Money moving, the Model T, Acorns and Brian Merrett, photographer and saviour of Buildings.
October 16, 2023 Volume 4 # 21
Money Moves to Safety
Rich people leave places that are dangerous— South Africa and Mexico— and go to places where there is the rule of law. Australia, and it has sun to boot. Ditto New Zealand. They also leave if taxes rise or are likely to rise if there is the threat of a new reforming government in the near future. Russia for obvious reasons is shedding millionaires, and if you fall foul of the Party in China you might end up dead. Britain is an odd one. Probably rich Russians heading for the United Arab Emirates where they are safe from sanctions and can park their yachts. But the Daily Telegraph reports that the British super rich are heading across the channel to France. France has Ireland-like tax breaks for the super-rich so it has seen an uptick in rich residents. Paris and Provence beckon. Relatively tiny Portugal has tax and pension laws that attract the rich. But the new Socialist government is axing them. Canada and the US love rich immigrants.
Bitcoin Mining
Using a computer to produce a bitcoin is said to take a lot of energy. It is called mining, though that is as realistic a word as the Cloud is for describing all the computers that store our info. Here are the top bitcoin mining countries. Canada uses the most renewable energy by far. There are at least two bitcoin mining sites— banks of computers— within 50 kilometres of where I am sitting. One in Cowansville, Quebec, the other in Magog. Using electricity generated by hydroelectricity.
This on the second week of Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial. He is the young computer and trading genius who started a bitcoin exchange. Once a billionaire, now broke.
He is charged with defrauding his customers. As usual in these cases in the United States, the prosecution loads up the charge sheet with all kinds of things, including `Wire Fraud’ accompanied by a lot of pre-trial publicity. If SBF, as he’s known, gets off I would be astonished. This week his ex-girlfriend turned Brutus.
A List That Seems a Little Anglo-Centric
The 115th Anniversary of Ford’s Model T
Henry Ford made the Model T from 1908 to 1927. There were red ones early on then they were all black. Small improvements along the way, but it was still the same car whether it was coupe, a convertible or a delivery truck.
The Model T shows Henry Ford’s genius. He didn't invent the car, like Steve Jobs didn’t invent the personal computer or the handheld I-Phone that did it all—phone, email, internet cruiser all in one. Blackberry did that.
Henry Ford and his clever employees invented the moving assembly line, around five years after the first Model T came out. That meant he could build them cheap. The story is that Ford’s genius was he paid his workers $5 a day so they could afford to buy a Model T. He didn’t do that out of the goodness of his heart, it was a business decision. Working on the assembly line was boring.
His workers left to work for his competitors. So to win them back he started paying $5 a day. There was also profit sharing so people worked harder. According to Ford’s own website that could double their pay. “We believe in making 25,000 men prosperous and contented rather than follow the plan of making a few slave drivers in our establishment multi-millionaires.”
Self serving, since Ford was richer than his compeitiros. But genius.
Henry Ford came up against another genius: Alfred P. Sloan
Alfred Sloan was the man who built General Motors. Unlike Henry Ford, who at the start got grease on his hands, Sloan was an engineer and businessman. General Motors eventually had five models, one for every strata of American society: Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac, with Cadillac becoming the byword for luxury and status. That was one part of Sloan’s genius, the other was creating the General Motors Acceptance Corporation in 1919. Buy a car on credit, and pay the interest to GM instead of the bank. GM beat Ford in the end. Genius.
No Acorns This Year
There are no acorns underneath the giant oaks on my driveway. Every fall I can hear them falling on the metal roof of my house. Not this year.
The oak trees on Sunday, the two big ones are older than I am. They still have their leaves while the maples are almost nude. Zoom in on that driveway. Not one acorn.
The reason is cold, not warm weather. There was a frost in early May in this part of the Eastern Townships. It killed the buds on the oak trees and they had to recover and re-bud. So no acorns this fall. Squirrels are bereft.
Still The Same
A 1978 song by Bob Seger. I heard it on the radio on Sunday morning then played it over and over on You Tube. Here are the lyrics followed by a link to the song. I think it’s about a love affair, not gambling.
You always won every time you placed a bet
You're still damn good
No one's gotten to you yet
Every time they were sure they had you caught
You were quicker than they thought
You'd just turn your back and walk
You always said the cards would never do you wrong
The trick, you said, was never play the game too long
A gambler's share, the only risk that you would take
The only loss you could forsake
The only bluff you couldn't fake
And you're still the same
I caught up with you yesterday (still the same, still the same)
Moving game to game
No one standing in your way
Turning on the charm
Long enough to get you by (still the same, still the same)
You're still the same
You still aim high
Still the same, still the same
Still the same, still the same
There you stood, everybody watched you play
I just turned and walked away
I had nothing left to say
'Cause you're still the same
Still the same, baby, baby, you're still the same
You're still the same
Still the same, baby, baby, you're still the same
Moving game to game
Still the same, baby, baby, you're still the same
Some things never change
Still the same, baby, baby, you're still the same
You're still the same
Still the same, baby, baby, you're still the same
Still the same
Still the same, baby, baby, you're still the same
Essay of the Week
Brian Merrett was a photographer and activist who became deeply involved in not only recording Montreal’s architecture but in preserving it. His work helped save the building that became the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). He lived up the road from the old Shaughnessy House, named after one of the early presidents of the Canadian Pacific Railway. At the time, the building was occupied by an order of nuns. Mr. Merrett knew they were going to abandon the building and that it probably would be torn down for development.
