The Gen-Xers also discovered the cities; they’re buying in a proper way. The Millennials are the ones we’re talking about. And they love cities desperately. And they’re loving them to death.
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.
