Why do I feel like Chicken Little?

Okay, so it isn't the sky, but the street which is falling. Or in danger of falling. For anyone who might be wondering just what I am talking about, you can read the actual news story here.

It's just the latest chapter in the history of our crumbling infrastructure, but an extreme example of hundreds of stores and offices closed indefinitely, along with the central portion of the green line of the Métro, because some leaking water has betrayed the existence of a giant crack in the slab of concrete supporting a block of the street above a Métro access tunnel.

Let's step back and look at this from the beginning.

That's too far! The crack you see there is the river around our lovely island, the only thing protecting us from the great hordes of the 450 area code around us! No, to focus in on the affected area, you have to get a lot closer.

Here is the same area, seen in panorama from street level:

Yes, this is downtown, next to the store the old timers in the city still refer to as Morgan's (we have a habit in Montréal of calling things by their old names, like we want to confuse the tourists), and next to the big office tower built next to the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral. The old timers among us will again recall some tidbits of history regarding the church and the building of the tower beside it and the mall beneath it.

First, the church has a kooky monument next to it which, as it turns out, is the former steeple. It seems the church was built on a swamp and the original steeple was too tall and too heavy for the land below to support, so it started leaning. They removed it, replaced it with an aluminum replica that was much lighter, and placed the original steeple on the ground next to the church to make people ask questions.

When the giant construction project was underway, passers-by were treated to this sight:

Not only did they excavate under the historical church to build the mall below, but in the process discovered a rare species of salamander in the historical swamp that halted construction for many months while the little creatures were painstakingly relocated. The other part of the construction story is the fine business sense of the church leaders: the whole project is part of an emphyteutic lease, meaning that ownership of the lucrative mall and office tower in this prime downtown spot will revert to the church at the end of the 99-year period of the lease.

Of course, this might seem less than brilliant at this moment with the area evacuated indefinitely!

These are the fears:

that our traditional attention to street quality


will lead to a larger type of collapse


bringing down not only the gleaming office tower behind the church


but also Morgan's (The Bay for anyone who has arrived in Montréal since the mid-1970's)

all of which will fall inward, collapsing into the McGill Métro station

I do have a suggestion to alter our infamously inscrutable parking signs, replacing this

with something more like this

I'm sure that we're all quite glad that all of that 'infrastructure' money (federal-provincial-municipal funding program) of the last couple of decades was spent on such useful items as hockey and canoe museums instead of on ensuring that half the water we purify doesn't leak into the ground and our streets don't collapse!

At least we don't have flaming balloons falling from the sky and igniting our trailer parks! (The trailer parks are all in the 450 anyway!)

Palmiers!

If you ever wondered just how tropical it might feel in Montréal on a summer day, with heat and humidity in great abundance, your wonder just might take a beating from this summer's folly of installing palm trees as sidewalk plants in our Gay Village.

It isn't that it doesn't get, as I have already said, hot and humid enough in the city during the summer months. In fact, I have marvelled for years that people move their distinctly tropical houseplants outside to their balconies and stairwells for several months with nothing but positive results. The folly might have been in the timing.

At the beginning of May, my sister was visiting me from Australia. Within days of our taking this picture in Québec City:

(yes, that would be snow upon which she is standing, albeit the very last of the snow to be found there), crews were installing the large palm trees on the four corners of Amherst and Ste-Catherine in the Village:

(Remember this second one, as I have an August photo of the same tree a bit later.)

We flew off to British Columbia to surprise my middle sister for her belated 50th birthday and while we were there the overnight temperatures in Montréal descended to about 3°C. Now I am no horticultural expert, especially with respect to palms, but I suspect that this was somewhat less than ideal for our large sidewalk decorations.

This is the worst result, and would be even scarier if it were not for the large green tree behind it that actually belongs in this climate:

And remember that second palm pictured above in May? Here it is now, still looking a little less than lush after weeks of hot and humid weather:

Now, lest we think I am just an evil critic of my neighbourhood's decorating decisions, let me point out that they also installed dozens of much more manageably-sized palms in large boxes and pots along the commercial streets of the neighbourhood. While some of those seem to be involved in life-and-death struggles with their companion plants:

and:

...others look very balanced and quite lovely:

See?! I ended on a positive note! ;-)

Getting Underway!

Here we go again!

I'm finally getting my annual drive for sponsorship for AIDS walk underway. This year our walk, called Ça Marche, will take place on an auspicious day for me. (Hint: my mother spent this day in the hospital some thirty-seventeen years ago and about ten days later a very official document bearing my name was issued. But let's not speculate on what that day might be.) ;-)

Ça Marche is one of the most important events in which I participate each year. Since my own diagnosis with HIV almost ten years ago, I have had a very personal introduction to the importance of HIV-specific services in our community and to the tragic consequences of a society that thinks that HIV/AIDS is something that is happening somewhere else, or to someone else.

Ça Marche gives me the opportunity to do something concrete about both of those things — raise money to help support the necessary services in my own community, and get out on the streets with other like-minded people to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS right here in Montréal.

I also get to challenge people in my own organization: any team of 8 people able to better my personal total earns a cake baked by me. I wouldn't mind baking a bunch of them, but I would like that to mean that everybody raised lots of money, not that I lowered the bar!

If you would like to sponsor me for Ça Marche, here is the link that I have somehow not figured out how to add to the template element at the right of the page.

Every dollar counts, and it makes my walking 7 km on arthritic feet worthwhile!