Ganondox wrote:
I know there is a few cities in both the US and Canada.
Supposedly one surveyor was drunk when doing his surveying and didn't get things exactly right. The result is a town on the US-Canadian border where the border runs down the middle of the street and sometimes through individual homes and businesses.
Check out Stanstead, Quebec and Derby Line, Vermont
From
http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/ja10/stanstead-border-town.asp:
Quote:
In Stanstead, 160 kilometres southeast of Montréal, the boundary is always butting in, getting in the way. But for long after the towns were founded in the late 1700s, the boundary line was meaningless. Roads crossed it with their own commonsensical logic. Houses were built right on top of the boundary — a family might cook dinner in the United States and eat it in Canada. River mills were set up so that they straddled the line, allowing people from both sides to use them. In 1904, in memory of her husband Carlos Haskell, Martha Stewart Haskell built the Haskell Free Library and Opera House on the international boundary so that everyone could use that too. The boundary line runs down the middle of the reading room. An entire tool-and-die factory was established with half the building in Canada and half in the United States. If you’d wanted to give future border security guards nightmares, the whole place could not have been set up any better.
...
To get into the front door of the public library, Steve and I walk past a border pylon plunked into the sidewalk. Across the street, a U.S. Border Patrol agent in a pickup watches us with no expression. A few strides, and we turn left through the library entrance into the reading room, past the reference desk. Stepping across a strip of electrical tape on the floor, we walk out of the United States and back into Canada, where most of the books are shelved. It’s surprisingly fun. We’re filled with glee, as if we’ve broken a taboo and gotten clean away with it. The librarians, who have seen all of this many, many times before, watch us with surprising tolerance and good humour. They, too, seem happy with the smallscale anarchy.
In the attached opera house, the performances take place in Canada, while most of the audience sits in the United States. During the Vietnam War, men who had fled to Canada to avoid the draft would come to the library to visit their families. As long as they stayed on the Canadian side of the black line, their sanctuary was intact.
...
Steve knows a guy on the Canadian side who is good friends with an American across the street. They used to cross over all the time to chat or to borrow tools or a lawn mower or to have a beer together. They still do that, says Steve, except that now they do it after dark. They may have to stop, though. There’s word that the Border Patrol is planning to scan the street with night-vision cameras.
10 Nov 2011, 8:29 am
