Farewell to Leo Leonard
July 12, 2012 § 1 Comment
Leo Leonard, the long-time proprietor of the Griffintown Horse Palace, died a week ago today at the Verdun Hospital. He was 87 years old. Leo bought the Horse Palace in 1968 after a life of doing hard manual labour on the Montréal waterfront and in Griffintown. Leo himself came from Goose Village, born in 1924. Leo, also known as Clawhammer Jack, is responsible for the Horse Palace getting its name. The stables were actually built over a century earlier, in 1862. As Leo told the story, he was working in the stables one day when a sign painter happened to amble by sometime in the late 1960s. So, Leo told him “to get scribblin'”, figuring that if San Francisco had its Cow Palace, then Griff should have the Horse Palace.
Leo’s funeral was this past Tuesday at Feron’s at the corner of Notre-Dame Ouest and Charlevoix. Jimmy Feron, the founder of Feron’s was himself a Griffintowner, a friend of the legendary alderman “Banjo” Frank Hanley.
This Saturday, the Griffintown Horse Palace Foundation, which is trying to save and preserve the Horse Palace, is hosting a visit to the site at 10am. We are also going to clean up the Palace a bit, preparing it for its next life.
We invite any and all to come down to the Horse Palace on Saturday, 14 July, at 10am, to take a look around. It’s amazing site, a little piece of a rural oasis in the middle of the city. Standing in the yard, in the shade of century old trees, you can almost forget you’re in Montréal.
The Griffintown Horse Palace is located at 1216, rue Ottawa, between rue de la Montagne and rue Murray in Griffintown. The nearest métro is Bonaventure, just head down Peel Street and turn right at Ottawa, the Horse Palace is three blocks from there. The nearest Bixi stands are at the corner of de la Montagne and Notre-Dame Ouest, three blocks north of the Palace.
If you want more information, you can email either myself or Juliette Patterson.
The Uniqueness of Cities
June 20, 2012 § 1 Comment
For some odd reason, I find myself reading a lot about London these days. I’m really not sure why, I have no real love for the city, to me, as represented in pop culture, it’s a megalopolis of bad architecture. Nonetheless, I am fascinated by authors’ attempts to tease out what it is that makes London a unique location. For the most part, I am reading cultural histories, so the focus is less on the built landscape of London (though that certainly frames the action) than on the people who live(d) there. For the most part, Londoners tend to be praised for their resourcefulness. And their stolidity. And the city itself for the ways in which it constantly re-invents itself.
I live in Montréal, a city that claims to be a unique location itself: a French-speaking metropolis in the Anglo sea of North America (conveniently, the Hispanic fact of the southern part of the continent always gets overlooked). Montréal is a bit of Europe in North America, I am constantly told by both the natives and the tourists who come here. When I lived in Vancouver, it was the outdoorsiness of the people that made the city unique (nevermind the fact that most Vancouverites AREN’T the outdoorsy types at all). And Doug Coupland argued it was the glass architecture.
I could go on, taking a trip around the world, laying out urban stereotypes as to what makes each unique. But in reading all this ephemera about London, I am continually struck by the fact that the things that apparently make London unique in the eyes of erudite and knowledgeable authors really just make London another generic big city. I would think that ALL urbanites are resourceful and stolid. And ALL cities constantly reinvent themselves. (As a running series on this blog about my neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles makes clear).
So what then? Cities are indeed generic. They all contain the same basics, which vary according to size. When it comes to the built environment, you’ve got a downtown core, inner-city residential neighbourhoods, some industrial (or post-industrial) inner city neighbourhoods, and these patterns repeat themselves out to and through the suburbs, residential/industrial, until you get to the city limits and the countryside takes over. Urbanites are a shifty breed, skilled at not noticing the homeless dude begging for change, but very skilled at noticing the various challenges along the sidewalk, including how to carefully avoid the homeless guy. Neighbourhoods in cities all follow similar patterns, there are points of convergence for the residents, there are amenities, parks, and so on.
