Vancouver's Cathedral Square

 

Cathedral Square in the eastern portion of Vancouver's downtown, right at the edge of Gastown, is one of those spaces that I've walked by a dozen times but never stopped to go inside and explore. Mostly it was because, despite the dramatic design of this public space, there was never any real draw to check it out. The square usually draws a cursory glance as people walk by to other things. It exists as one of those public spaces that were designed with the best intention, and then left to rot, untended.

Cathedral Square consists of a grassy expanse dotted by wooden benches on concrete platforms and a zig-zagged pathway. In the centre is a pool, the colour of the which makes it look less like a reflecting pond than your neighbours over-chlorinated and neglected backyard swimming pool, leafy detritus and cigarette butts magnified from their sunken spot at the bottom. This blue is "complemented" by Expo 86-style steel girders that make an open-air cage propped up on thick, concrete turrets. There is even a 'pier' should someone want to sit out and suntan. 

This cage sits atop a stepped plaza of sorts that is littered with trash, and mostly hidden from the street beside it. The site's architecture is imposing and unfriendly and almost prison-like in the huge concrete barriers and metal cage. Some of the benches are even missing, so all that remains is the concrete block on which they are supposed to sit.

Part of the reason for the site's lack of people, no doubt, is that the space is located in a inconvenient spot. As time passes in Vancouver the city's 'centre' has moved ever westward, from the pioneer days when the hot spot was what is now called the Downtown Eastside to contemporary times where most people are found along the commercialized spine of Robson Street in the West End.


However, it's undeniable that the design of this square is not a welcoming one. I found some pictures from the Vancouver Archives of what the square looked like when it first opened in 1986 to find out if it was as unwelcoming looking back then as it is now. 

Vancouver Archives, CVA 7840-098

In these photos the concrete pillars are fresh and have not yet succumbed to the rusty discolourations from years of rain, and there are flowers and small trees. 

Vancouver Archives, CVA 784-099

The cage overhead is revealed to have once been the frame for a covering that shielded the space from rain, but they obviously found it too difficult to maintain so removed it. You can also see in the below picture how the southern edge of the square is cut off from the adjacent street due to a change in grade, making this part of the space feel closed off and private.

Vancouver Archives, CVA 784-101

It's unfortunate that this space gets so little play. Vancouver's downtown peninsula has a real dearth of public squares and plazas larger than those occupying a ceded corner of real estate on a busy downtown block (the small plaza at the corner of Georgia and Granville outside of the Sears building was such a corner until the city built an oversized entrance to the Vancouver City Centre Canada Line station there). For now Cathedral Square remains mostly discarded.

As it stands, however, Cathedral Square does seem to serve a function of providing shelter and privacy to those who may be living on the street. I came across two people sleeping in separate sections of the plaza behind the giant concrete pillars. So a "rediscovering" of this space by the City would likely result in inequities in terms of who is able to use this space and for what.

Annex BIA installs anti-poster sleeves on light posts

Posters scraped off light pole on Bloor and Walmer

I noticed a few days ago that all of the posters had been scraped off the light poles on Bloor Street and thought it was just routine cleaning. That is until the next morning I stumbled upon workers who were wrapping the light poles with a tape-repellent sleeve that is supposed to keep posters off of them.

I first wrote about this back in February of 2011 for Torontoist, so it has taken the BIA quite some time to get things going. These sleeves are already in use just a few blocks west on Bloor in Koreatown. And, if you've ever walked down there, you'll notice that there are still lots of posters up on the light poles. All it takes is wrapping the tape securely all the way around the pole to keep your poster up.

Indeed, shortly after the sleeves were installed, I came across blank pieces of paper that had been taped to the poles in exactly that manner. In the bottom of each read: Annex Public Space.

Same light pole, but with new anti-poster sleeve and fresh Annex Public Space poster

As I wrote in that initial article, posters are an integral part of community expression. Many of the posters found on lamp poles are for lost cats, garage sales, and community services like guitar lessons. AstralMedia, through a 20 year street furniture contract with the City of Toronto, is supposed to be installing community message boards where people are allowed to put up posters. These official poster boards, while more are being installed, are few and far between.

