Montage du jour : La rue St-Laurent depuis Sainte-Catherine

4 comments

1. Again, the most striking thing for me is all the power lines… I wonder when they disappeared…?

2. I think we sold all of our old telegraph poles to Toronto, they seem to be infatuated with wires. They must consider wires to be ‘world class’ or at the forefront of the ‘messy urbanism’ movement (that’s ‘ugly urbanism’ to the rest of the world). That no other city appears to be following the Toronto example of uglification means that they may have finally found their identity: they’re ugly. That no other place wishes to look like them will make them uniquely ugly et voila! Toronto: unique, ugly.. uniquely ugly!

   When I first moved to Montreal, I the streetscapes yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason.. why? It wasn’t until I stopped looking for what was present on the streets rather.. what wasn’t.

   What’s not present on most Montreal streets are: crappy wooden telephone poles, humungous aluminum traffic signals festooned with a million ‘don’t do anything’ signs, dingy little rusting newspaper boxes and gigantic, generic, Playschool street furniture.

   I love the innocuous black traffic signals, the buried wires (on most streets), the benches (a rarity in most North American cities), the different style-depending on where you are-bus shelters, streetlamps etc, the absence of those useless, ugly, paper boxes and the feeling that most businesses put at least a little effort into their signage, frontage etc.

   There’s a sense of scale and aesthetics here that I’ve not seen in very many other places. Bravo Montreal!

3. …Montreal had the advantage of having been quite rich for quite a long time when it came time for electricity to be buried. There are still indeed many poles, but not along main thoroughfares.

   I, too, like the number of benches, and find our public spaces in general more, well, public than Toronto’s. I mean, Toronto has some great neighbourhood parks, but it’s more spread out and not as conducive to taking a little breather as it is here with many little urban spaces, benches, and sidewalk cafés.

   I also likened the street signs here to a more permissive society: elsewhere, there are lots of No Left Turn signs: a big red circle with a diagonal line covering the left-turning arrow. Here, those are used only for places like the exits to freeways or the big signs on the bridges saying No Right Turn On Red. Instead, we have green circles with an arrow that suggests sweetly that you can go forward or turn right; no mention of what you can’t do.

4. Just a thought.

   I like streetcars as much as anyone, but, if they return, and thats a BIG IF, to the streets of Montreal, Poles and wires will once again be a feature of streets on which they are used.

   Trolley busses have even more CLUTTER having TWO Wires and complex wire switching equipment at junctions.

   Other very cost-prohibitive systems of current collection were available, usually street-surface magnetically-actuated contacts which would energize as the car passed over them.

   This system does not work well in snow, obviously.

   If the contact stayed energized after the car passed on, horses would leap feet into the air if their metal shoes touched one.

   A second system was the ‘Conduit System’ where the trolley wire was beneath the street in a conduit and the car collector wheels hung down beneath the street on a shoe, somewhat like the cable cars of San Francisco.

   ( Cable Cars are Fascinating!! )

   Washington, D.C. used Conduit streetcars into 1960s as the Govt. did not want wires interfering with the senic views of the buildings.

   Conduit not a great system in snow, either.

   Both systems descrived here are VERY COSTLY! as in any reasonable conversation in these times concerning NEW streetcar systems.

   YES!! Toronto DOES look terrible with all it’s poles.