the plaza after rain [part ii]

Benjamin suggests we walk. I wonder if we’ll pass Ari and I glance around for her black pixie cut and soft white scarf. We pass the life-size elf princess on horseback in the window of the medieval cos-play store and Benjamin tells me that French philosopher Denis Diderot “had been working quite happily in his crowded, chaotic, and rather shabby study until he received a fancy velvet smoking jacket as a gift. He liked his new jacket but soon noticed that its quality made his surroundings seem threadbare. His desk, rug, and chairs looked scruffy by comparison. So, one by one, he found himself replacing his furnishings with new ones that matched the jacket’s elegant tone. He realized (though he later regretted it) that he had felt the need for a sense of coherence, a sense that nothing was out of place.”[1]

But this was more or less an haute couture accident. The City of Montréal’s awning, which you tell me is new, is Diderot’s smoking jacket. He’s speaking to me but looking at the plastic horse. I look to the awning. My fake fur coat with the sleek polymer rosettes of some dark unreal animal which I once thought of as “haute-thrift” suddenly looks quite shabby. 

I tell Benjamin that during the 1960s, the strip was a cultural nexus dappled with Vegas neons. It attracted some of the greatest Québecois stars of the era: Jean Duceppe, Anita Barrière, Claude Blanchard, Denis Drouin, Fernand Gignac, Jean Grimaldi, Raymond Lévesque, Suzanne Lapointe and Michelle Richard. Residential renovation subsidies in the seventies and the conversion of municipal workrooms into social housing rehabilitated the neighbourhood around the Plaza. In the 1980s waves of immigration from Vietnam, Latin America and Haiti—whom the Plaza website describes as “generally renters and relatively poor”—set up shop on the Plaza. I tell him of my visit to the two Plaza Psychics who, in perfumed rooms, read my palm and tossed cowrie shells on red silk and gave me, within the span of one hour, the same message: Your love life is a disaster, your money line, treacherous, and Black magic is coming. I had asked for the future of the Plaza and they had brushed me off. But I wonder if it was the Plaza, in that moment, in the storm’s eye of their prediction. This was before the plague, before the renovation. Today, in 2026, their businesses are not listed in the Plaza directory between Boutique Rêve and Bin Mart Liquidation. They may still be there, but virtually, they are not. Though I still have "Plaza Psychic" as a contact in my phone.

On one of my previous pre-refurbishment Plaza walks, I took note of every type of shop that exists on the street in a long list that eventually ran backwards down my small page. Despite the wealth in diversity and skill obvious to any Plaza flâneuse—Ghanaian cobblers, South Asian fortune tellers, Vietnamese restaurateurs, African clothing designers, Latin American grocers—the reputation of the Plaza to most was as “a bizarre strip of formal-wear shops touting bargain-basement prices on ‘80s-style prom and wedding gowns (and the requisite underpinnings).”[2] D’arcy L. from Terrebonne writes, Nothing really was of much interest to this cowboy other than a coffee shop. It really has a feel that the area merchants need to band together for a serious refresh or someone has to hope a tornado runs through here so a new beginning can be brought upon an old dilapidated area. In 2018, the city unveiled a two-year long multimillion-dollar project to refurbish the Plaza, in order to attract “different stores and big investments” due to “changing demographics in the neighbourhood.”[3] A major feature of this transformation was the replacement of the awning. It was wayfaring beneath the old marquise, years ago, that I suddenly felt I could summon a time-travelling Walter Benjamin, launch him unceremoniously from his beloved 19^th-century Parisian arcades to its campy Montréal kin, the Plaza Saint-Hubert. I had donned a mantle of polyester crinoline and declared myself its quétaine queen, then the whole place crumbled beneath my red heels.

*

I check the mail and find an envelope from Ari. I slide the little sound card into my laptop. There’s something in the quality of her voice, perhaps its warmth or a sort of self-assuredness, that immediately draws me in and keeps me for over two hours. She speaks naturally, without self-consciousness. She is quick to laugh. I can see why Walter Benjamin chose her. I look at the details of the file. The recording, to my surprise, began at 5AM.

