Great Canadian Skyline Thread II

[Rico Rommheim]

It's worth adding to my piece that I find Vancouver's neighbourhoods outside of downtown extremely underwhelming. Mount Pleasant and the hoods around Broadway don't exactly do it for me, and Commercial drive is cute but that's about it.

I'm much more impressed with some nuggets in the peripheral cities, like Lonsdale in North Vancouver, The village-meets-the-wild of Deep Cove, the charming coastal area in White Rock, and the impressive (although still gloomy) New West.

Not crazy about the pop-up TOD highrise clusters in and around Burnaby, but that's another discussion.

Montreal's strength is it's inner city neighbourhoods that go in every direction for 10km. But once you get to the suburbs it's a dead zone. We don't have a Steveton, or a White Rock or a Deep Cove. Our suburbs' finest hour is St-Lambert and maybe Ste-Anne, and they're okay I suppose.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Rico Rommheim

It's worth adding to my piece that I find Vancouver's neighbourhoods outside of downtown extremely underwhelming. Mount Pleasant and the hoods around Broadway don't exactly do it for me, and Commercial drive is cute but that's about it.

I think Vancouver has a couple fundamental problems with its neighbourhoods but they are changing.

One is it's such a young city that even some areas close to downtown, or which might be expected to be considered downtown given the size of the metro area, have 20th century street networks that are not as pedestrian-oriented as 19th century or earlier streets. The commercial areas tend to be somewhat vehicle-oriented and linear instead of blob-like.

Then on top of this Vancouver has/had somewhat bad rapid transit coverage of the "inner city" and no highways so routes like Broadway have to carry a lot of traffic and it just sucks if you want to get around the wider ring of neighbourhoods outside downtown.

It is kind of "unfair" to judge Vancouver for these problems since it has probably been the most effective North American city at dealing with these issues in the modern era, while most other cities that suffer less from them inherited different infrastructure from the past. But it is what it is.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by thewave46

If we're talking street-level vibe, the shift from northeast to southwest is more the pattern. Someone might confuse parts of Brooklyn and Montreal as being in the same country, or even the same city. It's less a 'country' thing and more a pre-WWII development thing in North America.

Can anybody help me ID this one? I can't remember where I took it. Maybe Victoria? Regina? Hamilton?

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by someone123

Can anybody help me ID this one? I can't remember where I took it. Maybe Victoria? Regina? Hamilton?

Halifax?

[lio45]

If there were palm trees I'd guess Maple Creek.

[steve61]

Originally Posted by someone123

Can anybody help me ID this one? I can't remember where I took it. Maybe Victoria? Regina? Hamilton?

It looks a lot like Halifax and aside from the closest car in the pic, the rest all have N.S. plates.

[lio45]

In all seriousness, one can find areas that look nearly exactly like that in all of the Atlantic provinces, parts of Quebec, and New England.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by lio45

In all seriousness, one can find areas that look nearly exactly like that in all of the Atlantic provinces, parts of Quebec, and New England.

Correct. Yet it would be quite hard to find a similar scene in Ontario or farther west in Canada. So IMO there really are quite obvious regional differences and they're not just age based (Baltimore for example is just as old but doesn't have these same wooden style buildings).

And if you wanted to learn a bit more in depth about architecture there are some obvious "tells" in this like the Scottish dormers on that blue duplex.

I don't really expect somebody to know the second part but that first part seems pretty clear. If you can't ID a scene from say St. John's and lump it in with Western Canada I dunno what to say (carving out Victoria as being architecturally unique from the everything-but-Victoria group is even weirder, though I'm not sure if that was the suggestion; but if the architecture is not unique then we're talking about scenery, right?). If you can ID St. John's you're admitting there's a unique non-age-based regional style in Canada.

[lio45]

The rightmost two, the ones with the beige/brown tones, could be teleported to St. John's and they wouldn't look out of place there (at least to me). The next one looks a bit too "big city" to be anywhere but Halifax given that it's obviously a random residential neighborhood and not the city core (no storefronts anywhere in sight). The five-sided dormers on the pale blue one are also a giveaway that I did not miss, thanks to what I learned on this forum

[Laceoflight]

Originally Posted by Rico Rommheim

Montreal's strength is it's inner city neighbourhoods that go in every direction for 10km. But once you get to the suburbs it's a dead zone. We don't have a Steve[s]ton, or a White Rock or a Deep Cove. Our suburbs' finest hour is St-Lambert and maybe Ste-Anne, and they're okay I suppose.

I don't agree. The old cores of the suburban towns surrounding Montreal are as good as Steveston or White Rock (amongst other examples). Vieux-Chambly, Vieux-Terrebonne, Vieux-Longueuil, Beloeil/Mont-St-Hilaire, Vieux-La Prairie, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, even Vieux-Boucherville or Vieux Sainte-Rose... I also think about downtown Saint-Jérôme, or downtown Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, or Vieux-L'Assomption. These are all good suburban neighbourhoods. As long as they are Vieux-Something...

Originally Posted by Rico Rommheim

But once you get to the suburbs it's a dead zone.

That I agree.

[biguc]

Originally Posted by esquire

Vancouver was ahead of its time... it stood out more 25 years ago when it was doing the condos towers everywhere, bike lanes, adding AT infrastructure, etc. sooner and more intensively than other Canadian cities.

Many other Canadian cities have caught up, or at least closed the gap in that regard such that Vancouver doesn't feel quite as exceptional anymore.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. 20 or so years ago (jesus) when I started visiting this board, Vancouver was an absolute urbanist's darling. Now it's kind of an also ran. Things that were seen as amazing reinventions of urbanity, like towers on podiums, are now tired and widely recognized as pretty crappy.