Four Days in Montreal

I got back last night from four days (well, three and a half if you subtract bus travel time) in Montreal. This was not the first time I had been to the city, but I noticed a lot of new stuff since I was last there for two weeks in the summer of 2007. Namely, more and better public spaces, changes to the street system, and perhaps most drastically, the addition of the Bixi bike share program and a slew of amazing separated bike lanes.

Streets

The above picture is Rue St. Catherine, which is one of the main drags in downtown Montreal, spanning the gay village, the Place des Arts, and the major shopping street. The city is undertaking a massive change in tone to the streetscape along certain stretches by taking out the curbs that separated cars from pedestrians and laying the whole road in the same material. Although only parts were open, it's already obvious that this changes how the street feels entirely. Given that when I was there in 2007 for the jazz festival this street was the one closed off for the largest outdoor stage, it only makes sense to be able to create a space that converts easily between road and pedestrian plaza.

This is another section of Rue St. Catherine in the gay village. For multiple blocks beginning at Rue Berri the street has been shut to car traffic from May until September in order to create a pedestrian street where the many bars and restaurants in the area are able to extend their patios. The result is an amazingly vibrant area filled with all sorts of people. We drank many a beer and people-watched along this strip, as it was busy even late into weekday nights.

Montrealers seem to love their patios (who doesn't, actually?) and examples abound all over the downtown. Sometimes it's just a few tables and chairs out on the street and sometimes it's more formal, like in the above picture. While it makes walking the crowded streets sometimes difficult, it definitely adds to the atmosphere and makes for a more interesting walking experience. Plus, you get to see what everyone is eating.

Public Space

Montreal's waterfront, while still littered with industrial remnants, has some really great spots with wide walking and biking promenades and plenty of green space to sit. However, it didn't really feel all that coherent to me, meaning that as I walked along the waterfront there wasn't a sense of unity between all the different pieces. There were a few gems, though, like the small pond/canal featured above.

The area around Place des Arts, where much of the jazz festival takes place, has really bloomed with public spaces since I was there last. There are a lot of plazas, including the one above with some cool water spurts that glow different colours at night. The area consists of a bunch of medium to large-sized public spaces, some with grass, but most with hard surfaces, that all connect up to each other. My other favourite, which I didn't manage to get a picture of, was a grassy field with a strip of sidewalk down the middle that oozed water vapour that was lit up different colours at night. Biking through the fog was a good way to cool down on a hot day.

Here's a strange piece of public art on Rue St. Catherine. The letters looked randomly placed until you stood in the right spot and they coalesced into a sentence. If only I knew French.

And of course there is the square at the Berri-UQAM subway station that turns up in many a tourist photo of Montreal. This square has a sloping grassy hill complete with water features and a hard surface plaza on which you can play oversized chess. At night they moved in a giant movie screen and played Persepolis while a truck nearby handed out free food to those who needed it.

Bikes

I only took the (bouncy--it has tires!) subway system once in Montreal. The rest of the time I was on a Bixi bike or walking. Twelve dollars bought a three-day subscription to the system, and, with the amazing and connected separated lane network, I could get virtually anywhere I wanted in the city without feeling squeezed by traffic. There was a Bixi station on almost every block, so we didn't have to worry when we went somewhere about where to park. It seemed like every third bike that road by (and a lot of people ride bikes in Montreal) was a Bixi bike.

It's All in the Details for Vancouver's Sea Wall

(This article originally appeared on OpenCity on August 17, 2011)

Vancouver has always been good at paying attention to the smaller design details that work to make up the larger picture. A walk along the lengthy, winding and continuous seawall that envelopes the downtown core and parts of False Creek is a lesson in details, with well-designed street furniture, beautifully landscaped parks, scatterings of public art, and a thoughtfully integrated system for both pedestrians and cyclists. It’s often said that Vancouver is a city that lives on its edges, and the seawall definitely helps propagate that.

