that clued me in. The whole visit was full of minor stuff like that.
Living in a medium-big oldish North American city is an education. I figure studying urban planning would either give you the vocabulary to express it, or else obfuscate it with theory to the point where you couldn’t get to the corner dep safely.
Maybe your friend was just being a bitch?
Really enjoyed this post, now only if there were more of these and less photo montages :)
I didn’t really think about this parallel, how urban dwellers can differentiate better than non-urban. It obviously makes sense, just like we’d think in a more crude way when we were out of our element.
Posts lately have been awesome, keep it up. Esp the infrastructure related posts!
cheers.
Kate M: There is an architectural vocabulary at work. You notice changes in the length of blocks, the number of traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, street furniture (bus stops, trash cans, mailboxes, benches), the width of sidewalks, and transitions where zoning changes from purely residential to mixed-use. In the New Urbanist glossary they call these slices “transects,” for instance.
We notice how things feel “wrong,” such as in the example of houses dangling near the escarpment / Decarie Expressway, because in our minds these houses feel isolated or “displaced” from their natural environment (other houses, residential streets) or out of scale with their surroundings (1970s apartment towers looming over Hutchison near Mt-Royal, for instance).
I’m not buying it… I grew up in the country and even in my first years living as a typical rube in the big city I could tell the difference between a tree-lined residential neighbourhood and the quality of life afforded by a front door looking out onto a major street, with only a narrow sidewalk as your front yard. I suspect that your friend was exaggerating for effect.
That said, I have a knack for wandering into terrible neighbourhoods when I go to bigger cities I don’t know well, so maybe I’m the one that’s obtuse.
Here is a view from the Internet of a Westbound streetcar ascending Rue St Jacques between St Remi and Decarie just to the East of the above modern view.
http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b61/SDR_North/TheGlen090355.jpg
The CPR ‘Glen’ Yard is to the left, the concrete structure supports the circumference of the ‘turning loop’ that was constructed so that entire passenger trains could ‘turned’ to face the opposite way for departure from stub-ended Windsor Station on their next journey.
Later in the Fifties, the City of Montreal elected to paint all concrete overpasses of this design a light slime-green, which was a mistake, as the paint held the water in, damaged the concrete, and the paint later peeled off in layers.
To the right of the photo, down the bank, was the CNR Turcot Roundhouse.
As a kid my father used to bring me down Decarie from Saranac in a ball-bearing coaster wagon, then cross St Jacques and stand overlooking the whole CNR scene and the preparation and serviceing of the steam locomotives.
Both Girouard and Decarie were busy corners even then, as then-almost-new 2-17 channelled all the Toronto-Ottawa truck traffic along St Jacques, some of which turned on Girouard and Decarie.
Streetcars passed by regularly on their way to Girouard and Snowdon Junction at Queen Mary, and, later, Terminus Garland.
Altho thru streetcar service ended here in 1958? the tracks remained in use until late June 1959 to allow cars from Route 17, Cartierville to return to the St Henri Car Barns once located at the North East corner of Glen Road in St Henri.
Elderly green two-man car approaches Garland Terminus southbound Route Cartierville 17. Decarie is to the right.
http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b61/SDR_North/MTC1423DecarieSoutbound.jpg
Cartierville car Northbound over CPR near Blue Bonnets. Decarie passed beneath the CPR to the left.
http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b61/SDR_North/CPROverpassCartierville17.jpg
Great post. It’s a two way street as well – coming from a very small town in the Canadian north I reveal my, ever growing, inability to understand rural life each time I return from the city. In my transmogrification into an urban planner, I’ve apparently lost any ability to read the landscape of the north (or so my friends and family think). And, speaking as a former Arctic-dweller I can saw that, while there may not be 29 Inuit words for snow, there are at least 29 Inuit words for pedant.
You don’t have to be from the country to not “get” the difference between the above environments, you just have to be someone who doesn’t really care. Which is defensible enough, I suppose; I’m probably not going to feel or interpret the difference between old- and second-growth woodlands if I’m walking through them, cause I’m just strolling in the woods. A country cat (or a dedicated hiker) will pick up on it right away, and point out the greater ecological richness and variety of native species that the old-growth forest sustains, and I’ll probably shrug. It’s just some trees, and both types of forest are equally good for walking through, so what’s the big deal?
Both us trained (by schooling or experience) urban types and the tree-lover are correct, of course: better urban form really will help make high-density areas livable and pleasant, and native woodlands are essential to ecosystem function. But we certainly can’t expect people who don’t spend all their time in the city (or in the woods) to care as much as we do, and thus to notice it as swiftly.
Alanah smelled the coffee!!!
Seriously, not everyone wants to live the way people do in the Plateau.
