Creature of the Shade

that view of montréal

Montréal is such an unphotographable city that the most memorable postcard photo is taken with the city at your back:

Even after two decades, the Olympic Stadium looks like an event rather than a place.  Blur the photo a little, and you could be looking at an explosion in the middle distance of an otherwise serene urban landscape.  Olympic Games and Expos -- Montréal has had both -- often build structures that are conventional in their very uniqueness.  These big events are invigorating ruptures.  As sudden surges of money and intention, they can enrich a city's infrastructure, but the thrill of the event can easily lead to eventlike buildings that make the sense of rupture permanent. 

It's not bad, necessarily, this sort of visual dissonance, if you're composing for mountaintop views.  But as you get closer to the tower through charming cafe-lined streets of this city of details, it becomes even more alien, and somehow even less relevant, even as its shadow looms.  If it were any closer to the core of the city, it would be an atrocity.

What of the core, then?  There's the usual patch of tall buildings, with some interesting neighborhoods and cultural districts in around them, but somehow it doesn't add up to a picture as the great skylines do.  It looks like the skyline of any modernist city in the North American interior, with nothing to attest to this city's unique position in Canadian culture. 

No, as the guidebooks tell you, this is a city of details, a city for the flaneur rather the synthesist.  Prompted by the abundance of quirkiness, I found that my near-abstract photos seemed to speak about Montréal in particular more than these shots usually do:

And of course, despair being a French invention, Montréal is a place where even  abandonment seems composed.  My tour ended in Parc Jean Drapeau, a vast island park in the St. Lawrence -- detached from the city and thus nearly empty on a Monday -- where I stumbled on this stadium remnant, barely two decades old and already a fetching ruin. 

Though on reflection, this is no less a ruin than the stadium with its flashy leaning tower.  Both harkening back, wistfully, while seeming unprepared for the future.

ottawa postcard

When I remember Ottawa, I'll always have the image:  "Boxy modernist building across the lake."

Wherever I looked, that seemed to be the story.

Ottawa is a largely planned city, but planned mostly in the era of motorways and modernist boxes, both residential and employment. Everyone was expected to repair to parks for beauty.  So there are generous parks along  waterways lacing the city, with a network of bike trails along same.  It all pretty much follows Le Corbusier's trinity of tower, park, and freeway, a vision so compelling that it guided a generation of architects despite failing the most basic quantitative tests of transport capacity:  You can't build enough freeway lanes for towers of that size, if freeways are the only way.  Jane Jacobs nailed Corbusier in 1961, before most of Ottawa's Corbusian towers were built: 

"His neatly arranged skyscrapers in the park," she argues, "are a terrible oversimplification of urban order. Their rigid separation of functions makes a true diversity impossible; their inhuman scale and vast empty spaces kill off the close-knit vitality of an attractive city."

"Close-knit vitality" is now being built manually, on the flats east of Parliament Hill.  This has long been an area of produce markets and funky shops, but now it is sprouting condo towers, hopefully just enough to create a vibrant mix rather than the overkill of Vancouver's Yaletown.  The towers are a good thing, though some affordable housing would be even better.

 

I must admit, despite all this rambling, that Ottawa made me happy.  There's a certain lightness of expectation about a city designed to represent a lightweight nation.  Canada is more a club of provinces than a discrete place or being.  Banners celebrating the provinces are far more prominent in Ottawa than in Washington or Canberra, one of those subtle indications that this is an unusually federal federalism, and thus an unusually contingent capital city.

Bingualism, too, is a delight.  Ottawa is a fully and honestly bilingual city.  The capital region, consisting of Ottawa and Gatineau across the river in Quebec, is almost exactly bilingual, with a nearly 50-50 split between native speakers of English and French.  Here, even the beggars greet you bilingually, pardon-monsieur-excuse-me-sir.  I was here when I read Charles Krauthammer's article lamenting the USA's growing English-Spanish bilingualism.  Krauthammer calls Canada "a country created of two nations at its birth," and argues that this, particularly the resulting bilingualism, is Canada's weakness.  Yet I wondered, as I walked the streets of Ottawa and later Montreal, whether a society that can flip instantly between Anglo and Gallic allegiances may not have just the kind of litheness that the new century will reward.

hello from 'central canada'

On this train ride from Toronto to Ottawa, the uniformity of the scenery is a thing of awe. Flat or very faintly undulating land covered with grass and small broadleaf trees. Here and there a patch of suburban sprawl, but scarcely a town, as the line seems to skirt all the major cities it serves. Now and then a wetland. Summer now, so all green, but it’s surprisingly easy to translate the scene to fall or winter with not much more than a laying-on of a color filter. I’ve ridden for four hours, and seen nothing that makes sense as a sequence.  Trees, field, marsh, town, marsh, field, marsh.  The order seems random, without even the hint of narrative to tantalize the attention.

So much of what Canada has meant to me is what British Columbia has meant.  A city and wilderness right there in each other’s faces. The wilderness not reduced to a postcard, but pressing back with bears, cougars, weather, and sheer obstruction. The enforced languor of bi-hourly ferries in landscapes too steep for the most precipitous roads. The narrow perch of the Sea-to-Sky Highway above the unfathomable fathoms of Howe Sound, now being widened for the Olympics – a widening that will make it feel even more narrow. Small towns stuck in crevices, not to say crevasses, hanging on by not looking up, or down.

Ontario is so perfectly different that the idea of Canada makes sense only as the difference itself, the dissonance between landscapes that precedes even the clash of linguistic solitudes. In Ontario I have seen nothing but human work. Every tree seems adapted to a settled landscape, such as the environs of a rail line. Even without the blasting extremes of weather, it’s a landscape that naturally sends one indoors, to do the work that drives an economy and a culture. 

Just now, I looked up to see a small town, historic fragments, a few old storefronts facing an empty parking lot by the rails.  Weeds wherever there's nothing else.  Like this:

A couple of people, looking at the train, seeming to think nothing, say nothing, be nothing. I could be anywhere.  Perhaps I am.  Perhaps that's Canada's secret.