On this particular trip, I was interested in checking out the new portion of the seawall at the site of the Olympic Village neighbourhood (now just called The Village). The area had been under construction for several years and then cordoned off during the Olympics, so I hadn’t gotten much of a chance to wander around the completed site. The stretch of the seawall along the neighbourhood is some of the best in the city, and, with the proximity to the mid-rise buildings that make up the Village, one that exudes the most urban feeling.

The thing that makes this portion of the seawall so charming is the attention to different details and how they all creatively fit together. Several different materials are used from wooden planks to grass to interlocking brick to sand to granite. The combinations create an interesting and ever-changing texture as you move from one portion to another, allowing also for different levels and separations between uses (lounging, cycling, walking).

The street furniture is comfortable and also ingeniously playful. For example, the metal chairs positioned on the board walk itself are rooted to a pole that allows the chair to spin in circles, so you can face whichever direction you want (or, if you’re me, spin around so fast you make yourself sick). And the street furniture ranges from single chairs, to benches with backs, to benches without backs, to stone blocks. The true accomplishment is how much variety is found without the space feeling disorganized or cluttered.

My favourite example of creativity is found in the long, wooden wave decks about one metre across that dipped every so often to create the perfect spot to fit a reclining body. We’re so accustomed these days to seeing street furniture that seems like it was designed so that no one would want to sit or lie down on it for very long, so it’s refreshing to come across something obviously made for people to be comfortable and enjoy themselves. Imagine that.

Sherbourne Common, Nightclub Edition

It's official. I love Sherbourne Common.

While the park is sure a beaut' of a public space during the day--with its whimsical play equipment, water canals, splash pad, and groundhog sitings--it turns into a whole other beast at night when coloured lights play off the falling water of Jill Anholt's sculptures. Some of the lights even change from blue to green when you walk past them. For a full review of the new waterfront park, check out my article on Torontoist.

Here's a few pictures I took when I was there last night to wet your whistle.

Dance Like Everyone is Watching

If you're like most people, when you're in a public place you'll do almost anything not to stand out too much. You certainly wouldn't dance around crazily to music only you could hear while someone filmed you and then post that video on the internet. So I guess that makes Phil Villeneuve not like most people.

I was first exposed to the antics of Villeneuve when a friend showed me the video of him whirling and twirling to the Scissor Sisters in a No Frills grocery store. I was slightly horrified as I watched the video, the same kind of stomach-cringe I get when I watch people on American Idol or when a certain beauty pageant contestant stumbled through an answer. I'm embarrassed for them. I literally sweat watching.

But I feel there is something important about dancing and being silly and spontaneous in public. There can be a tedium to the day-in day-out rhythm of urban life that causes us to switch to autopilot. We've all seen that glazed over look as people push their shopping carts down an aisle or stare straight ahead on the subway. You feel as though you could bounce a tennis ball off their forehead and they wouldn't blink.

The reason things like flash mobs and crazy dancing people are so compelling is because of the way they play with the tedium of that urban routine. They force people to snap back into reality, because suddenly reality has become, well, surreality. This is shown best in the New York Grand Central Station freeze, where a group of people all froze at a predetermined time to the amazement of everyone else. It's hilarious to watch everyone's reaction as their boring commute is suddenly hi-jacked and turned into a Twilight Zone episode. It turned a completely forgettable act into something impossible to forget, which I'm sure is the goal of Improv Everywhere, the group that organized it.

Flash mobs, however, have become almost tedious in themselves. They all seem to have official websites and predetermined dates and times. There's the No Pants Subway Ride and the Zombie Walk, and the Pillow Fight and on and on it goes in countless cities around the world. I feel like, by reducing it to virtually one person, Villeneuve sheds all the weight built up by these mass events and gets back at the core of what it's all about--the delight of the unusual.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Villeneuve video is that everyone around him is trying so hard not to care. But it's clearly impossible to deny a grown man swinging around the pole of your subway car like a stripper. There's a few turned heads, some smirks, but mostly people are just attempting to ignore him like you would ignore that crazy man who corners you on the bus and won't stop ranting about U.S. foreign policy. He knows this too, which is why he grabs people's hats or puts his arm around them.