Not to say that it's a bad city. It's fine for what it is. It also happens to be approaching the tipping point between midsized and big city. All indications are that it'll make the transition with style and emerge as a truly great city.

[WhipperSnapper]

I'm not the best at identifying the subtle nuances but I will still say post war construction is far more ubiquitous than prewar. One is growing. The other is shrinking.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by lio45

The rightmost two, the ones with the beige/brown tones, could be teleported to St. John's and they wouldn't look out of place there (at least to me). The next one looks a bit too "big city" to be anywhere but Halifax given that it's obviously a random residential neighborhood and not the city core (no storefronts anywhere in sight). The five-sided dormers on the pale blue one are also a giveaway that I did not miss, thanks to what I learned on this forum

For the record I think you can easily do something similar with Toronto. The older architecture there does not quite look like American Midwestern cities (or whatever you consider Buffalo etc.) and Toronto diverged a lot even around the 1960's. The overall effect is that there isn't much street-level overlap in the significant inner-city areas between a city like Toronto or say Cleveland.

We could always say "if you subtract X, Y, Z..." but this undermines the argument (the traditional deplorable vulgar response being "if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle"). I would argue that when you put the whole package together for many Canadian cities you get something quite unique.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper

I'm not the best at identifying the subtle nuances but I will still say post war construction is far more ubiquitous than prewar. One is growing. The other is shrinking.

This is true but I think it's underappreciated how Canadian cities actually got more distinctive in the modern era in many cases, Vancouver being a prime example. Although I would like to see more expression of regional architecture in modern infill.

Also it depends a lot on the city. According to Wikipedia the Halifax area had 122,656 people in 1941 (67,917 in 1881) and it is still under 500,000 today. Furthermore, common to most cities, a lot more people spend more time in the older more central parts than in newly-built suburbs. So the prewar stuff is still quite prominent.

[lio45]

You guys say that too in English?

It isn't fully true anymore though; if your uncle "feels" like a woman enough, she can legally become your aunt despite the XY chromosomes and the balls.

[thewave46]

Originally Posted by someone123

For the record I think you can easily do something similar with Toronto. The older architecture there does not quite look like American Midwestern cities (or whatever you consider Buffalo etc.) and Toronto diverged a lot even around the 1960's. The overall effect is that there isn't much street-level overlap in the significant inner-city areas between a city like Toronto or say Cleveland.

We could always say "if you subtract X, Y, Z..." but this undermines the argument (the traditional deplorable vulgar response being "if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle"). I would argue that when you put the whole package together for many Canadian cities you get something quite unique.

I suppose.

I just don't think the unique thing is necessarily a distinctively pan-Canadian element. Each region might have its quirks of design - some are a product of the people, or the materials available, or the time it was developed - but they're of a North American descent. That picture of Halifax could easily be an older Northeastern US town/small city. Toronto and Vancouver stand in for 'generic United States city' frequently.

The exceptions are somewhere like Old Quebec. Somewhere that has an absolute sense of 'there's nowhere else like this on this continent'. Aside a couple of examples of city Canadian distinctiveness, our cities aren't really that.

Our cities are similar to our English accent west of Quebec that could be 'Anywhere, USA'. It's not bad, but it's hardly our marker of distinctiveness.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by lio45

The rightmost two, the ones with the beige/brown tones, could be teleported to St. John's and they wouldn't look out of place there (at least to me). The next one looks a bit too "big city" to be anywhere but Halifax given that it's obviously a random residential neighborhood and not the city core (no storefronts anywhere in sight). The five-sided dormers on the pale blue one are also a giveaway that I did not miss, thanks to what I learned on this forum

Well... it's basically downtown depending on where you draw downtown's borders since it's kitty-corner to the library and a block from Spring Garden. The two brick buildings furthest left are actually shops although you can't really tell from the image.

[WhipperSnapper]

I disagree in part. "urban" Toronto could stand in somewhat convincingly for Anywhere, USA showing a picture of the actual city before showing the filmed scene with glimpses of Toronto or with CGI. However, it usually stands in for specific cities.

New York stood in for Toronto in the one and only episode of FBI I saw.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by thewave46

Our cities are similar to our English accent west of Quebec that could be 'Anywhere, USA'. It's not bad, but it's hardly our marker of distinctiveness.

I guess I'm the one that gets triggered by statements like this, so I'll chime in. Toronto's residential vernacular looks like nowhere in the US, and the commercial streets look like nowhere in the US save for maybe parts of lower-slung sections of Brooklyn or Queens.

The caveat always being that Toronto still looks North American to people from other continents.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by thewave46

Toronto and Vancouver stand in for 'generic United States city' frequently.

It's subjective. If we showed pictures to Martians they could say "yeah, these are all just boxes for earthlings made out of earth plants or earth dirt, whether we're talking Tokyo or Regina". I would hope SSP could do a little better than the level of sophistication/taste in architecture or urban environments of an average TV show or movie audience! And I'm skeptical that average Americans would have no idea if you were showing them a random shot of Toronto or NYC. Of course in practice on SSP we have no problem identifying these buildings as belonging to a given city or region most of the time. This belies the argument that these places are all the same, to a large degree. If they really were the same you would not be able to tell the difference (without non-architectural tells like license plates; the earlier picture was in fact a joke).

Within a lot of regions you can even often tell where the inspiration came from a given building. Those Fergus houses being one example. They really don't count as "Anywheresville" architecture except based on a very limited view of architecture (maybe at the level of "all old-timey stone houses look the same").