Essays

For several years, Marcello Di Cintio has been visiting and writing about communities that live in the shadows of walls, fences and other “hard” barriers. L’Acadie fence in Montreal was the last stop in a three-year-long itinerary that took Di Cintio to the Western Sahara, the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the India-Bangladesh borderlands, Israel and Palestine, Cyprus, the US-Mexico border and Belfast. “Wall of Shame,” his story of the Saharawis in the Sahara Desert, appeared in Geist 74, and won Honorable Mention at the National Magazine Awards. It can be read at geist.com.

A fifty-year-old fence built of chain links and steel posts separates the Town of Mount Royal, one of Montreal’s most affluent neighbourhoods, from Parc-Extension, one of the poorest. The l’Acadie fence stretches for 1.6 kilometres in the middle of the city, along the west side of boulevard de l’Acadie from rue Jean-Talon to the Rockland shopping centre. The barrier has been referred to as “apartheid fencing” and “Montreal’s Berlin Wall,” but in spite of the hyperbole the fence is almost invisible.

For most of its length, the l’Acadie fence stands about two metres high. Shrubbery planted along the west side, however, grows taller. The thick hedge and its delicate pink blossoms conceal most of the barrier. Only the occasional gap in the foliage reveals the chain links and fenceposts. Three pedestrian openings marked by shiny gates on squeaky spring hinges represent the only breaches in the barrier. The gates were recently reinstalled and still have that new-gate smell, but the rest of the structure betrays its fifty years. The wire sags. Green paint flakes off the fenceposts, and scabs of rust run through the chain links.

There are no checkpoints along the fence: no electrified wire, no concertina wire, no red-lettered signs warning Keep Out. For a tool of apartheid, the fence appears almost benign.

In the late 1950s, the City of Montreal widened boulevard de l’Acadie, then called McEachran Avenue, and converted what was once a dirt track into a busy urban thoroughfare. McEachran formed the eastern boundary of the Town of Mount Royal (TMR); Town residents worried for their children’s safety, petitioned the town council to erect a barrier along the Town’s eastern edge. According to council minutes from May 1960, the Town contracted builders to erect a six-foot high chain-link fence with a single pedestrian opening and “an appropriate hedge.” The builders finished the fence in June.

The new fence faced Parc-Extension, a low-income neighborhood crowded with new Canadians. Montrealers around the city saw the fence as a class barrier, a structure built by the rich to separate themselves from the poor across the boulevard. In a letter to TMR’s town council, the City of Montreal wrote that Montrealers “have been greatly offended by the unsightly fence.” A former president of the TMR landlord association admitted to the newspaper La Presse that the barrier was a terrible political symbol and said “everywhere we go in Montreal they want to talk about the fence.”

Anger over the barrier seethed hottest in Parc-Extension, where residents believed the fence had been built to keep them out. “A lot of people were incensed,” Nick Semeniuk told me in his home on the east side of boulevard de l’Acadie. The house, which used to belong to his mother, faces directly across l’Acadie, and Nick was living there when the fence first went up. “I was quite mad, too. They wanted to keep out the riff-raff.” For Nick, the fence expressed in galvanized mesh a rivalry that always smouldered between the Parc-X boys and the “Townies” on the other side. Not outright warfare—Montreal is no Belfast—but the rather more benign enmity of teenagers from opposite sides of an economic line. Neighbourhood toughs from TMR hung out at the corner store near Nick’s mother’s house and picked fights with the local boys, and Parc-X kids felt unwelcome in TMR. “You couldn’t go to their parks. They would chase you out and say ‘You’re from Parc-X and you don’t belong here,’” Nick said. “So we beat them up.”

Parc-Extension ranks among the poorest neighbourhoods in Canada, not just in Montreal. Among dense, urban communities, only Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside can claim a lower median income than Parc-X. The neighbourhood is also among Montreal’s most crowded; its population density is five times the Montreal average. Thirty-three thousand residents press into an area about a kilometre long and half as wide hemmed in by rail yards on the west and south, Highway 40 to the north and the l’Acadie fence on the east. In French, the word enclave is also a verb, and Parc-X is enclavé.

Ever since the City of Montreal founded Parc-Extension as a community in 1910, the neighbourhood has been a draw for those born elsewhere. The British bought the first houses here; then, after World War II, the Italians, Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans arrived. (Most of these have since left; Nick considers himself the last “Ukie” in Parc-Extension.) Greeks moved in en masse in the 1970s, and by 1976 Greek was the neighbourhood’s most prevalent mother tongue. The Greek community remains strong, and white-haired Greek men still crowd the entrances to their cafés, but the majority of today’s immigrants to Parc-X now come from Africa and South Asia. Many restaurant kitchens that once served souvlaki and thick-crusted pizzas now offer cheap lunchtime thalis and tikka kebab. Nearly every Parc-X depanneur deals in cheap Bollywood videos. West African grocery stores import palm oil and cocoyams and advertise “outdooring” ceremonies for local Ghanaian children.  

From the street, the flat-fronted row houses and apartment blocks reveal nothing about Parc-X. Instead, neighbourhood life is revealed in the back lanes. Here, women clip their wash to clotheslines that run to lampposts and back through squeaking metal wheels. Saris and bedsheets hang like flags. Sequins on salwars flash the sun. The women—brown and black, clad in hijab or the bold prints of Africa—chat across this canyon of brick and laundry on balconies linked by coiling iron stairwells. Below, tiny squares of lawn—some trim, others surrendered to dandelions—lie littered with plastic toys and bicycles. Weeds along l’Acadie trap discarded phone cards, the detritus of the poor and the newly arrived.