This is a total adaptation of city space for something other than what we've all decided is appropriate for that space. Subway cars are for commuting. Grocery stores are for buying food. Dancing is something you do when you've had that third drink and your favourite song comes on and the dance floor is just crowded enough that no one will see you jerk about. But it's good to challenge what we can do in different areas of the city and push people's comfort zones, if just for the simple fact that it keeps things interesting.

I often think about what I would do if I encountered Villeneuve dancing in my subway car or grocery store or bank. Maybe I would laugh, engage with him, and give him a twirl. But most likely I would avert my eyes and pray he picked on someone else.

Oh well. I can always watch him on YouTube.

Mess is in the Eye of the Beholder

[This article was originally posted on the Torontoist, February 24, 2011]

On February 22, 2011, the Annex Gleaner reported that the Bloor Annex Business Improvement Area intended to end the prolific postering of the stretch between Bathurst Street and Spadina Avenue with specially made light pole covers that are supposed to repel both tape and staples.

Just like digital locks on CDs could never stop determined pirates, it’s almost certain that some street hacker will figure out a way to affix a poster to these supposedly poster-proof sheathes. It’s almost as if the BIA is challenging them to find a way.

Still, coming on the heels of the ongoing debate surrounding Rob Ford’s plans to expunge all traces of spray paint and sharpie marker from Toronto, the announcement by the Bloor Annex BIA raises concerns over the sterilization of the city’s surfaces. Not only is a certain amount of messiness and visual clutter to be expected in any city of a certain size, but it should be welcomed as a sign of vibrancy—to a point, of course.

Dylan Reid, in a piece from the Summer 2010 issue of Spacing titled “Bless this Mess,” wrote about Toronto’s messy urbanism, noting that it is the city’s hodge-podge of architectural styles and general visual disorderliness that makes it so appealing. Posters and flyers contribute to this messy urbanism by cluttering our visual landscape. As Reid says, “The instinct for order and beauty has its place; the problem comes when it is dominant. It needs to be constantly challenged and questioned by the push for vibrant messiness.”

Consider this ideal against a city like Vancouver, where posters are corralled into specially designed poles and removed every Tuesday afternoon. Vancouver’s manicured streetscapes lose some of that explosive spontaneity that can be found in Toronto.

Designated postering spots are coming to Toronto too, albeit slowly. The City drafted a bylaw restricting posters and flyers in 2006, but enforcement has been lax and will continue to be so until enough official posters boards and columns, provided by Astral Media, are installed around the city. A June 2010 report by the City [PDF], requested by Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong (Ward 34, Don Valley East) noted that 261 posters boards and thirty-four columns have been rolled out, but they are insufficient for the bylaw to be fairly enacted. Eventually, Astral Media will roll-out two thousand posters boards and five hundred columns across the city.

Postering and flyering have long been used not just by businesses, but also by citizens to advertise services, support political causes, or simply make announcements to their community. Today, when much of the community message board's function has moved online to sites like Craigslist and Kijiji, it’s refreshing to walk down the street and see someone advertising their ugly, thirty-year-old couch, or their services as a piano teacher. If these anti-poster sheathes are put up all over the Annex—and if they spread elsewhere in the city— how will certain notorious gay porn websites, without the lure of those hot pink posters, entice men aged nineteen to twenty-six to audition? Won’t someone think of the porn?

No, not all posters are works of art. In fact, many are poorly designed, grammatically incorrect, written in Comic Sans bold, and rife with incorrectly used quotation marks and italics—but they are part of the neighbourhood. Posters are not just a form of community expression, but a sign of a lively, exciting place to live, of a city that has stuff going on and things to do and people with opinions to share. This city’s posters are like weeds: you can keep removing them one at a time, but they will sprout back if you don’t get at the root. And if the root is a community’s desire to express itself, do we really want to destroy that?