Look at all the new developpement in Montreal (the city), they try to mimick the suburbs more than the other way around. People are not fleeing the city center for nothing.
Also please stop quoting Jacobs, isn’t there anyone else to quote?
If you bothered to read Jane Jacobs you would quote her too.
Why do people always mention the Plateau, when it is not the only central neighbourhood and not the one featured in this post? It has become such a cliché among haters of urbanity.
People are not “fleeing the city centre”. Lots of people would like to live in central neighbourhoods, but unfortunately rents and mortgages in those areas tend to be high.
Leila, his ilk are incorrigible, but usually they don’t hang around for long.
Plateau, Mile End, Homa, and areas around are all lumped around as the Plateau, the same way most of you lump anything outside those areas as _the_ suburbs…
Not everyone loves to live in the center Maria, you have to accept that. Moreoever, if you were right, you wouldn’t be able to afford your housing because of huge demand, rent would have doubled or more… you should thank the suburbs ;)
For a time I resided in a small town with a population of Sixty Four, 64! with one channel on the TV, and when we visited the big city of Calgary, then half the size that it is now, what the children in the party were most amazed with were the electric escalators in the Chinook Mall.
They had not yet even considered where the sewage from all the skyscrapers went or how the streetlights all came on at once.
The Turcot Interchange may well have ‘blown their minds?’
The question was; ‘Where did all the stairs go when they get to the top?’
I told them the stairs collected in a bin under the floor and they ran the escalators backwards at night.
Later, I told them the escalator stairs were on an endless chain like the tracks on a bulldozer, which their father had, and that solved that.
A trip to the Big City before Satelitte TV, VCRs and so forth.
Yes, we still even went to a movie theatre on Fridays nites, followed by Pizza at Pizza Hut.
A long way from Les Duranceaux, Pont Jacques Cartier/Harbour Bridge and the Forum.
As mentioned in another post, when I was young, my father used to travel to the South end of Decarie and we would sit overlooking Turcot Yard and it’s roundhouse.
A view of Turcot Roundhouse from the foot of Decarie.
http://neath.wordpress.com/2006/07/09/the-turcot-roundhouse/
Also from that location could be seen LaSalle Coke to the West, on the far shore of the Lachine Canal and the Lachine 91 streetcar traveling East and West on the Lachine Route.
The following views show what Turcot Roundhouse really looked like in the early Fifties, and is part of what we saw from the foot of Decarie oh so long ago!
http://www.imagescn.technomuses.ca/structures/index_choice.cfm?id=79&photoid=-548712458
http://www.imagescn.technomuses.ca/structures/index_choice.cfm?id=76&photoid=80099437
http://www.imagescn.technomuses.ca/structures/index_choice.cfm?id=79&photoid=-1718349249
http://www.imagescn.technomuses.ca/structures/index_choice.cfm?id=79&photoid=-1674850540
By 1950, things were about to change, like it or not, Diesel Electrics were on the way.
View from Turcot Roundhouse looking up towards St Jacques.
http://www.imagescn.technomuses.ca/railways/index_choice.cfm?id=55&photoid=44705314
Montreal Locomotive Works on East end Dickson St. is about to commence the production of Diesel Electric Locomotives for road and passenger service, having up to this time produced mainly smaller Diesel locomotives for yard and switching service.
In this view we see two PA1 Diesel locomotives built at the American Locomotive Company works in Schenectady, New York.
These two units, were painted in CN’s Gold/Green of the era were lettered for MLW and GE, and were used as ‘Demo’ units in Canada in the hopes that Canadian railways would order them, and they would then be built in Montreal.
Such was not the case. None of this type were ordered for Canada and the units pictured went back to the USA.
Other styles of Alco-designed Diesels were produced at MLW, steam succumbing to the Ivory Hunters in the end.
Sixty years later, MLW on Dickson is no more. All the jobs are gone, and so are the Alco PA1 Diesels that were to breathe new life into Montreal Manufacturing and preserve passenger trains.
The 1950 image is odd that although CNR was still almost 100% steam, no steam locomotives are visible at usually-busy Turcot Roundhouse, and all the doors are closed.
Above the scene can be seen St Jacques, with Decarie out-of-frame to the left. A CPR Diesel Switcher, also built at Alco, can be seen to the right of the concrete bridge supporting the turning loop at the Glen/Westmount yard.
Side Bar Note.
In the late Sixties, Delaware and Hudson elected to improve their Montreal-New York passenger trains and purchased four PA-type locomotives second-hand from the ATSF ( Santa Fe ) putting them to use on their New York Montreal Trains.
The PAs came off/were added at Albany.
D&H PA 17 adds a bit of class to disappearing passenger services and to downtown Montreal.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2192/2036857988_172257fb0f.jpg?v=0
I have to say, not only is Spacing just about my favourite site, feeding an old but never dormant passion for this city, but I now look forward for Cdnlococo’s posts. What a great storyteller with a vivid sense of history.
