Winter

by Adam Gopnik

  I took the freedom of that underground city for granted — as every denizen takes his burrow — as just the natural and logical consequence of a cold city, but of course it was nothing of the kind. Instead, a generation of planners, fairly called visionary, and in particular another émigré, American-born but a long-time resident of Montreal, named Vincent Ponte, had shaped my school-free afternoons. Cities, as the urban philosopher Jane Jacobs taught us, are self-organizing, but they are not (as in her lesser moments she sometimes seemed to imagine) self-starting. The entirety of this subterranean system was the result of conscious decisions, envisioned and executed by a generation of urbanists who, for once, got it mostly right, and they have gone on getting it righter since. Forty years after my wanderings, Montreal now has a huge indoor network of tunnels, walkways, atriums, and above-ground extensions within sixty separate real estate complexes, some public and most private. It’s almost twenty miles long, and still growing. Within the Big Burrow there are office, retail, institutional, cultural, hotel, residential, recreational, and transportation services, including ten Metro stations, two commuter rail stations, and two regional bus stations. By now eighty percent of the entire downtown’s office space can be accessed without stepping into the cold air, and more than half a million people a day are citizens of the subterranean city. There are two thousand stores, almost two thousand housing units, two hundred restaurants, forty banks, forty movie theatres, a cathedral, an exhibition centre, and a convention centre. It’s a model of urbanism in a cold climate, the ultimate winter city.

  There’s a plaque in ground zero of this complex, Place Ville Marie, dedicated to the late Vincent Ponte, naming him as the godfather of this underground winter world. Ponte was a young architect who came to Montreal with the Chinese-American I. M. Pei in 1959, at the urgings of the developer William Zeckendorf, to rebuild the big gash in the middle of the city where the railway had run and make it into a new development, a cruciform high-rise unlike anything seen in the city until then. Now Ponte, like Pei at the time, was in many respects a classic Corbusian thinker and architect, someone who had absorbed the then-governing rhetoric of the mega-block, the enormous tower set in a plaza. He was a “master planner,” a type that right-­thinking architectural critics now reject. But parts of his plan were masterly, and he seems to have had a special gift for making master plans seem seductive, irresistible; one later client, a Dallas realtor named Jack Gosnell, said that listening to him was like attending a concert by Elvis Costello: “horn-rimmed glasses, a shock of black hair, and a hypnotic sound.”

  It hadn’t yet become quite so evident as it soon would that the big, open plaza in which the ideal skyscraper was always placed would for the most part, and wherever one found it, become an urban wasteland. Without corners or small stores, without the necessities of collision and bump and interchange that cities demand, those plazas, from Anchorage to Albany, became spirit­ual ashtrays. But though Ponte may not have known that the big plaza would never work in a winter city — well, they never work anywhere, but they work least well when the wind blows cold — he did see something else: that one could look down and dig down and make a second city there.

  And so his master plan for Montreal in 1961 was one of the first “multidimensional” city plans, inspired by Renaissance ideals, insisting on street life at several levels, and beginning — by a simple, baby-step series of connections between the train station, the new Place Ville Marie, and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel across what was then Dorchester Street — to build the city below. And on that basis there began a kind of organic growth; one tunnel met another, and one crossing crossed one more, and soon a kind of small Italian hill town was rolling along underneath Montreal.

  Two simple changes — and who exactly spurred them is a matter of some small debate — helped and were hugely important. One assured that everything in the city below a certain point would be public property. In New York City, by contrast, if you own a property you own it, as the saying goes, all the way down to China. (Of course, in China you own the opposite building right through to Manhattan; at the moment the smart money is on the Chinese to take possession of the earth between the two points if there were a conflict.) If you want to tunnel underneath the Empire State Building you have to defer to the people who own it. In Montreal, somewhat uniquely, you have a complicated lease arrangement where everything below ground belongs to everybody: you can tunnel by right, if not quite at will. Ponte also seems to have rightly envisioned the new Montreal subway, the Metro, as the real spine and bloodstream of an underground city, to have seen that the below-ground city spreads naturally from the existence of a more familiar city thing: the below-grade train. The multidimensional city depends on a subway to serve as its nervous system, and a series of tunnels and walkways to serve as its connective tissue.

  The idea of an underground city, of digging deep for space denied above, is an ancient one, and usually ambiguous in feeling. Ideas of fear and caution inflect the below-ground living space. The Jews of the Middle Ages were not allowed to let their synagogues rise above, or anywhere near, the local church steeple, so they had to dig down for more space. In our own time, the idea of going below ground seems especially unappealing — it puts us in mind of the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, forced by the Eloi to live in a sunless subterranean wasteland — and, to be sure, the very first substantiation of that underground world in Montreal had its dank passages and smelly subsections. But over time and with experience, it became apparent that if you create light wells, and if you have a kind of permeable membrane of stairs and escalators leading you below ground and above ground and back again, you can create a fully heated, massive below-ground city that will be as appealing as the city above.