And, of course, there is the anonymity of city life. I live in a city of around 4 million people, but I can go days, weeks, even months without running into someone I know on the streets of Montréal. I seriously doubt that is any different in Dublin, Boston, San Francisco, Nairobi, Tokyo, or Beijing.
So what is it that makes cities unique? What is it that makes London or Montréal unique? Does it come down to how we, the urbanites ourselves, choose to build our cities, and reinvent our cities, and carry out our lives in them? Certainly Pittsburgh has different things to offer than, say, Winnipeg. But either way, trying to boil down the lived experience of millions of people, and their millions upon millions of ancestors in any one urban location, whether it has existed for over 2000 years like London or for just over 200 years like Vancouver, is a pointless exercise. London is no more unique for its constant reinventions and the resourcefulness and stolidity of its people than is, I don’t know, St. Petersburg, Russia.
On Living in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood, Pt. IV
June 17, 2012 § 3 Comments
Yesterday, during Bloomsday, I presented The Point a 1978 documentary on Pointe-Saint-Charles directed by Robert Duncan and produced by William Weintraub. The film presents a very depressing picture of a very depressed neighbourhood in the late 1970s: a picture of unemployment, alcoholism, violence, and dislocation. The graduating class of James Lyng Catholic High School faced a bleak future in 1978, unilingual and unskilled.
I then presented a bit of context to the film, both the historical time period in which the film, and by whom (Anglos in the late 1970s, between the election of the Parti québécois as the provincial government in 1976 and the First Referendum on Québec sovereignty in 1980). In shot, a very volatile period in Montréal’s and Québec’s history. I also pointed out that the Pointe was more than just some sad sack inner-city slum, pointing to such things as the Clinique communitaire de Pointe-Saint-Charles and other examples of neighbourhood organisation and resistance (i.e.: the very things that I love the Pointe for). I felt it was important to demonstrate to the audience that a poor, dislocated neighbourhood with rampant unemployment during the years of deindustrialisation was more than just that, it was a community (this is something I have learned in studying Griffintown, especially from talking to former Griffintowners).
I then moved on to discuss gentrification here in the Pointe. I am of two minds on it. On the one hand, the Pointe is not Griffintown, the condo developers and gentrifying tenement owners do not have to start from scratch. There is a very strong community here already. On the other hand, the community that exists here only works when those of us who are interlopers get involved, and understand what already exists here and how precious that is.
I have posted before in this series “On Living in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood,” (here, here, and here) my experiences and impressions as I look around the Pointe, both good and bad.
But tonight, sitting on my front stoop, talking on the phone (because it’s about the only place I can get a continuous signal in my flat), the entire process of gentrification was brought home to me in blatant fashion. A young woman, in her early 20s, and pregnant, is looking for a place to live. The flat upstairs is for rent, so I talked to her, told her about it, how big it was, etc. It was apparent that she is a single mother-to-be, as she used the singular in referring to her needs for a flat. She looked sad and defeated, because the flats around here cost too much for her to afford. As she turned to go, she said “It looks like they just want to push all the poor people out of the Pointe.”
What can you say to that? Especially when you’re one of the guilty. It is a simple fact that rents are going up in the Pointe, both because former rental units are being bought up and converted into single-family homes, and because landlords are realising they can make a lot more money if they renovate and gentrify their flats. And so where does that leave this woman? A quick search of Craigslist for flats in the Pointe reveals the same thing, they’re getting expensive. And so where do those who can’t afford to live here go?
I don’t have the answer for that one.
