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The ex-churches of Quebec

On January 28, 2019

Quebec was colonized in the 17th century by France, a country that remained largely Catholic even as England, northern Germany, and other parts of Europe were turning Protestant. Like the mother-country, Quebec became Catholic. Protestants were not even allowed to settle there. Only after the British takeover of Canada in the mid-18th century was Protestantism even tolerated in Quebec.

In much more recent times, Catholic Church membership and attendance have dropped off sharply in Quebec, and many congregations have had to close their doors. The availability of deconsecrated church buildings has given rise to some intriguing examples of adaptive reuse. On a recent visit to Quebec, I saw one church that had been converted into a restaurant and another that was a fitness center. Neither use really makes sense to me, because they do not take advantage of the single large, enclosed space that is a hallmark of churches.

Decline in church membership is only one reason why churches might be converted to other uses or torn down. Another is urban redevelopment, which is carried out with particular ferocity on the land-hungry island of Montreal. Churches—along with many other buildings of historic value—disappear and are replaced by new construction.

But they don’t all disappear without a trace. On the corner of Viger and St. Denis streets, there stands a lonely church tower without a church. This is the tower of Trinity Anglican Church, built in 1865 and demolished in 2011 to make room for a giant new hospital, University of Montreal Health Centre. The tower was rebuilt in 2016, using the original stones. Even as the city is redeveloped, this memento of the past has been retained.

The reconstructed church tower of Trinity Anglican Church, next to University of Montreal Health Centre.

The Gothic church tower has been integrated into the glassy facade of the hospital.

The Gothic church tower reflected in the glassy facade of the hospital.

The backside of the tower is used for bicycle parking.

The story of Trinity Anglican Church is inscribed in the reconstructed steps below the doorway.

The story of Trinity Anglican Church (in French) is inscribed in the reconstructed steps below the doorway.

Vanishing Montreal blog has pictures of Trinity Anglican Church shortly before and during its demolition.

Exploring Brooklyn’s battlefield

By Willy

On September 12, 2017

In USA

In 2014, I spent part of the summer in Washington, DC, researching for my dissertation at the National Archives and Library of Congress. On weekends and some afternoons, I explored the city and surrounding region, and I even made longer trips to Pennsylvania and New York. As I traveled around, I kept running across sites or artifacts associated with the American Revolutionary War. The more I saw and read about the Revolution, the more I became aware of how little I knew about that part of history.

I made up my mind to read The Glorious Cause, by Robert Middlekauff, the volume of the Oxford History of the United States about the Revolution. The book is long, so it took me a while (I had to take a lengthy break in the middle), but it was worth reading, because I learned much that I, as a historian of the twentieth century, had never before had occasion to learn. (Since my fateful summer of 2014, interest in the Revolutionary War has gone mainstream, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton.)

While reading The Glorious Cause, I was particularly fascinated by Middlekauff’s narrative of the Battle of Long Island, also known as the Battle of Brooklyn—an engagement I had never heard of before. The Battle of Brooklyn (August 26-30, 1776) was the first major military engagement of the American Revolution after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence two months earlier. British troops, under the command of General William Howe, landed on Long Island and attacked the Americans under George Washington. (These events are covered in the Hamilton song “Right-hand Man.”) The American forces were protected behind the hills known as the Heights. The passes nearest the American positions in Brooklyn (then a village independent of Manhattan) were well defended, but the British circumvented the defenses by taking the lightly-defended Jamaica Pass to the east. A contingent of Marylanders died holding the main body of the British troops off at the Vechte farm, but most of the rest of Washington’s army escaped across the East River to Manhattan, surviving to fight another day.

In the 240 years since the battle, Brooklyn has grown to engulf the farmlands and woodlands where British and Continentals clashed. Scattered around the borough are sites associated with the battle, some marked with plaques, others not (but all listed in detail in this comprehensive guide). In addition to gentrified brownstones, hipster lofts, and forbidding project housing, Brooklyn has its own Revolutionary War battlefield. Brooklyn has it all.

In March this year, I spent a day exploring Brooklyn, looking for sites that had to do with the battle or the Revolution in general. I found two sites particularly interesting.

The first was Prospect Park, site of a pass where American troops were routed by Hessian mercenaries fighting on the British side. The park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead (whose other credits include Central Park in Manhattan and the US Capitol grounds) preserves part of the landscape of the battlefield, which has been lost under buildings and streets most everywhere else in the borough.

On a hillside in the park stands a monument to “Maryland’s Four Hundred,” who fell holding back the British (or “saved the American army,” in the exaggerated wording of the monument). The mention of the number of Marylanders is a not-so-subtle reference to the Three Hundred Spartans, who held the Persian army off at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, while the armies of other Greek city-states escaped to regroup and ultimately defeat the Persians. The placement of the monument to 400 Marylanders in the park, near the battle pass, is another reference to Thermopylae, because the Spartans died defending a pass. But despite the monument’s claim that the Marylanders performed their great deed “on this battlefield,” they did not fight in a pass; they fought on a farm, more than a mile from the monument.

Memorial to “Maryland’s Four Hundred” in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

Misleading inscription on the memorial to “Maryland’s Four Hundred.”

The site of that farm is the other especially interesting site related to the Battle of Brooklyn. The old farm is also a park—not a grand park like Prospect, but a small municipal park with a playground and athletic fields. In the middle of the park stands the Old Stone House. Originally built in 1699, the Vechte Farmhouse went to ruin and was demolished around 1900, but then in the 1930s the stones were dug up and the house reconstructed from drawings. The ground floor contains a small, free museum about the battle and its context.

