New Jersey Boucherville & Laval
Today I visited New Jersey The South Shore.
Now, before y’all get yer britches in a twist, yes, there are truly lovely places on le rive-sud like Old Saint Lambert and that bit where Blork lives, which are entirely sane, livable, normal places for humans.
But today we went out way, way, way past the cozy mazy subdivisions of Longueuil, Brossard et al and went straight for the jugular: Boucherville.
Namely, the new hyperdevelopment outlet mall that features an Ikea the size of Dorval Airport, a Structube, a soon-to-open Winners, La Vie En Rose, etc. etc. — all in all, a tawdry, tarty roadside attraction that must have been virgin forest, or at least married-with-children farmland, a mere decade ago.
The “mall” itself is rather like that one up near Blue Bonnets - a collection of decorated shedlike outbuildings amid a square kilometre of Parking Lagoon (© James Kunstler) in between the Moonbase Alpha office parklets, refrigerated warehouses, and the sanitized shed / animal death camp (take your pick) of Olymel’s meat-packing facility. An exotic-bird pet store on the way there proclaims itself “TWIT PALACE” in 9-foot-high letters.
There is no neighborhood to speak of near this store. Not for several miles at least. No sidewalks anyway.
The presumably local residents that shop at this Ikea really, really, really do seem more New Jersey than Manhattan - trés “bridge and tunnel crowd,” as my LA friend Eric would say; inhabiting that alternate reality where Marisa Tomei c. My Cousin Vinny is a style icon and the House of Pain (BOOMshalockalocka!) look for guys never really went away. I saw one happy couple who were creepily twinlike: same Tevas, same cargo shorts, same sleeveless shirt, same ponytail right down to the length. Buy in bulk and save, I guess.
That being said, the service at this outpost of ubersuburbia was golden-retriever friendly; a local kids’ soccer team was helping to bag items, all the lanes were open and we got through swiftly. Even the item-pickup zone was high-tech, with an airport-like “arrivals” monitor. Take note, Montreal Ikea.
As Mrs. Westexpressway got the char, I watched with some not unlargely misanthropic amusement as several good sub-burghers stared at their handful of flatpacked items, touchingly trying, and largely failing, to fit them into their Carlsbad-Cavernous SUVs. To be smug about it, we who had had Lego and aptitude tests as children had our entire office cubicle system packed into Thumbelina The Trusty Tercel* and whisked ourselves away towards the louche pleasures of the Lafontaine Tunnel.
***
Not that long ago we made a trip up to New Jersey Laval to visit the flagship store of Fly, the French furniture chain (featuring $8 M of your money invested by Desjardins. Hoo boy.) In case y’all were wondering, it’s not so French — most of the suppliers are local — and not so fly. Most of the stuff is literally the same as Structube / Dixversions / Pier 1 Imports, and even the most Ikea-like items were poor copies thereof. We saw dozens of things that were almost nice if the designers hadn’t decided to hit them with the Ugly / Poor Quality / Cheap Materials bundle of sticks.
That fleeting experience notwithstanding, it was the surroundings itself that amazed me. Fly is an anchor store in a new avenue of MegaStores, designed to look like a quasi-urban gated neighborhood crossed with a Hollywood backlot. It’s next to the Cosmodome space-camp, which itself is getting an eponymous subdivision next door. All of this of course not situated in a town per se, but amid other commercial developments clustered around freeway exits. For miles upon miles upon miles. This is not a “city.” It’s a glorified rail switching yard, and to say that is an insult to rail switching yards.
What are we doing? No, really. I thought we were a distinct society. I want Quebec to be a distinct society, and the Montreal metropolitan region to be the jewel in the crown. So why does so frigging much of the area around here look like US 1 outside of Princeton?
I mean, not to open any sort of culture war here, but what really differentiates Quebec from any other large Eastern seaboard state, aside from language, poutine, a delayed spring thaw, and hydroelectricity?
Same strip malls as Saint Catharines, ON. Same fast food fry-pits. Same car dealerships. Same cars. Same highways, same subdivisions, same farmland plowed under to the consumer credit death spiral.
We are smarter than this; Quebec spent 30 years developing its own parallel institutions so that we could control our destiny. So why do we go and make the same boneheaded planning mistakes and fall prey to the same get-rich-quick franchise schemes that everyone else in North America does?
*The gas-sipping Toyota Echo actually, but that wasn’t very alliterative.