“He talked the nuns into letting him take photos inside the building,” his wife, Lucinda Lyman, said. He discovered the building when parts of his downtown Montreal neighbourhood were torn down for roadwork.
“In 1972 and 1973, after the transformation of my own street into a motorway exit ramp – which had made my parking space disappear – my monthly visits to the nuns’ house, which now housed my car, encouraged me to produce photographic documentation which ultimately prevented the demolition of this house,” Mr. Merrett said
.
Mr. Merrett approached Phyllis Lambert, a member of the wealthy Bronfman family, and showed her the photographs. Ms. Lambert, an architect and promoter of architectural causes, bought the Shaughnessy mansion in 1974 and transformed it into the CCA
Photos courtesy of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
“This is how I became active in Save Montreal, and in 1975, I was invited to be part of the founding board of Heritage Montreal. For these two organizations, I prepared numerous photographs of threatened buildings,” said Mr. Merrett, who died on Sept. 21 at his home in North Hatley, at the age of 78.
Brian Merrett was born on July 29, 1945, in Saint John, N.B. His father, John Campbell Merrett, was there working on an urban plan for Saint John. He was a prominent architect whose work included the Art Deco interior of Central Station in Montreal. Brian grew up in Senneville, a semi-rural suburb at the western tip of Montreal and was influenced by his father’s architectural ideas.
His first camera was a 35 mm, which he won in a Popsicle contest when he was 12. He became an avid photographer, and his first professional job was in 1969, photographing the Bank of Montreal building for his father’s firm.
In Montreal, the 1970s were a time of rampant destruction of older buildings – particularly those associated with the city’s anglophone heritage. Mr. Merrett was involved in organizations to save buildings such as Windsor Station, the 19th-century Canadian Pacific Railway headquarters, which the company wanted to tear down. That campaign was a success, and he photographed not only the station but the neighbourhood around it, which is now almost all changed, replaced with high-rise towers, though the station itself remains.
The fight to save the Van Horne mansion, named after another builder of the CPR, was a failure. Mr. Merrett photographed the razing of the Van Horne building in Montreal by the real estate developer David Azireli in September of 1973. Witnessing the demolition of heritage buildings in the city transformed Mr. Merrett from a photographer to an activist.
“I think I spent my youth at protests and gallery openings,” said his son, Toby Merrett, who says some of his father’s most important work lives on in the books he published,
The first book he published was in 1987, Mansions of the Golden Square Mile, Montreal, 1850-1930, in conjunction with François Rémillard, who wrote the text. The Golden Square Mile was where the Montreal establishment lived in the late 19th century and the start of the 20th. The two men collaborated on several books, most, though not all, concerned with Montreal heritage architecture. Their last book, on the great houses of Quebec City, came out in October, 2022.
The McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal is cataloguing thousands of Mr. Merrett’s photographs, which he donated to the institution.
“Brian has done so much for the safeguarding of Montreal’s architectural heritage and helping people, through the books that he published, and through his more artistic photographs of Montreal architecture and helping people appreciate the beauty of what surrounds them,” said Zoe Tousignant, the curator of photography at the McCord. “His work is a record of the urban fabric of Montreal as it was evolving.”
Mr. Merrett was the staff photographer at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for many years. His job there involved taking photographs at exhibitions but also of individual works of art, something that is a unique talent, says Stéphane Aquin, director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
“There’s really a lot of knowledge, technique and sensitivity that goes into photographing objects. Paintings can come out as flat or not, depending on the lighting. Same with sculptures and silverware,” Mr. Aquin said.
But Mr. Merrett’s architectural photography is what he will be remembered for.
“Brian is one of the great photographers of Montreal’s evolution and changes over the years,” Mr. Aquin said. “He would be at the top of the list with people like William Notman. Through Notman, we have a sense of what Montreal was at a certain time and through Brian Merrett, we have a sense of how Montreal changed and a sense of the city’s memory and a sense of the city’s past and present taken from his viewpoint. He left us and future generations a record of how we were and how we have changed.”
Taking a straight picture of a tall building is difficult, and Mr. Merrett had specially adapted lenses to eliminate the height distortion. In his regular work, he used 35mm cameras and a larger-format Hasselblad, the camera the astronauts took to the moon. To capture works of art, he often used an even larger-format camera on a tripod.
In later years, Mr. Merrett split his time between Montreal and North Hatley, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, in a converted cottage on Lake Massawippi. He was an enthusiastic outdoorsman, and he was involved in local causes, in particular those that involved architecture and development. He established Friends Amis North Hatley Canada (FANHCA). The group recently stopped a condo development in the area.
Bruce McNiven, his friend and fellow founder of Heritage Montreal, said Brian Merrett was modest and self-effacing, though at the same time passionate in his desire to record and preserve buildings in Montreal and throughout Quebec.
“He was never part of the school of general handwringing, false nostalgia, and anger about what was lost,” Mr. McNiven said at his memorial service. “He took his camera into battle.”
And Mr. Merrett won many of the battles to preserve older buildings not only in Montreal but also in Senneville, where he grew up, saving an elaborate outbuilding on a 19th-century estate that was being developed.
Mr. Merrett leaves his wife, Ms. Lyman; brother, Tim Merrett; children, Toby and Hannah; stepchildren, Lyman and Jonathan; and three grandchildren