Thursday Doors – January 21, 2016

Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in on the fun by creating and sharing your own Thursday Doors post each week between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American eastern time) by using the blue link-up button below. 

Discoveries in a Snow Covered City Laneway

While walking around in Montréal’s Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district looking for doors and staircases for this recent Thursday Doors post, I came across a laneway that’s part of the city’s Ruelles Vertes program.

Laneways can often be a source of inspiration for photographers looking for interesting doors and since this one seemed to have a promising start, I decided I had to explore:

Les Ruelles Vertes or Green Laneways program is an urban greening project that was launched by the city in 1997.

The goal of the project is for neighbors who share a given laneway to come together to convert it from the typical urban eyesore and dumping ground into a greener, more livable and usable space.

Converting to green laneways has been shown to improve air quality and counteract the heat absorbing effects of all that concrete and asphalt. The program also encourages people to get to know and work with their neighbors; something that has been lost in many of the world’s big cities where people can go for years without even knowing the name of the person who lives right beside them.

Partially subsidized by funds from the city’s sustainable development program, each conversion project must be brought forward by a volunteer committee made up of residents and must be approved by a majority of the laneway’s residents before being implemented.

A project can be as simple as planting a few trees, fruit-bearing shrubs, or climbing vines, but residents are also encouraged to put out flower boxes, planting beds and shared gardens, or paintings and  murals to brighten up the lane:

In a number of these Ruelles Vertes you’ll also find Take A Book – Leave A Book, little free libraries. In fact for me, finding this adorable door in such an unexpected place was a heartwarming moment.

Take a book, leave a book

And why not? Just knowing that someone actually took the time to build it, put it out, and maintain it, and then judging by the tracks in the snow, seeing that this library had just recently been used, is reason for anyone to smile 🙂

This peaceful scene left me looking forward to coming back in the summer to further explore this laneway, as well as a few of the others that have been converted over the years.

And who knows, maybe while I’m at it I’ll discover a few more interesting doors:

As always, thanks for looking 🙂

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