Our Swedish correspondent Cornelia has started hauling her camera around town again and spotted some stuff others might not have noticed. The tiles at the Laurier metro are nothing but a fake veneer, as she proves at left, (from her blog entry "Tell me tiles, tell me sweet little tiles.").
Whereas Westmount's manhole covers are of the finest quality, as you can see below. One thing about manhole covers: in poorer countries they routinely get stolen, so you can easily fall into a hole in the middle of the sidewalk, particularly perilous because those same towns are often ill-lit.
Kristian You're spot on. I'm in a fairly upscale area just outside of San Jose , Costa Rica & about 80% of the covers are missing. Dreaming of a Momesso Special right about now.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of marking wet concrete, I liked it when they stamped the year the structure/sidewalk was made.
ReplyDeleteLast time I saw that was 1994. It's the underpass on Cote Vertu under the Montpelier train station.
Thing is, those aren't the tiles at Laurier, it's just a coverup for the time being as an update to the drainage system at Laurier is being done. Same for Berri-UQAM, they removed the real tiles and covered it up with a plank of wood with the sticker of the circle tiles.
ReplyDeleteFor those who may not remember, the square-shaped sewers which are built on the actual edge of the sidewalks in Montreal used to be covered with about an eighth-of-an-inch metal plate.
ReplyDeleteHowever, these plates were eventually replaced with thicker and rounder ones and encased in the concrete so that the sidewalk snowplows could no longer accidently dislodge them--as so often happened--thus leaving a gaping hole for some hapless pedestrian to stumble into!
As for those "sidewalk construction identifiers": there are still many of those old metal maple leaf emblems embedded in places in Cote des Neiges dating back into the 1950s when the quality of cement they used was of better quality than it is today.
As with many things back then, they took pride in their work.
Small piece of Westmount man(person)hole cover trivia - north side of de Maisonneuve just feet west of Elm - cover on sidewalk from St. Leonard... I assume it was part of a sewer cover exchange program to foster good relations between municipalities...
ReplyDeleteYes, that was tile wall-paper at Berri UQAM, perhaps meant to be temporary, but it had been up long enough to start peeling off...
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