Poetry in the city: the return of Montreal’s neon lights
MONTREAL — In Montreal’s Gay Village, a red-orange glow radiates from a Vietnamese tapas restaurant onto a side street lined with red, brown and grey-bricked apartment buildings.
Neon-infused glass tubes have been melted and twisted into the words “Cang dong cang vui,” meaning “the more the merrier,” and mounted conspicuously on a wall above the kitchen, which serves dishes inspired by Southeast Asian street food.
Lucent scenes such as this can be found across the cityscape, from a tiki bar in Chinatown with a green neon pineapple adorning its entrance to a cherry-red neon condor stretching its wings in a downtown Peruvian restaurant serving pisco cocktails.
Behind much of the resurgence of the city’s neon lights is a 59-year-old artist who works out of a 75-square-metre studio in a slightly derelict, repurposed factory that used to make porcelain toilets along the southern bank of Montreal’s Lachine Canal.