July 4, 2004 10:36 PM
Comments
Oh, hey, I just noticed that your post is much longer (Didn’t click on the “read more” thing…)
Twit Palace! I’ve been meaning to get a photo of that for ages!
Regarding your final question, the fact of the matter is that aside from a handful of urbanites who live in the city, the vast majority of people here are just like people elsewhere in North America. Their biggest concerns are matters of convenience and affordability.
Even in the city you see this. Check Kate’s blog today for a link to a story on the amount of franchaise stores openning up on St. Denis.
We are awash in sameness, sad to say.
wrote Blork on July 5, 2004 11:05 AM
Ed, you nailed it. It’s probably the least efficient use of space possible; I can’t imagine what it must be like in winter. Even a bad old traditional mall-with-multilevel-parking-ramp is a better proposition; I suppose the idea these days is to have each store visible from the highway. I see dozens of SuperCenter type agglomerations like this in Oshawa when I take the train to T.O….and I can’t help but think, “When there’s no more gas, this whole area is doomed.”
I had no idea there even was an “old Boucherville.” I guess most of the old towns clustered near the river and extended back towards the land as they expanded. We’ll have to bike across the ice bridge someday and go on a tour of the nicer bits with you and Martine.
wrote aj on July 5, 2004 11:07 AM
again, Ed (comment 2):
Yeah, Twit Palace is a “where’s the CAMERA!” moment.
Convenience and affordability, in the case of sprawl development, soon turns out to be neither. It’s been well documented by others, but the cost of a new subdivision — water and power infrastructure, roads, etc. — has to be supported by taxes levied on older parts of a city where the physical infrastructure cost has already been paid several times over. And new subdivisions demand new highways which have been proven to worsen traffic, not alleviate it. Sure, the house itself might be cheap and the taxes somewhat lower, but there’s the extra cost of driving everywhere. You are sensible and take public transit to work, but hundreds of thousands of others drive every day.
All of this expansion was made possible by first, the post-WWII consumer credit boom, and lately, by the abnormally low interest rates that were designed to kick-start the economy after the dot-com bubble burst. The effect, though, is that it’s encouraging people to overextend their credit to buy houses and things they really can’t afford.
Same goes for businesses. That’s why they move out of the city and into prefab office parks near the border - some town offers them a tax holiday or whatever to attract them. Rereading Montreal Metropolis and that’s exactly what the different towns on the Island used to do, to get heavy smokestack industry into Montreal East or St-Henri, for instance.
But change one constant — the price of transportation energy — and the so-called savings vanish.
wrote aj on July 5, 2004 11:26 AM
1. In Sherbrooke you have both mall types one next to the other. “Le Carrefour” which is the big ass mall that killed all little shops downtown years ago. I’m not generalizing, exagerating or using classic “No Logo” comments, it really did kill them. In recent years they’ve been building the huge seperate but grouped megastores you mention. Even worse.
2. “Regarding your final question, the fact of the matter is that aside from a handful of urbanites who live in the city, the vast majority of people here are just like people elsewhere in North America”.
Isnt’t it interesting, reading this a week after the elections? Outside of the island; live almost exactly as in the rest of north-america. Ramble on about being different, vote Bloc. In Montreal; actually do live in a somewhat different, unique, multiethnic city, speak at least two languages, don’t ramble quite so much about being different, vote for a Canadian party.
Vast generalizations here, skipping over various details, etc. but still, that’s kind of the way it works no?
wrote Patrick on July 5, 2004 9:51 PM
There’s another one of those hyperdevelopment mall things in St. Bruno. It’s the weirdest thing, because it’s like a mall, except instead of one parking lot and one building, you get a huge cluster of big-box stores, each with its own parking lot. The worst of it is the Hellish maze of un-named streets that run between the stores and then out to the highway. Complete madness! It can take 15 minutes just to get out of the parking lots!
On the other hand, “old Boucherville” (the small village area on the edge of the St. Lawrence) is very, very charming. I always thought of Boucherville as an industrial wasteland until Martine and I started exploring a bit and went behind the malls.
And what’s up with the Boucherville IKEA? They only have the small hot dogs, not the jumbo ones! (A trip to IKEA *must* include a hot dog at the end.) On the other hand, it’s only about a ten minute drive from Chez Nous, so it’s nice to be there on a (for example) Wednesday night when there are only 30 or 40 people in the store, instead of the usual 800 or so!
wrote Blork on July 5, 2004 10:57 AM