  Everyone could arrive in the centre of the city by train and leave their car at home — or never have one. The underground city helped midwife a remarkable rebirth of the central city (but not always and not everywhere — the western edge of St. Catherine Street in Montreal has been laid waste). On the whole a kind of virtuous circle begins that Ponte, for one, seems to have anticipated: when people are brought in below ground they are eager to come up above ground. You create a permeable membrane between the underworld and the overworld, all based on foot traffic — on the pedestrian, the walker, who is the city’s red blood cell, without whom the city pales and sickens and dies of anemia.

  Early last March I had the great good fortune to walk through the subterranean city with the architect Peter Rose, one of the builders of modern Montreal in its formative years. It was a bitterly cold day — the kind of day in Montreal that makes you believe that spring will never come, bringing my Haitian cab driver on the way in from the airport to something close to tears as he considered the climate of his exile. Peter and I trod from one end of the underground city pretty much to the other, stopping for lunch and coffee along the way. The first thing Peter asked me to note about the underground city now is that it isn’t really any longer underground, and the other thing is that it is not a separ­ate city but a second city, beneath the skin, that feeds and sustains the city streets above. Where the underground city of my youth still had something a touch stale about it, smelling of the tunnel and the burrow, the new one — stretching east to entangle the vast basements of the vast developments with which provincial and federal governments have warred for the heart of Montreal and the allegiance of Quebecers — is now a subtle, mutable space well lit by intermittent pools of light amid the foot traffic of office buildings, creating exactly the atmosphere that Ponte dreamed of, in which the inner world becomes an artificial Serengeti. One walks, coat on arm, quite literally for miles, without stopping to think that outside it is bitter and hostile.

  Once again, the possibility of walking below, in comfort, gives the city back to the walker, whose natural mode is curiosity. We have learned that even very small elevations towards the sun can make a big difference in feeling and temperature. Even in
the dead of winter on a bitter day, the street life above our starting point at Place Victoria had a density equal to that of the life going on below. Density tends to produce, and reproduce, density. The underground/above-ground spaces create a permeable membrane of civility where life tilts easily up or down. Like ant colonies in the best sense, the overflow outside is a sign of the teeming life inside.

  Successful cities are never mono-causal; there is no one master plan. (The most beautiful city in the world is built on and around water, and demands, of all things, boats.) Ponte made a parallel plan for Dallas that was an absolute disaster, simply because tunnels alone — in the absence of a subway and winter — don’t work. Ponte is as hated in Dallas as he is honoured in Montreal. There the multidimensional underground plan is decried, derided — exactly because it killed the life of the streets, “stripping them of their humanity.” The trouble is that the Texas city was rooted in the car and its parking places; Ponte’s vision could not be applied without the spine of the metro. (“The tunnels these days have got to be dealt with in a compassionate, thoughtful, and fair way,” one urbanist says of the Dallas tunnels waiting for destruction.) In Montreal the choice is not between the street and the tunnel but between the winter street and the underground city. The greatest nervous system in the world is no good without blood circulating, and clean arteries are no use at all without clear neural networks.

  I think there is also a subtler asymmetry at work between winter and summer cities that may miss even the architect’s and planner’s eyes. It is the difference between being very hot and very cold. When you’re very cold, you can almost always get warmer; the first and most effective savannah “box” is still a fur coat. In very hot weather there are sharp limits to how cool you can get, and you can’t get much cooler, at least not decently, on a city street. In cold weather, with the right clothes on, you can walk out and around the city happily, if a bit briskly. The city “works” for walkers on two levels and temperatures. But in ninety-degree weather there is really nothing to do save gasp and go inside where it’s air-conditioned; there is no equivalent portable temperate box, save an air-conditioned car (most Americans are already in shorts and T-shirts). “We cannot walk in hotness,” my then four-year-old daughter declared one day in the ever-hot Roman Forum, and it is true.

  So there is an essential irony in this story. The stress of the winter city makes it sweet. The multidimensional plan is not an all-purpose solution to anything, but it is an ideal solution to one thing, and that is winter. Where the tropical city resists the underground solution in both senses — both the metro and the purposeful non-mall — and retreats to air-conditioning units that shuffle from barred space to gated community to fenced enclos­ure, the winter city invites the walker in. Winter cities can become close to ideal cities because, in escaping the cold, they defeat cities’ real enemy — the car — and let cities’ real necessities — the pedestrian and the small store — intermingle on several levels, even in the most resistant season.

  Winter acts on the city as a positive stressful and shaping presence. It is no accident, none at all, that the cities that feel most successfully urban, that have kept the cosmopolitan spirit alive through the long assault by the car, are almost all northern cities: the towns of northern Europe, Paris (yes, it is), the cities of Scandinavia, the cities of Canada. It is not just that these cities thrive in spite of the weather, but rather that the weather, met by a resourceful enough architect’s response, makes them better cities. Winter is not a barrier the city has to overcome but a pressure that makes it better — the ice-wine principle. Extreme stress forces compression, and it’s compression that makes things sweet. The winter city is alive for walkers in a way that the tropical city is not. The more winter, the more walkers; the more walkers, a richer world. It’s a simple but immensely potent formula.