Posters and flyers can be found at varying degrees all across the city, but perhaps the best case is on St. George Street on the University of Toronto campus, where the posters cause light poles to bulge out in the middle, giving them the appearance of snakes who have only half-digested their meals. When was the last time these poles were stripped of their wheat-pasted second skins? One has to wonder at the layers of cultural history plastered to them. Peeling them back, one by one, would be an archeological dig uncovering concerts, roommates needed, and political rallies of days-gone-by. Imagine those same poles sans posters, empty and exposed and naked in their slimness.

There are worse things than a little mess.

Make Vancouver's Robson Square a Real Square

Vancouver's best public spaces have always happened around its edges, as if some invisible centrifugal force were at play in the city, spinning all the residents to the sea wall. Don't get me wrong, the sea wall is magnificent. It's a gem of which Vancouver should be proud. But as a public space it has to be acknowledged that the sea wall is primarly a linear, moving strip. People walk the sea wall. They bike. They rollerblade. They jog. In other words, they move.

What Vancouver needs, and what was shown to be a great success during the Olympics, is a permanent central square. A place where citizens and visitors alike can sit and take in the bustle of the city. A central spot to meet, eat your lunch, read a book. The Vancouver Public Space Network recognized this need when they held their Where's the Square contest, calling on Vancouverites to rethink the city's potential.

During the Olympics, the redesigned Robson Square showcased this potential. The short block between Hornby and Howe, hemmed in on each side by the courthouse and the art gallery, was closed in order to allow thousands of people to congregate. As the Vancouver Public Space Network points out, the time is right for this area to remain closed. The section of the road in question has been closed for awhile for construction and Councillor Suzanne Anton has put forward a motion to make this closure permanent.

From the very beginning of its life Robson Square, designed by Arthur Erickson, got it backwards. Allowing a road to bisect the space and placing a pedestrian space underneath the street conveys a preference. The preference for cars over people. Literally.

Robson Square needs this portion of the street to stay closed in order to be a successful public space. Its downfall is that the majority of its space is hidden from view. The redesign for the Olympics (read my previous review of it here on Beyond Robson) did much to make this space more comfortable and inviting, but the reality of the situation is that without the closure of the street here the public space remains off the beaten path so to speak, closed off behind bushes or underground.

Much has changed in city planning and design since the original days of Robson Square. We now have car free Sundays where we pedestrianize city streets, and the Olympics saw the closure of many streets to car traffic. There is a longing for these central public spaces in Vancouver and we shouldn't miss the opportunity to make Robson Square into a real square.

A Walk in Nordheimer Ravine Reveals, Among Other Things, a Giant Spider Web

A few days ago, after being holed up in the apartment all day, my Exploring Partner and I decided to check out Nordheimer Ravine, which lies just just south of St. Clair between Avenue Road and Bathurst Street. I have now lived in Toronto for nearly six months and what is great is that I'm still discovering things about this city--things that lie just beyond the boundaries of my apartment within a short walking distance.

Nordheimer Ravine is one of those places where, if I may indulge in a cliche, the city just disappears around you. We entered the ravine off Bolton Drive and immediately were swallowed up by the fiery Autumn colours. For those that lament Toronto flatness, the ravine is a welcome change in topography. It is also the site of one of Toronto's numerous "lost rivers". Castlefrank Brook lies buried beneath.

The path we chose let us out at Sir Winston Churchill Park, which actually sits on top of one of Toronto's water reservoirs. The park seems to be the kind of place that is good for two activities: 1) allowing your dog to romp around with other dogs in the fenced-in off leash area, and 2) running around in circles on its top perimeter. Maybe it's the inevitable onset of winter, or the fact that I haven't lived in a place that gets enough snow to actually do this, but I find myself constantly on the look-out for good places to go sledding once the white stuff drops. The sides of Sir Winston Churchill Park, which slope drastically down into Nordheimer Ravine, look to be the perfect spot to pick up some good speed and not worry about slamming into anything hard at the bottom.

