This city, so far, is:
Le Corbusier’s wet dream.
Land of Doughnut Plant franchises. (Take that, New Yorkers who think themselves swell for eating unhealthy blackout doughnuts at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge!)
Home of octopus served live, with the tentacles still wriggling around and the suction cups still quite functional.
The NY Observer reports that a feud between two factions of the Satmar Hasidic sect is imperiling the ugly-as-shit Rose Plaza development in Williamsburg. For details on the feud, read the Wikipedia page. (Fair warning: As with much of Wikipedia, it’s a contested site, so to speak.)
Running as an undercurrent in the drama is the complex world of Williamsburg Hasidic Jewish politics, with two bitter rival factions of Hasidim’s dominant Satmar sect staking out opposing positions on the issue.
Like oil and water, the two factions frequently take opposing sides in the community, supporting rival political candidates and warring with each other over proposed developments. The split initially formed over a succession fight after Grand Rebbe Moshe Teitelbaum, the sect’s leader, died in 2006, leading both his sons, Aaron and Zalman, to claim leadership. Their factions together have tens of thousands of members.
Recently, they stood in virulent opposition to each other on the hard-fought Broadway Triangle affordable-housing development planned for East Williamsburg, with the locally dominant Zalmanite faction strongly urging the plan, backed many Brooklyn Democrats and Mr. Levin, and many Aaronites working to defeat it.
If stopping poorly thought-out development—or at least giving projects time to breathe—is a side effect of the ongoing clash, I’m all for it. The Satmar community’s neighborhood in South Williamsburg has a kind of anti-aesthetic (I’ll explain more in a future post, once I can take some photos), and projects steered by Satmar developers often (but not always) de-emphasize design and context in favor of very utilitarian concerns. We shall see what happens here.
I’ve been perusing the PDF proofs for the piece about Montreal. It’s long and juicy and weird in unexpected and pleasant ways, and I’m excited to get it on this website. I wish I’d kept a diary alongside all of my notes for the article, though I wonder if I really would have had enough time to actually reflect on what I was seeing.
For example: we went to Saint-Viateur, the venerable bagel shop in the Mile End neighborhood, several times. We were first escorted by our tourism representative, Tanya, then we did a photo shoot with a band, and finally we stopped in to buy bagels to bring back to New York. Every time I went, I enjoyed a hot bagel, still warm from the oven. They were delicious. Here’s a dude making a few of the many thousands that the bakery produces every day. (Saint-Viateur is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, which is sort of insane.)
I never really appreciated the spartan space, or aroma, or the bakers with their wooden planks, because every time we were there I was thinking about where to take a photo, or where we should go next to maximize our time. There was always a loft party to attend:
Along those same lines were my impressions of Montreal’s architecture—I saw much of it, and learned about little. We met with a young, forward-thinking architect and professor named Thomas Balaban (who doesn’t seem to have a website), and gazed upon cool juxtapositions like this one, in Multimedia City:
But never got any kind of overview of Montreal’s city planning. Although it’s a pretty small place, all things considered, and there’s basically one main road (Saint-Laurent) that runs northwest from Old Montreal to the city’s outskirts.
A final note: People compared individual neighborhoods in Montreal to those in New York (e.g. Mile End is Williamsburg, Multimedia City is DUMBO), and compared the general climate of the city to Berlin. All these observations seemed pretty much on-point. Montreal is smaller than Berlin, of course, but it’s dirt-cheap and many people we met don’t pay rent at all. The people that do pay rent save all their loose change for the month, which is more than enough to cover the miniscule bill. Fuckers.
