Montreal is notorious for its ragged infrastructure: aging water pipes, fragile electrical grid, but especially the nasty potholes that damage hundreds of tires (and people) every winter.
The mayor elected last year, Soraya Martinez Ferrada, blamed the former mayor Valérie Plante for the poor state of the roads. However, Soraya forgot to mention that, even as she spoke, half of the City’s repair equipment was derelict and whoops, she apparently forgot to find or fund replacement repair services before the public suffered riddled-road rage.
(To be fair to Soraya and Valérie, there are foundational corruption and construction issues with Montreal’s roads, including adulterated concrete, that predate both their administrations by decades.)
Meanwhile, dozens of news articles and social media posts about injured cyclists, flattened tires, and wounded pedestrians stoked citizen fury.
Finally, one guy decided to take action.
Saad Tekiout owns a landscaping business but turned his hand to filling in potholes himself. Of course, times being what they are, he Instagrammed it.
Citizens went wild for Montreal’s own “pothole vigilante.”
Though the City did not condone Tekiout’s DIY approach to fixing the roads, they say they won’t pursue him for doing roadwork without a permit either.
And it seems Tekiout’s viral repairs may have spurred the City to finally start filling in potholes in earnest–here’s a crew I spotted yesterday around the corner from us…doing the work by hand, as they situation with the pothole-repair machines won’t be resolved for some time:
Others take a whimsical rather than practical approach to repairing Montreal’s pathways. Laurence Petit, a self-taught artist known as La Fée des Trottoirs (“the Sidewalk Fairy”) fills the cracks in Montreal’s sidewalks with tiny mosaics.
Unlike the Pothole Vigilante’s street repairs, flacking (as this artform is called) doesn’t violate any city permitting laws, and locals praise her colorful installations.
I encountered a couple of her mosaics myself, walking through our old neighborhood a few days ago:
Petit takes inspiration from Montreal’s own Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Though most Montrealers would prefer not to have cracks in their tire rims due to potholes, they appreciate the passionate humans who bring a little light to the path by healing our city’s defects in their own subversive ways.
