Living it up, SHAUG TOWN style

The area between Atwater, Sherbrooke, Guy, and René-Lévesque has a couple names going for it.  Shaughnessy Village.  Lincoln-Tupper.  The West End.  None of these names have much currency in conversation, though, and they seem to carry their own connotations.  Shaghnessy Village implies–principally–the area south of Ste-Catherine.  Lincoln-Tupper would logically be bounded by its eponymous streets.  The “West End” tag is logical enough, but just as likely to refers to NDG, and is perilously similar to “West Island”.  Though comprising one of the most densely-populated census tracts in Quebec, the neighborhood doesn’t have a definitive label.

Spacing Montreal recently wrote about the difficulty in determining what constitutes a neighborhood.  The post linked to Le Coeur de Sainte-Marie, a blog that investigates the names and boundaries that have helped define the Centre-Sud’s identity.  If nothing else, the resulting discussion underscored the difficulty in assigning a name to a location. Places as complex as neighborhoods, where personal experience and subjective opinion matter as much as simple geography, are not easy to label.  In peeling back the layers of history, the fascinating legacy of wards, parishes, old municipalities, and colloquial nicknames on the area’s toponymy becomes apparent.  Can any neighborhood–let alone the subject of this post–be objectively called anything?

Yes.  I’m going to resolve the ambiguity and dub the area “Shaug Town”. Much better ring to it.

Eyyy!

Having lived for two years on Mackay, a stone’s throw from the Shaug Town‘s eastern border, I’d like to think I know a bit about the dirty streets of downtown’s western annex.  Though not the city’s prettiest neighborhood–or even close– its unexpected vibrancy and wild contrasts mitigate any lack of good looks.

I always thought the “Village” component of the “Shaughnessy Village” label to be pretty ironic.  This isn’t a quaint neighborhood of two-and-three-story rowhouses–and if it once was, that day is long gone.  There’s no village-ness of any sort, no cozy sense of community; Shaug Town is about as Big City as Montreal gets.

Concordia's downtown campus has gone from"DRAB" to "FAB"

Abe Lincoln would be proud

Here is an alley

No scenic ruelles here–asphalt alleys wind their way through mazes of tall concrete walls.  Elsewhere in the city, the local architectural heritage is painstakingly documented and renovated; here it is vinylized, gutted, or otherwise demolished.   And the area is certainly not the product of any principled, rational urban planning.  Here, streetlife exists only by virtue of a very large amount of people living in a very small amount of space.

The Plateau can toot its own horn about the population density of its triplexes versus the Le Corbusier towers-in-a-park model.  They’re no competition for Shaug Town, though. The high-rises here are hardly the epitome of rationalist modernism–living conditions are by-and-large tight, the apartments small, the rents cheap.  The towers climb above rowhouses and low-rise apartments, stacking tenant atop tenant, student atop student, professional atop professional, immigrant atop immigrant.  Diversity here is forced by proximity.  Forget the poem outside the Mont-Royal metro, this is the heart of the city.

Arahova, Sexe Cité, Bar Diana: Trifecta of Quality

Shaug Town, USA

Ooodles of Nooodles

Fondoop-a-doop!

Not that I have any desire to live here.  I wouldn’t go back, and I technically lived outside the neighborhood.  I’ll take NDG, the Plateau… Outremont.  Shaug Town is a little too much for my tastes.

The high-rises–the legacy of a Drapeau-era real-estate boom–rise often and arbitrarily.   They pop up between row houses and  empty lots, crumbling commercial buildings and parking lots.  There’s no logic to the arrangement.  Traffic rushes up and down St-Marc and Fort, hurrying on and off the Ville-Marie Expressway.  There’s a sense of urban desperation here.  It’s as if the city threw up as many structures as it could, in a sort of last-ditch effort to delay Toronto’s rise towards national pre-eminence.

The legacy of this final growth spurt, the bizarre architecture, the retro-modernity of the expressway… it’s ugly but exciting.  The Montreal that accomplished this no longer exists.

This street is called Fort, but where's the FORT at?

The moorish arches are nice, but I find the staircases lacking

Tunnel towards Little Burgundy

Looking down Tupper towards Place Ville-Marie

I don’t know much about the history of the area–one day, I’ll actually do some research.  Still, the architecture of the area lays out a concise résumé: a heyday as a respectable bourgeois residential neighborhood; a momentary real-estate boom; a decline as surplus housing stock attracted students and low-income tenants.

It’s also common knowledge that the area was once the city’s gay anglo center.  Drapeau sent in the morality squads in anticipation of either Expo or the Olympics, and the community moved east.  Judging from the current vibrancy of the Gay Village, the neighborhood’s been the worse for it since.

Though the decrepit Seville block still stands vacant, a steady stream of small businesses continue to push their way westward: noodle shops, cafés, Asian groceries, awkward salons, a laundromat. The turnover is high, but the storefronts are filled.

It’s no beauty, but it works.

Columns and pediments add a classy touch to any building

Seville block and the Forum

It's Bananatime. It's the One-Oh-Eight!

Western boundary

HOLEY MOLEY!

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