“I feel like the temperature outside matches my body temperature”…“It’s so mild”…“Eat pussy, not animals, is written on a parking— parking machine or slot or whatever”…“Crop you have to tell phone bones is also written on a pole”…“Oh, that corner smelled like shit, like actual shit”…“Okay”…“I am now coming to the corner of Saint-Hubert and Jean-Talon”…“I see my own reflection in the mirrors or the windows of Lana Café and the shop next to it sells clothes”…“All of the eyes of the mannequins are covered with hats”…“And there’s this weird machine in the corner of the window”…“It says Cheque writer and signer service”…“And right across the street there’s a spa that has a light that says facial waxing”…“But in the corner of my eye, I thought it was a phone store”…“You know those places that— oh, there’s actually one place that fixes phones here and a jewellery store that closed down”…“It says Hablamos Español”…“Oh”…“But it probably went bankrupt because I don’t see anything on display.”

“It’s so weird to look up and there’s a ceiling with a reflection of the ground that I’m walking on”…“It’s kind of like”…“it feels like there’s an actual ceiling”…“Whenever I walked on the street, I always thought, oh, the building on top of me has a really large balcony.”

“So many phone places and spas, beauty spots, and an ice cream—Oh no, it’s a pizza store, a clothing store for kids”…“There’s light blue decoration”…“It makes me feel really comfortable”…“And they’re also hiring”…“I never have the urge to buy baby clothes”…“I only think, oh, look at that”…“That’s so cute”…“What if I put it on my cat?”…“Okay, so there’s a store with a TV screen playing a video on repeat”…“And it’s just a chest of men with different polo shirts”…“But I don’t understand why it says polo-style”…“It is polo”…“So a store specializing in polo shirts?”…“Does polo style mean something different than polo or a stylish person wearing polos? It’s like”…“The street makes me feel like all of the owners have some kind of agreement and they all just rob each other with consent and share whatever product they sell”…“Who needs this many spas? Bedazzled baseball hats”…“Whoa, I’ve never seen a Domino’s Pizza look this empty before”…“It looks like the cafeteria of a prison or a really, really boring corporate company”…“The square tables and the plastic red chairs, yeah, reminds me of an office job”…“Hair extensions”…“Hair extensions, nails”…“There’s a light blue wig on a mannequin”…“But if I were a person who wore wigs, I would not buy this because it looks so scary”…“and bad”…“Um”…“Oh! Okay”…“So I’ve just noticed that the mannequins have really large heads and bodies that are not proportional at all”…“There’s this neon pink wig with light like beige ends, and the chest of this lady or mannequin is two times smaller than the head.”

“So a lot of the marketing photos on these stores seem like they were taken on an iPhone or somebody’s home”…“It’s refreshing to see skin marketed and being able to tell that it’s not edited”…“You know, uh, a marketing for a lash tech focusing only on lashes and not making everything else perfect”…“Hmm”…“Fleur-de-lys”…“Face and hand reading, job problems, money problems, enemy problems can be dealt by specialist who brings back loved ones”…“And they also fix cell phones and sell clothes”…“And I think they also sell these mushrooms called Berat Bersih Mycovita.”

“The purpose of these shops is not to make money, but to express your… your interests”…“Express yourself”…“It’s kind of like an art, you know, where you put everything you like on display and they don’t have to make sense at all”…“I think this is what my brain would look like if it didn’t try to categorize everything”…“Into little boxes.”

“Oh, um, okay”…“I’m about to cross the street to go on Belanger”…“Um, my bad poetry would be, oh, my bad poetry would be, let me see”…“I’m just looking around...”

Raise your head
There’s a glass sailing above you
You can’t jump too high
because it will make the rain
fall on your head

[final section of this piece forthcoming...]

[1]     Paul Knox, “Material Culture and Society in Metrourbia,” in Metrourbia USA (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 143.

[2]     Ingrid K. Williams, “Five Places to Go in Montreal,” New York Times, January 11, 2017, accessed January 30, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/travel/five-places-to-go-in-montreal-canada.html.

[3]     “A goodbye for some is opportunity for others as work continues on St-Hubert Plaza,” CTV Montreal, October 14, 2018, https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/a-goodbye-for-some-is-opportunity-for-others-as-work-continues-on-st-hubert-Plaza-1.4133560.