Other Arches - Yokohama, Japan

Shown above is the arch in Yokohama, Japan.

In Ottawa, the artisans who will paint the arch have arrived from Beijing and are applying the 13 undercoats of paint to make the cement structure smooth and ready for the four top coats of paint.

Other Arches - Philadelphia, USA

This picture of the arch in Philadelphia USA gives some idea as to what the painting will look like on the concrete arch in Ottawa.

Other Arches - London, England

Other Arches - Los Angeles, USA

Other Arches - Chicago, USA

Other Arches - Havana, Cuba

Other Arches - Sidney, Australia

Boston Chinatown Arch

It is made of concrete, tile roofs, and wooden beams. There are lion pedestals on both sides of the arch, but only lions on one side the day I was there.

The street is open to cars on one side, and closed for about 200' on the other side, making a lovely plaza with great landscaping themes that will be subject of another post.

The lack of car traffic makes it easy to admire or photograph the arch.

The underside of the tile roofs are made of carved wooden supports.

The view from the side with an active vehicular road.

Montreal Arches

(Guest post by Charles Akben-Marchand of Images of Centretown)

This past Saturday, I went on a trip to Montreal to check out transit, cycling, and other features there that we can learn from in Ottawa (both in terms of what to do and what not to do). We also swung by Montreal's Chinatown to check out their arches.

This arch is one of two on Boul. Saint-Laurent, and faces South-East. The other one is a few blocks up. It spans four lanes of traffic, and like ours has two lions at the entrance.

This third one is at the start of a pedestrian zone perpendicular to Saint-Laurent, which Google Maps says is Boul. de la Gauchetière Est. It's noticeably smaller. Unfortunately, the white streaks are not runny paint, but pigeon poop.

While it was raining when I took this shot, you can see that pigeon netting covers the entire decorative roof tiles of the arch, which takes a lot away from it. It also looks like pigeon poop is clumping up under the pigeon net on top of the decorative element on top of the roof (which might be a dragon head, but it's obscured).

Hopefully the sculpted dragons on Ottawa's Royal Arch will scare away the pigeons. Or maybe they can include an owl design...

Tulip Arch

Each year at Dow's Lake the NCC sets up this entry arch to the Tulip Festival tents and vendor area.

With the added awareness of arches in life caused by the construction of the celebrated Chinatown Arch on Somerset Street, I paused to look at this tulip arch. It is simple, a metal frame with canvas infill. It does work to create an entry point. And person after person stopped to take a picture of it. I was astounded how many photos were taken in the ten minutes I watched the arch.

It drove home how photographed and memorialized the new Chinatown Arch will be once it is finished and everyone will have to take a picture of it.

Other Arches - Busan, South Korea

Other Arches - Honalulu, Hawaii & Mexico City

This is the gateway arch in Honalulu, Hawaii. The Chinatown there is famous, rated a must-see in the tourist guides. The roof is green -- Honalulu is no longer a national capital. The arch makes a nice door-like feature over the sidewalk crossing over a river on the edge of chinatown, which is visible in the background.

This is the Mexico City Royal Arch -- note the gold roof. It was inaugerated in 2008.