There are a few architecturally grand buildings around, which were done in 1930. I particularly liked the one on the south side. If this had been built today it would be a functional, yet non de-script box, but back then they did things with a bit more flair.

We followed Nordheimer Ravine, where we came upon what appeared to be a subway entrance, but turned out to be an emergency exit. This exit was put to good use in 1995 when a train rear-ended another in the tunnel, trapping people for hours as the temperature rose to over 40 degrees (you can read more here).

Further on, there is another piece of subway infrastructure, this time in the form of a worker entrance/exit. A few bags of garbage labelled TTC were piled at the front and some graffiti was sprayed across its concrete surface. It's unclear whether they are reclaiming this particular area, of if it's a general message to be applied across the city. The shape is kind of interesting, almost like it is welcoming you in with its concrete flippers.

We also, surprise surprise, ran into some yarn-bombing--one of my new favourite forms of street art. This time no nails were put through the tree to hold the yarn (although it appears to be just a dead log). We didn't stick around to find out if there was a similarly sized yarn spider around.

Then the ravine ends, and we were spat back out into Toronto at the site of the St. Clair West subway station. In a city where a lot of natural topographical elements were either shaved off or filled in, it's nice to come across a place like Nordheimer Ravine.

City as Conversational Hardware

Yesterday, when in the alley taking out the trash at work, I noticed that our dumpster had been spray-painted with the words: I love u. I wondered who this was for. Was it for a certain person who the painter was hoping would see? Was it a general message to anyone who walked by? Was it written ironically on the side of a dumpster as a form of protest against garbage? Perhaps a declaration of undying love for Smithrite?



Further down from my work, on a sign advertising a public garden, there is a Jim Pattison sticker and someone has used Sharpie to scribble out his name and then write "sucks". What was the purpose of the Jim Pattison sticker in the first place? Was it put there, again ironically, because Jim Pattison owns so much space in Vancouver, but doesn't own the public garden? And who scribbled it out and wrote sucks? Was it the same person, or someone different that came along and decided to join in on the conversation.


It's these kind of questions that make graffiti, tagging, bombing, stickers, or the inside of bathroom stall doors so interesting. These are pieces of city hardware--walls, doors, alleys, dumpsters--that are being used to open a kind of public discourse, a conversation which anyone with a Sharpie marker can join in with. City's treat graffiti as visual garbage to be painted over and swept away. But really it's the most democratic form of conversation there is, combining the anonymity of the internet with the wide audience of a public podium.


Imagine our city like a metaphorical message board where you can leave messages for strangers who can then respond back to you. We have a digital version of this on the web, but it's impersonal compared to stumbling upon "Good Bye" painted on the side of a discarded mattress in an alleyway. This mattress has a story to tell. Was the writer saying goodbye to the mattress? To the person that used to sleep on the mattress? Or is the mattress saying goodbye to me?

Street artists, like Banksy, have been using, abusing, and reassigning public property as message boards for quite some time, making political and social statements. But what if we opened this up to everyone? What if we did away with the metaphorical message board of alleyway writing and quickly scrawled fuck yous on bus shelters, and set up--somewhere in the city--an actual message board.

No doubt such a message board would garner crude and offensive material, but it would also, as the dumpster with I Love U scrawled on it shows, collect other kinds of conversation. But maybe taking these messages out of alleys and billboards and bus shelters and collecting them all on a sanctioned wall would miss the whole idea behind them, kill the conversation before it even starts. There is something strangely engrossing about reading an intricate web of arrowed sentences on the back of a public washroom stall that you might lose exposing it on a public wall. Perhaps, oddly, these conversations are meant to be private in public, reaching out to other city dwellers from the safe anonymity of a dark alley or locked stall door.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a dump, that mattress still lies, shouting its mournful Goodbye to any passing birds that happen to fly over.