An Oddity
June 17, 2012 § Leave a comment
Yesterday marked the first time ever readership of Spatialities was not predominately Canadian. Yesterday, for some odd reason, readership was dominated by Americans at a two-to-one ratio over the next most common nationality: Russians. And the Russians had a 80% lead on the French, who were tied with the Canadians. This has never happened before. Every time I’ve looked at viewers’ nationalities (gotta love the obsessive-compulsiveness of WordPress’ nerds), Canadians have far out-stripped Americans, by anywhere from two-to-one to twenty-to-one. So, thanks, eh! to the Americans, Russians, and French
The Problem With Niall Ferguson
June 16, 2012 § 6 Comments
I’ve never been crazy about Niall Ferguson. I don’t think he’s ever had an original thought, and he’s about the worst kind of academic bully, demeaning himself to attack his critics in a petty, small-minded manner. Hell, we’re talking about a guy who in, his latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, who attacks Gandhi! Yes, Gandhi! Gandhi, in a 1931 interview in London, noted the use of disease in the European conquest of the rest of the world (indeed, Jared Diamond confirms the disease theory in his 1999 book, Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fate of Human Societies). Ferguson heaps scorn on Gandhi and goes on to argue that Western medicine did a world of good in the conquered parts of the world. Ferguson isn’t entirely wrong, especially in the case of malaria in Africa. But he’s too smart by half here, by mocking Gandhi, he discounts the fact that disease was a corollary of Western conquest. Want some figures? Try these on for size:
Caribbean Islands, 1492-1542: nearly 6,000,000 dead
Peru, 1570-1620: 750,000 dead.
Mexico, 1519-1600: 24,000,000 dead.
Ferguson’s attack on Gandhi is symptomatic of Ferguson’s general crusade against those who have the temerity to suggest that Western imperialism was not an entirely good thing. See, for example, his Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power.
At least in Civilization, when he’s done attacking the likes of Gandhi and others who experienced the negative effects of Western imperialism, he does go on to note the horrors of the German Empire in Africa, which does show some maturity in Ferguson in the decade since Empire.
Then there’s his attack on Marx & Engels. Ferguson wrote his manuscript in 2010, twenty years after the end of the Cold War. And yet, Ferguson, showing how petty-minded he can be, spends almost as much time attacking Marx and Engels personally than actually discussing their arguments. Why bother? Seriously. Ad hominen attacks in the works of an historian as eminent as Ferguson are just kind of sad and pathetic, especially when tacked onto commentary of Marxism/Communism.
Ferguson is also adept at the fine art of quoting out of context. For example, he attributes the following quotation to Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author:
Will the West, which takes its great invention, democracy, more seriously than the Word of God, come out against this coup that has brought an end to democracy in Kars?…Or are we to conclude that democracy, freedom and human rights don’t matter, that all the West wants is for the rest of the world to imitate it like monkeys? Can the West endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble them?
Sure, Pamuk wrote these words. However, these words are those of the narrator of his fine novel, Snow. They are not the words of Pamuk himself. But Ferguson kind of forgets to tell us that in his book. These words are the epigraph to Chapter 5, “Consumption” (Consumption is one of the “killer apps” we in the West invented, but have now been “downloaded” by the East, seriously, that’s Ferguson’s language). And Pamuk’s words here are meant to be mocking. But when you know the context of the quotation, well, then they mean something quite differently, don’t they?
And so once again, Ferguson, who actually makes a pretty good, if unoriginal argument in Civilization, shoots himself in his rhetorical foot and one is left wondering just how seriously he can actually be taken.
The Most Incredible Title. Ever
June 13, 2012 § Leave a comment
Suleiman the Magnificent ruled the Ottoman Empire was the longest-serving of all Ottoman Emperors, sitting on the throne in Istanbul from 1520-66. As emperor, Suleiman was truly magnificent, in terms of territorial expansion, legal reforms, and almost completely reforming Ottoman life. However, I do think that the greatest of his legacy to the world comes in the form of his title:
His Imperial Majesty The Sultan Süleyman I, Sovereign of the Imperial House of Osman, Sultan of Sultans, Khan of Khans, Commander of the Faithful and Successor of the Prophet of the Lord of the Universe, Protector of the Holy Cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, Emperor of the Three Cities of Constantinople, Adrianople, and Bursa, and of the Cities of Damascus and Cairo, of all Armenia, of the Magris, of Barka, of Kairuan, of Aleppo, or Arabic Iraq, of Cilicia, of the Vilayets of Erzurum, of Sivas, of Adana, of Karaman, of Van, of Barbary, of Abysinnia, of Tunisia, of Tripoli, of Damascus, of Cyprus, of Rhodes, of Candia, of the Vilayet of the Morea, of the Marmara Sea, the Black Sea and also its coasts, of Anatolia, of Rumelia, Baghdad, Kurdistan, Greece, Turkmenistan, Tatary, Circassia, of the two regions of Kabarda, of Georgia, of the plain of Kypshak, of the whole country of the Tatars, of Kefa, and all of the neighbouring countries, of Bosnia and its dependencies, of the City and Fort of Belgrade, of the Vilayet of Serbia, with all the castles, forts, and cities of all Albania, of all Iflak and Bogdania…
Bloomsday Montreal 2012
June 13, 2012 § Leave a comment
Montreal’s first annual Bloomsday gets underway tomorrow at 12.30pm at the Atwater Library, with a a reading and music inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses, hosted by Dana O’Hearne. And also tomorrow night, 5pm, at Hurley’s Irish Pub on Crescent, we will be hosting a Trivia Night, so come on down and check out both events.