The reconstructed Vechte farmhouse, Washington Park, Brooklyn.

The Old Stone House isn’t exactly the Vechte Farmhouse that stood there during the battle. It is a twentieth-century building made of seventeenth-century parts. But that doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is that there is plenty of continuity with the past, there and at other sites associated with the Battle of Brooklyn. There may be no national park for the battlefield, as there are for Saratoga and Yorktown. Instead, remnants of the eighteenth-century battle and its memorialization live on in twenty-first-century New York City.

How does Singapore work?

By Willy

On November 16, 2016

In Southeast Asia

For several years, I was perplexed by a little place called Singapore. I had never been there myself, but I had read and heard that it is a completely independent city-state on an island in southeast Asia. The more I learned about technology and economics, the more I was baffled by Singapore. How could a single city on an island survive as an independent nation? To function, cities need hinterlands from which to draw resources. But how can a city’s hinterland be in another country?

I was fortunate to get the chance to visit Singapore for a conference earlier this year, the Society for the History of Technology’s annual meeting. Having visited Singapore, and read up on it during and after my visit, I think I have a better understanding of how Singapore can be a viable city-state on an island. Here are some things I’ve learned about how Singapore works.

Land

It is true that Singapore is very small for a country, but it is large for a city-state. At 278 sq mi, it is much larger than the other two independent city-states, Vatican City and Monaco, both of which are smaller than a square mile. Singapore has room not only for urban areas, but also highways, parklands, reservoirs, military bases, and even some farms.

As Singapore’s population grows, land becomes ever more dear—a problem in dense urban areas around the world. One of Singapore’s solutions to the land crunch is buying sand from Indonesia and using it to reclaim land from the ocean. Another solution is particularly heavy-handed urban redevelopment: unilaterally replacing low-density neighborhoods with high-rise apartment blocks. This has created clean, healthy housing for the common man and woman, but it has also given most of Singapore a generic, characterless appearance.

Although Singapore is an island, it is separated from Malaysia (and the Asian mainland) only by the Straits of Johor, which is about as wide as the Hudson River between New Jersey and Manhattan. There are two permanent above-water links between Singapore and Malaysia, the Johor Causeway and the Second Link. The Johor Causeway opened in 1923, was partially destroyed by retreating Allied troops in 1942, then repaired by the Japanese within days of their occupying the island. It has been in use ever since. The Second Link, a longer but less-interesting concrete bridge, opened in 1998.

Scale model of the entire nation of Singapore, in the Singapore City Gallery.

Water

Singapore has four sources of clean water, known as the National Taps: 1) rainwater collected in reservoirs, 2) desalinated seawater, 3) three pipelines from Malaysia that cross over to Singapore on the Johor Causeway, and 4) processed wastewater. The last of these, known as the Fourth National Tap or Newater, processes the water through multiple stages of filtration and irradiation. Most of this water is used by industry, but some of it is pumped up into the reservoirs, mixed with rainwater, processed again, and then delivered to the municipal water system. (One of the Newater plants is integrated into a visitor center. Like so much else in Singapore, it is a tourist attraction.)

The drainage of Singapore island has been engineered on a huge scale, to save as much rainwater as possible. Singapore’s planners have gone as far as damming the mouth of Marina Bay, adjacent to the downtown commercial district, to convert it into a freshwater lake.

Tank at the Newater treatment plant with an integrated visitor center.

Marina Barrage, completed in 2008.

Energy

A highly-industrialized, heavily-urbanized place, Singapore has high energy needs. The island has no petrochemical deposits. Fortunately for Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia both have an abundance of petrochemicals. Singapore imports crude oil from its neighbors, processes it in refineries, and re-exports the refined products at a profit. The majority of Singapore’s electricity is generated from imported natural gas. I expected to find that Singapore also bought electricity from Malaysia’s electric grid, but it turns out that the opposite is the case: Singapore sells a little electricity back to its neighbor across the straits.

Food

More than 90% of Singapore’s food is imported. Farms on the outskirts of the built-up area produce some eggs, fish, and leafy greens, but almost everything else needs to be imported. The top sources of fruits and vegetables are Malaysia (of course), China, Australia, and the USA.

Despite needing to import everything—or possibly because of this—Singaporeans have developed a strong and distinctive food culture. My favorite experience in Singapore was eating lunch at a hawker center in Chinatown—a food court for inexpensive, tasty street food. I got filled up on a mushroom-noodle dish for S$4.50.

Economy

Singapore has managed to stay independent and continue drawing resources from its hinterland in other countries because of its robust economy.¹ Located strategically on the Straits of Melaka, Singapore has been an important free-trade port almost from its founding in 1819. The city-state’s industries include ship repair, electronics, and petroleum refining. Singapore is also a center of international banking, and its airport is a major hub in southeast Asia. Singapore has been able to sell itself as a clean, hassle-free (if generic) Asian travel experience, and tourism is thus a major part of the economy as well.

Singapore is an orderly, well-managed country. It is a demonstration that technocracy can work on a small scale—as long as you are able to banish your messy hinterland to another country.

Ships anchored off Marina Bay, Singapore.

Malaysia is also politically invested in Singapore’s independence. Singapore was a part of Malaysia from 1963-1965, but the Malay States expelled Singapore because their leaders feared the ethnic Chinese of Singapore would dominate national politics. [↩]

WillyLogan.com

Technology, History, and Place

Tag: urban space (Page 1 of 2)

The ex-churches of Quebec

Exploring Brooklyn’s battlefield

How does Singapore work?

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