Archive for the ‘gentrification’ Tag
“Does Anybody Buy Books Today?”
Filed under: poems | Tags: gentrification, poems, poetry, poetry recordings, S.W. Welch Books
Leave a comment “Developers” are changing the face and character of cities all over the globe, no less in Montreal, Canada.
The city’s Plateau / Mile End neighbourhood has been undergoing gentrification for years, but a recent flashpoint has been the threatened eviction of a longstanding used bookstore, S. W. Welch. The landlord’s jacking the rent caused such an uproar that locals organized a “read-in” in support.
The story was widely covered in local media, including a number of telephone interviews with one of the landlords, Danny Lavy, quoted in the poster, above. Lavy’s words struck me as so representative of a certain mindset (like those that inspired Basil Bunting’s “What the Chairman Told Tom”) I quickly cobbled them together into a poem of my own.
You can hear the poem, here:
(You can read another poem about the changes in Mile End, here.)
“Mile End est mort…”
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: gentrification, Mile End, poetry
Comments (6) For the more than three decades I’ve lived in Montreal, I’ve lived in the quarter known generally as The Plateau and more specifically and recently (to my ears, anyway) Mile End, most notably at “Grand Gnostic Central” on the corner of Rachel and St. Urbain (scenes from the cinematic version of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz were filmed just up the block), a couple of locations on Hutchison and Parc Avenue south of Bernard, and, since 1996 (for the time being) on the corner of St Joseph and Parc in what our landlady calls her Chateau du Parc.
Credit: Mary Shelley
Montreal, like any number of cities on earth, is suffering a process of gentrification. In my area, it’s been underway for years, but it’s picked up since a number of software companies (Ubisoft and Softimage) have moved in. When it all began, I reflected that more affordable if less “desirable” neighborhoods attract those who can afford to live in them, which will often include creatives, writers, painters, artists, and so forth. Their creative energies, by a cruel dialectic, make the neighborhood more beautiful, pleasant and lively, attracting more residents and businesses, beginning a process of, well, gentrification. The creatives and others who made the place attractive in the first place are forced to move out, to some other quarter, sometimes in some other city, where the process can begin all over again.
A poem in Ladonian Magnitudes, “The Intersection” remarks this process. I share it below as a manner of memorial.
The Intersection
where l’Esplanade
meets Villeneuve
that spring dusk
the air’s first
breathable classic
sunlit redbrick
the unique quaint
three-storey walkups
characteristic of
the quarter’s charm
are almost all
so made up
like new the one
run down white tshirt
underarm stain yellow
building with muddy
white frames peeling
around cracked panes
stands out like
never among
those other fronts
kept up for years
without a thought
of what they’d go for
Poeta Doctus 