Footbridge at Atwater: A Chorographic Inventory of Effects

A qualitative mapping of place, region, landscape, or waterway may be called a chorography. This text engages us in a poetic and creative recounting of the Lachine Canal, a vestigial corridor that draws a shallow line through the southwestern portion of the island of Montreal. Linking the Old Port of Montréal with the town of Lachine, on the shores of Lac St. Louis, the itinerary of his paper proceeds from an inventory of thirty-two contaminated sites on the canal. (Today there are more such sites, but this is where this qualitative accounting began). The Atwater Footbridge secures a platform from which—in thirty-two movements or gestures—van Wyck reflects on its layered social and industrial flows.

Constructed in the early nineteenth century, an era of great enthusiasm for canals in North America, the Lachine Canal bypassed the otherwise unnavigable rapids on the St. Lawrence River, the principle impediment to the smooth flow of trade between Upper and Lower Canada. Between 1825 and its closure in 1970, the Lachine Canal became a trade and industrial passage through which virtually all rail and water traffic on the St. Lawrence Seaway moved. The spatial and economic logic of Montréal came to be organized around this hydro-corridor: between Church and State, industry and urbanization, land ownership and production. Following the canal’s closure, and with much of its industrial infrastructure now in ruins, the canal was gradually reinvented as a recreational corridor. In 2002, under the auspices of Parks Canada and the Old Port of Montréal Corporation, the canal and its five refurbished locks were reopened to pleasure boating and designated as the Lachine Canal National Historic Site.

What has captured van Wyck’s imagination in all of this is not only the formal history of this corridor, nor the social and industrial transformation wrought by it. Rather, it is the material and sedimented accumulation of “past” that is very much alive in the present; this toxic and archival quality of the site of the Lachine Canal calls for a procedure both lyric and chorographic.