Our Street Was Paved with Gold Albert Kish, 1973, 28 min 37 sec “Filmmaker Albert Kish revisits Montreal’s St Lawrence Boulevard - the Main - the road from the docks to the heart of immigrant Canada. This is a little Europe, a street of many languages, foods, and small courtesies that make a stranger feel at home. For the filmmaker his prevailing memory is of the seventeen steps of a walk-up apartment, but for all ...

Concordia’s EV building and an apartment building behind it. September 13, 2005

Flashmob and urban prank enthusiasts will want to head down to Phillips Square on Saturday, where a mischievous/playful group of people will be staging a “bubble battle” at 4pm. Here’s more information from the event’s Facebook page: This Saturday, come blow bubbles with us at Phillips Square. Watch people’s eyes light up as millions of bubbles soar majestically through the air. Bring friends, cameras and, of course, what you need to create bubbles I guess ...

I’m in Calgary at the moment, en route to Hong Kong, where I will be doing a master’s degree for the next couple of years. This is a fast-growing, fast-changing city, and there are a couple of interesting changes that I noticed while I was here. One of them is the introduction of two new scramble crossings in the Eau Claire neighbourhood of the city’s downtown area. Often associated with Tokyo’s famous Shibuya Crossing, scramble ...

Earlier this month, Montreal City’s Kate McDonnell took a trip with her friend Ben Soo to Montreal East, where they poked around the vast industrial areas that make up most of the small, overlooked town on the east end of Montreal Island. Kate posted some shots on Urbanphoto and wrote a bit about the place: There’s always a tang of sulphur in the air from the hydrocarbon cracking. The streets are in poor shape and ...

Who doesn’t remember Roadsworth, the artist whose quirky street-and-sidewalk stencils vaulted him into street art stardom in 2004 after he ran into trouble with the law? Since then, Peter Gibson—the artist’s real name—has made a living working in a perfectly legal capacity with City Hall and various other public organizations. Last spring, the Commission scolaire de Montréal commissioned him to redesign a concrete schoolyard at Bernard and St. Urbain; in the fall, the Ville-Marie borough ...

Old diner sign, now gone, on Sherbrooke near Concordia’s Loyola campus. March 29, 2007

Last August, Thomas-Bernard Kenniff wrote about the “bâtiments fantômes” you see around town. Here’s a particularly nice example in a downtown parking lot next to the Hôtel de la Montagne. May 31, 2008