  Yet there are losses in the conquest of winter, and they are real — losses that I think have to do with the relationship between the indoor city and the outdoor world. The first loss has something to do with that prime experience of the watcher and the window, the experience that shaped the nineteenth century, the Romantic apprehension of what winter is and could be. That feeling that only the thinnest of membranes, the simple pane of glass separating the onlooker — the poet or the painter or the ordinary child — from the threat beyond is one that has receded from our immediate experience. There is a great difference between the experience of winter before our eyes and of winter above our heads. The artificiality of the underground or indoor city — this ability of ours to make an artificial environment, to turn those little bubbles from the savannah into larger tempered sheds — means that we escape winter where we once engaged it.

  This alteration to what I call Romantic winter is, of course, still more acute in the case of radical winter, where the great frontier of the Far North, and South, is now colonized, domesticated, fixed. (Richard Panek’s book The 4 Percent Universe has wonderful descriptions of the base station at the South Pole as it exists today, in all its slightly claustrophobic comfort. On “warm” days people run outside in sneakers and jeans; on colder ones they snuggle inside with DVDs. Neither hopelessness nor heroism infects their circle.) I think that we feel this loss, this alienation, this divorce from the experience of winter, and everything we connect with winter, in our literature and in our art.

  Though it may seem a lurch to pass in a paragraph from city planning to verse making, it shouldn’t. What else is poetry for, save to memorialize an everyday emotion, to build tunnels between common life and common space? Two poems by my two favourite mid-century American poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Randall Jarrell, certainly began to hint at how that kind of transformation of winter imagery has taken place in our minds and, indeed, in our souls: part of our increasing alienation from nature is our distance from winter.

  You’ll recall that all the nineteenth-century poetry that has littered our path — Cowper and Wordsworth and Coleridge — and all of its art — from Friedrich to Lawren Harris — rested on the sense that the seeming pain of winter, whether experienced temporally in one place or spatially in pursuit of a pole or two, provided a deeper pleasure. Meaning lay in the pursuit, in singing skates or pressing icebergs. In the second half of the twentieth century, winter is experienced in poetry of disillusion rather than of renewed illusion. I think of Bishop’s wonderful poem “The Imaginary Iceberg,” which begins:

  We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,

  although it meant the end of travel.

  Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock

  and all the sea were moving marble.

  We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship;

  we’d rather own this breathing plain of snow

  though the ship’s sails were laid upon the sea

  as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.

  O solemn, floating field,

  are you aware an iceberg takes repose

  with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?

  . . .

  The iceberg cuts its facets from within.

  Like jewelry from a grave

  it saves itself perpetually and adorns

  only itself, perhaps the snows

  which so surprise us lying on the sea.

  Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off

  where waves give in to one another’s waves

  and clouds run in a warmer sky.

  Icebergs behoove the soul

  (both being self-made from elements least visible)

  to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.

  We would rather have the iceberg, even as a destructive knell and portent of our own disillusion. Remember the myth and meaning of the iceberg that we looked at in the paintings of Lawren Harris? They were all about transferring human consciousness into the icebergs. Now Bishop’s imager
y becomes, on the whole, inanimate as the last vestiges of the Romantic faith in a living, spiritual nature pass away. Now the iceberg is the one thing into which consciousness can’t pass, even if we will it to, for the iceberg “cuts its facets from within.” It saves itself perpetually and adorns only itself. The iceberg is alluring because it’s self-sufficient; that’s why we’d rather have it than a ship that’s as certain to sink as we are. It’s a full stop at the end of consciousness — and we prefer it because of its stubborn, resolute blankness. The iceberg, once a dangerous, half-sinister, half-benign, pulsating, living deity, is now an emblem of self-sufficient indifference. The ship sinks; the icebergs don’t care.

  Randall Jarrell’s winter poem, “90 North,” set as a childhood fantasy, is similarly disillusioned about the old straight, hard path between pain and meaning. Where Bishop writes an epitaph for Romantic winter, Jarrell writes one for radical winter.

  At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,

  I clambered to bed; up the globe’s impossible sides

  I sailed all night — till at last, with my black beard,

  My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.

  . . .

  Where, living or dying, I am still alone;

  Here where North, the night, the berg of death

  Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness,

  I see at last that all the knowledge

  I wrung from the darkness — that the darkness flung me —

  Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,

  The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness

  And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

  The search for radical winter now ends as a metaphor not for stoic courage but for nothing: “I see at last that all the knowledge / I wrung from the darkness / . . . is worthless as ignorance . . . / Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain.” Though Bishop’s iceberg is more nobly enigmatic and mysterious, and Jarrell’s is simply the name we give to death, both begin with the awareness that neither divinity nor an occult secret resides in cold, in winter. The secret winter is keeping is that there is no secret, just the resistant, obstinate fact of matter. Pain can be called wisdom — that was the foundation, the story, or myth, of the nineteenth-century Pole — but now we know it’s just pain.