The full schedule for the 3-day event can be found here.
Highlights, aside from what I’ve already noted:
4pm, Friday 15 June, Bombardier Theatre, McCord Museum, Official Launch, featuring Prof. Michael Kenneally, Principal of the School for Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia, who will speak on “The Achievement of Joyce’s Ulysses.
8.30am, Saturday, 16 June at Le Vieux Dublin Pub on Cathcart, I will be hosting a breakfast event featuring the indomitable Don Pidgeon, who will tell stories about Griffintown. Don’s ALWAYS entertaining, a natural-born story-teller, this is not to be missed.
9.45-11.30am, Saturday, 16 June: Prof. David Hanna of UQÀM will be leading a tour of Griffintown, which will meet at Métro Square Victoria.
10am-5pm, Saturday, 16 June: Our main event at James Square on McGill’s Campus (the entrance on University), where we will have daylong readings from Ulysses, as well as performances by the Bernadette Short Dancers, and Irish and classical music performances.
1pm-3pm, Saturday, 16 June: I will be screening a viewing of William Weintraub’s 1970s documentary, The Point, at the McGill Community for Lifelong Learning, which is located at 688 Sherbrooke Ouest, I’ll be in Room 1041. I will also talk about Pointe-Saint-Charles, my favourite Montreal neighbourhood (and also my home).
2.45pm-4.45pm, Saturday, 16 June, in the Bombardier Theatre of the McCord, film-maker Brian McKenna will present his new film, The Coffin Ship Hanna.
On the Difference between being a Reader and a Writer
June 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
Upon the recommendation of the fine people at Argo Bookshop, I read Italo Calvino‘s If on a winter’s night a traveller, which was in and of itself an excellent read, a meditation on the multiple meanings of reading, amongst other things. I was struck by a discussion between the protagonist, The Reader, and The Other Reader, who at least got a name, Ludmilla. Both The Reader and The Other Reader have been continually frustrated in their attempts to read a book, any book, as they are continually met with incomplete manuscripts, so they get into their novel, only to have it end. Up to this point, it has been due to publisher’s errors and problems in the actual process of printing and binding the books.
But The Reader has made a contact within the publishing firm, who has given him reign to peruse the completed manuscripts, and he excitedly tells The Other Reader when they meet in a café. He then wants to rush back to the publisher to continue their investigation. But she refuses.
Why don’t you want to come?
On principle.
What do you mean?
There’s a boundary line: on ne side are those who make books, on the other those who read them. I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased: the world of those who deal with books professionally is more and more crowded and tends to become one with the world of readers…I know that if I cross that boundary, even as an exception, by chance, I risk being mixed up in this advancing tide; that’s why I refuse to set foot inside a publishing house, even for yourself.
