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Posted May 3, 2021, 2:27 PM
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The Vomit Bag.
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Join Date: Oct 2003
Location: Otisburgh
Posts: 44,903
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For years, it was "The Main" (Blvd. St. Laurent) in Montreal, but I would submit Boul. Acadie as a better example. To the left, the boundary of very posh Ville de Mont Royal. To the right, the boundary of one of Canada's poorest neighborhoods, Parc-Extension.
https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5256...i8192?hl=en-US
https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5243...i8192?hl=en-US
https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5277...i8192?hl=en-US
There was a chain link fence for many years on this boundary. My Mom, who grew up in VMR, recalls when they would always lock the gates just before Halloween, so as to prevent the kids from the wrong side of the tracks from trick-or-treating on the nicer side of town.
Quote:
The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.
For several years, Marcello Di Cintio has been visiting and writing about communities that live in the shadows of walls, fences and other “hard” barriers. L’Acadie fence in Montreal was the last stop in a three-year-long itinerary that took Di Cintio to the Western Sahara, the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the India-Bangladesh borderlands, Israel and Palestine, Cyprus, the US-Mexico border and Belfast. “Wall of Shame,” his story of the Saharawis in the Sahara Desert, appeared in Geist 74, and won Honorable Mention at the National Magazine Awards.
A fifty-year-old fence built of chain links and steel posts separates the Town of Mount Royal, one of Montreal’s most affluent neighbourhoods, from Parc-Extension, one of the poorest. The l’Acadie fence stretches for 1.6 kilometres in the middle of the city, along the west side of boulevard de l’Acadie from rue Jean-Talon to the Rockland shopping centre. The barrier has been referred to as “apartheid fencing” and “Montreal’s Berlin Wall,” but in spite of the hyperbole the fence is almost invisible.
For most of its length, the l’Acadie fence stands about two metres high. Shrubbery planted along the west side, however, grows taller. The thick hedge and its delicate pink blossoms conceal most of the barrier. Only the occasional gap in the foliage reveals the chain links and fenceposts. Three pedestrian openings marked by shiny gates on squeaky spring hinges represent the only breaches in the barrier. The gates were recently reinstalled and still have that new-gate smell, but the rest of the structure betrays its fifty years. The wire sags. Green paint flakes off the fenceposts, and scabs of rust run through the chain links.
There are no checkpoints along the fence: no electrified wire, no concertina wire, no red-lettered signs warning Keep Out. For a tool of apartheid, the fence appears almost benign.
In the late 1950s, the City of Montreal widened boulevard de l’Acadie, then called McEachran Avenue, and converted what was once a dirt track into a busy urban thoroughfare. McEachran formed the eastern boundary of the Town of Mount Royal (TMR); Town residents worried for their children’s safety, petitioned the town council to erect a barrier along the Town’s eastern edge. According to council minutes from May 1960, the Town contracted builders to erect a six-foot high chain-link fence with a single pedestrian opening and “an appropriate hedge.” The builders finished the fence in June.
The new fence faced Parc-Extension, a low-income neighborhood crowded with new Canadians. Montrealers around the city saw the fence as a class barrier, a structure built by the rich to separate themselves from the poor across the boulevard. In a letter to TMR’s town council, the City of Montreal wrote that Montrealers “have been greatly offended by the unsightly fence.” A former president of the TMR landlord association admitted to the newspaper La Presse that the barrier was a terrible political symbol and said “everywhere we go in Montreal they want to talk about the fence.”
Anger over the barrier seethed hottest in Parc-Extension, where residents believed the fence had been built to keep them out. “A lot of people were incensed,” Nick Semeniuk told me in his home on the east side of boulevard de l’Acadie. The house, which used to belong to his mother, faces directly across l’Acadie, and Nick was living there when the fence first went up. “I was quite mad, too. They wanted to keep out the riff-raff.” For Nick, the fence expressed in galvanized mesh a rivalry that always smouldered between the Parc-X boys and the “Townies” on the other side. Not outright warfare—Montreal is no Belfast—but the rather more benign enmity of teenagers from opposite sides of an economic line. Neighbourhood toughs from TMR hung out at the corner store near Nick’s mother’s house and picked fights with the local boys, and Parc-X kids felt unwelcome in TMR. “You couldn’t go to their parks. They would chase you out and say ‘You’re from Parc-X and you don’t belong here,’” Nick said. “So we beat them up.”
Parc-Extension ranks among the poorest neighbourhoods in Canada, not just in Montreal. Among dense, urban communities, only Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside can claim a lower median income than Parc-X. The neighbourhood is also among Montreal’s most crowded; its population density is five times the Montreal average. Thirty-three thousand residents press into an area about a kilometre long and half as wide hemmed in by rail yards on the west and south, Highway 40 to the north and the l’Acadie fence on the east. In French, the word enclave is also a verb, and Parc-X is enclavé.
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more on the Great Wall of Montreal here:
https://www.geist.com/fact/essays/th...l-of-montreal/
__________________
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. (Bertrand Russell)
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