Dear Lila,
Thank You for the lovely comment!
We of the now-older generation are charged with the duties of preserving our past, and, forms such as ‘Spacing Montreal’ have provided an avenue to do this!
Much thanks must be given to those suvh as Messrs Gates and Jobs, and others who have developed what we now call the Internet, and devised and designed the soft and hardware that all an amature to somewhat competently express thought in such a way it can be diseminated to all.
As a kid, I haunted the West end, riding the streetcars, busses and my bike.
Over time we walked most of the still on the surface portions of Riviere St Pierre from the far end of Cote St Luc East of Westminster thru to the bowels of CNR Turcot Yard.
We ‘lived’ in the CPR Sortin Yards at the West end of Cotr St Luc Rd, as it was well beyond the area of parental jurisdiction.
CPR used to gather all the to-be-scrapped freight cars and passenger cars at Sortin and we used to play on them, running the floors of a track of flat cars as fast as we could go, jumping the couplings.
Great fun1
Those more daring would run the roofs of box cars, which was more dangerous, and this also sillouetted one against the sky, and, soon, the CPR Police would arrive, for certain.
We would look down a man hole with a wooden cover between the two main tracks to Grovehill and Dorval and the yard proper never even thinking that years later other urban explorers would DARE to go under Sortin in the pipes below.
In 1961 CNR colected all the by-then redundant steam locomotives at Turcot, well over 110 of them, and we roamed the dead lines of once-pround passenger engines and lowly switch engines, some of which appeared in the above images.
Scrapping was ugly, but, we watched just the same.
Took all the spring, summer and fall of 1961 to scrap them all, and it left a permanent impression.
Still dream about Turcot quite regularly, Montreal, and the streetcars.
Montreal Star or Gazette had a full feature on the scrapping in June? 1961.
Great to be young in Montreal back then!
So much to do, and learn!
What an interesting place!
Malek,
Not everyone wants to live in dense, mixed-use, walkable, transit serviced neighbourhoods (like the Plateau), that’s true.
Some people do love abundant free parking, a big front and back yard and their own swimming pool. That is also true.
Unfortunately for use city-loving dwellers, we are stuck paying big $$$ for 100 year old apartments on the Plateau because zoning laws strictly prohibit Plateau-style developement in most of the country.
Density caps, wide streets, single-use zoning and minimum parking requirements are not necessarily the result of “consumer preference” but rather from 60 year-old zoning laws designed to solve “congestion”. (Those didn’t work as planned, obviously).
I always scratch my head at suburbanites being threatened by Plateau-style new-urbanism, transit-oriented developement and the like… Where in the last 50 years was anything built like it around Montreal? I think suburbanites have a good head start! Don’t worry, old-school suburbia is here to stay for a while.
— X
Cdnlococo: Electric escalators in the Chinook Mall? Wow! They finally replaced the steam escalators!!! :)
* * *
Speaking of jumping over freight cars, this reminds me of a funny adventure.
In 1976/77 or 78, a big woodworking plant on the corner of Rockland and Beaumont in Mont-Royal decided to go up in smoke, as if the dog days of summer weren’t hot enough. The smoke plume was visible from St-Hyacinthe, according to some people who drove all the way from there to Montréal to see what was happenning…
I sneaked into the CPR Outremont yard, and noticed people sitting on a cut of cars. So I climbed up there and we watched the stock of lumber turn into smoke (it smelled real good, though). After about 30 minutes, a city cop car came to a stop below us, and we thought “shit, there goes our nice perch”.
But no. The cop came out, climbed up on a car, and proceeded to walk all the way to the end of the cut and back, then he arrived on the car we were on, and sat down to watch it burn with us.
— “I’ve been dreaming of doing that ever since I was a kid”, he said of his little romp accross the cut…
So we watch it burn for a good while, until the radio in the cruiser starts to go off. The cop gets down, and talks on the radio. All we heard was the prototypical «Oui! cheuf!!!». He then came back up on the car, with a very sorry air, to tell us that he’s sorry, but the chief told him to ask us to come down. After we climbed down from the car, he went to walk the whole cut another time and finally came down…
RE: Chris Erb.
I hear you, I am often in little Quebec and Ontario towns and the locals never fail to look at me like I’m an alien for “walking” as opposed to driving. Basically it’s the reverse situation in samall towns regarding walking and it depends upon the size and structural layout of the town as well.
samall meant to be small.
Ha! Stumbled upon this post one year later… just for posterity, I want to say that I’m not the author of the rude “29 words for snow” comments… even though I usually sign my posts with “X” too… :-)
-Xavier