It is clear that for The Other Reader, this is her own stance. Of course, within a few chapters, she has violated her position. But that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is the point she raises, and the separation between authors and publishers and readers. I had a thought similar to this last week when I was in Archambault looking for a book. I didn’t find what I was looking for, a history book, but I did see my friend Simon Jolivet‘s book on the shelf. Now, this is not surprising, Simon wrote a book, based on his PhD dissertation, and it got published. That’s the way it’s supposed to work in academia. In fact, that’s the very process I am presently engaged in myself. And certainly I have known many, many authors throughout my academic career (to say nothing of the fiction writers I know). And certainly, books get treated differently in academia than in the general public: we have to publish them if we want to survive in our field, it’s part of the job (which is why I find it obnoxious when people presume that because it’s summer I’m doing nothing if I’m not teaching).
And yet, it’s one thing to see my professors’ books on the shelf in the bookstore, it’s another to see a friend’s, especially when we did our PhD’s together. It’s not an incredibly profound statement, I realise, but there is still something rather exciting about seeing your friend’s book on a shelf in a busy downtown Montréal bookstore, to know that people have bought it and read it and will continue to do so, and to finally have it sink in that this will also happen for me, my book will be on these same shelves and people will buy it and read it, beyond the academy (I hope).
But does that change my relationship with reading, both fiction and non-fiction? I doubt it. And, of course, The Other Reader eventually realised that herself when she started to get mixed up in book production and forgery rings.
In Griffintown
June 12, 2012 § 1 Comment
I spent Sunday morning, prior to the destruction of the Irish team at the hans of Croatia in Euro 2012, in Griffintown, with Scott MacLeod, working on his documentary, In Griffintown/Dans l’Griff. It was an incredibly hot day, and Scott, myself, the crew, and Claude Mercier who, along with his wife, Lyse, are the stars of the film, all got nice and sunburned. Below are some action shots, as well as Claude, Scott, and I in Parc Saint-Ann/Griffintown, squinting in the bright sunlight. It was a great experience, in between shots, Scott and I talked about his vision for the film, how he planned to intersplice archival footage, his own animations, and live action shots to create the documentary. I look forward to seeing the final version.
Filming Griffintown
June 10, 2012 § Leave a comment
Two months ago, I posted this about film-maker Scott MacLeod‘s fundraising attempts for a documentary on Griffintown. I’m happy to report he raised enough money and all systems are go. Today, I will be meeting up with Scott and his crew for a bit of filming before Ireland takes on Croatia in its first match of Euro 2012. I am slated to discuss the destruction of Griffintown in the 20th century, due to both bureaucratic inertia on the part of Hôtel de Ville, and depopulation due to deindustrialisation in Griffintown. Of course, all the Lachine Canal-side neighbourhoods of Montréal experienced deindustrialisation, but Pointe-Saint-Charles, Little Burgundy, Saint-Henri, Côte-Saint-Paul and the like didn’t become ghost towns like the Griff. The difference? A combination of local populations resisting deindustrialisation and depopulation (the Pointe, in particular, was home to a radical, populist resistance), as well as political support. Griffintown got none of that. The city abandoned Griffintown, left it to die.
Fast-forward 50 years and now there is nothing the Ville de Montréal loves more than Griffintown. You can practically see the dollar signs in Mayor Gerald Tremblay’s eyes whenever someone mentions the word “Griffintown.” All the city can see is the tax dollars that will come in from all the condo dwellers there once Devimco and a handful of other developers are done with the neighbourhood. Did I say neighbourhood? Oops, sorry. To me, neighbourhood means a form of community, there is common cause amongst neighbours. In some cases, this is organic, in other cases, communities can be planned to encourage neighbourliness. The re-jigged Griffintown, however, is not one of those. No parks, no schools. None of that. Can’t have that, that’d steal space from condos!
So we are going to get a district of high rise condominiums, populated by harried, busy urban dwellers with no real, organic chances for community living, unless they seize the chances themselves. Maybe they’ll become the condo dwellers here in the Pointe, many of whom have joined the casseroles protests, such as they exist in the Pointe, and have joined the community gardens, and have joined the old populist community organisations of the Pointe? Or maybe they won’t. I’m not optimistic, because the Pointe already had this community-based model when the condos went up and when we gentrifiers moved into remodelled tenements. The Griff has none of that.
But don’t tell Gerald Tremblay. Actually, go ahead, he’s not listening anyway.
Matthew Barlow 