Montréal: Old City, Plateau & the Soul of French Canada

The twin towers outside rise sixty-nine metres above Place d'Armes and dominated the Montreal skyline for decades before taller buildings arrived. Inside, the nave holds thirty-two hundred people, and when it was built it was the largest church on the continent. Look toward the sanctuary at the gilded reredos — the carved wooden altarpiece behind the altar — and you are looking at one of the finest examples of Gothic Revival woodcarving in the world, every panel telling a story, every figure shaped by hand from Quebec wood.

At the rear of the church, the Casavant organ holds nearly seven thousand pipes and fills this space with a sound that seems to come from the walls themselves. Celine Dion was married here in nineteen ninety-four. Pierre Elliott Trudeau's state funeral was held here in two thousand. For a country without an official national cathedral, this has always been the building Canadians reach for when the occasion demands something larger than ordinary architecture.

In the evenings most nights of the week, the basilica transforms for AURA — an immersive light and sound show that floods the interior with projected colour and music. The blue vault becomes a living sky. The altar pulses with gold. If you can come back after dark, do it. But right now, before we move on, take one more slow look at the whole of this space — the scale, the colour, the extraordinary ambition of faith made visible in stone and wood and gilded plaster.

When you are ready, step outside into Place d'Armes. The statue in the centre is Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, the man who founded this city in sixteen forty-two. We are heading to the ground where he first stood.

Before the French arrived, this confluence of rivers was a significant meeting point for the St. Lawrence Iroquoians and other First Nations peoples who had lived along these waterways for thousands of years. The name Montréal comes from Mont Royal — the mountain rising to the north — which Jacques Cartier climbed and named in fifteen thirty-five, more than a century before the city was founded. The Haudenosaunee and Algonquin peoples knew this territory with an intimacy that no European map could capture, and their presence here long predates any colonial claim.

Maisonneuve survived extraordinary odds. Iroquois raids nearly destroyed Ville-Marie in its first years of existence. He fought them personally and at close quarters — the statue in Place d'Armes commemorates a hand-to-hand battle in sixteen forty-four in which he killed an Iroquois war chief with his own pistol. By the time he was recalled to France in sixteen sixty-five, the settlement had survived, grown, and begun its slow transformation from religious mission into fur-trading post into the commercial city that would eventually become Canada's largest.

The museum's current building was designed to evoke a sailing ship — appropriate for a city born at the edge of a river — and its rooftop terrace offers some of the finest views of the Old Port and the St. Lawrence. The archaeological crypt beneath the building is unlike anything else in the country: actual centuries of habitation visible below your feet, lit dramatically, with audio explaining what you are seeing. If you have time after this walk, come back and go underground. It is worth every minute.

Walk the full length of the Vieux-Port on a summer evening and you will find rollerbladers and cyclists, families with strollers, buskers with guitar cases open on the cobbles, and people sitting on the grass doing absolutely nothing in particular with the specific Montréal art of making idleness look like a serious accomplishment. In winter, the Bonsecours Basin just behind you becomes one of the finest outdoor skating rinks in Canada, ringed with warming huts and hot-chocolate vendors, the old market dome reflected in the swept ice.

Look east along the quay. Two things catch the eye. The silver dome of the Marché Bonsecours — the city's grand covered market, built in eighteen forty-four, now repurposed as a gallery and boutique space — floats above the roofline of Old Montréal like a full moon. Further east, the grey stone clock tower rises from the quay, built in nineteen twenty-two as a memorial to merchant seamen lost in the First World War. It was the first thing sailors saw when they entered the harbour. Both landmarks have been watching this river longer than anyone alive can remember.

The smell of the river changes with the seasons. Green and vegetable in the snowmelt of April. Warm and slightly metallic in the heavy August air. Cold and clean in October, in the weeks before the ice comes. Right now, whatever the season, breathe it in. This is the smell that greeted European arrivals after six weeks at sea, and by all accounts it was extraordinary — the smell of a continent, arriving before the land was even visible.

Go inside. Look up at the ex-votos hanging from the ceiling — small carved wooden boats, ship models, painted tablets, tokens left by sailors who survived storms at sea and credited the Virgin with their survival. They have been accumulating here since the seventeenth century. Some are crude, clearly made by a man with rough hands and no training who simply needed to leave something behind as evidence of gratitude. Others are beautifully crafted, the work of weeks. All of them are direct physical evidence of the terror of crossing the North Atlantic in a wooden ship and the overwhelming relief of surviving it.

Climb the tower at the eastern end of the chapel and you will get one of the most intimate views in Old Montréal — the river spread below you, the quays stretching in both directions, the dome of Bonsecours Market visible to the west, and on a clear day the gentle green hills of the South Shore across the water. Marguerite Bourgeoys is buried in this chapel. She was canonised by Pope John Paul II in nineteen eighty-two, becoming the first Canadian-born woman to be declared a saint. Her museum occupies the archaeological space beneath the floor — the excavated foundations of her original seventeenth-century chapel, and her remarkable story told with unusual honesty about what it meant to build a new society with almost nothing.

The RÉSO is not beautiful in the way the streets above are beautiful. The lighting is fluorescent. The shops are largely chains. The air has the institutional staleness of a system that circulates through ducts rather than windows. But it is functional on a scale that few underground systems in the world can equal. A commuter arrives at Windsor Station, walks to their office tower in the financial district, stops for lunch at a food court, visits the gym, buys groceries at a basement supermarket, and returns to the train — all without encountering weather, winter or summer.

The deeper cultural truth of RÉSO is what it reveals about Montréal's relationship with its climate. This is not a city that surrendered to winter. It is a city that built a countermeasure of extraordinary ambition and then, having done so, went right back outside to enjoy summer with the full intensity of people who understand what the alternative feels like. Above ground, the terrasses fill the instant the temperature crosses ten degrees. Below ground, the tunnels hum indifferently through all four seasons. Montréal holds both realities simultaneously, and the combination — pragmatic engineering below, exuberant street life above — is one of the things that makes this city unlike any other in the world.

The Peel or McGill metro station beneath you is worth going down into. Montréal built each of its metro stations to a different design by a different architect, treating them as public art rather than mere transit infrastructure. Several of them are genuinely extraordinary. Go down, have a look, then come back up and continue north toward Place des Arts.

Jean-Paul Riopelle, who signed the Refus Global and later became one of the most celebrated Canadian artists of the twentieth century, is represented here as well. His vast abstract canvases — built from thick palette-knife impasto, paint applied in mosaic-like fragments that coalesce into landscapes of pure gesture — feel like the boreal forest rendered in colour and motion. Riopelle lived most of his adult life in France and New York but circled back to Quebec in his final years. He died in two thousand and two, on the island of l'Isle-aux-Grues, on the day of a total solar eclipse that he had wanted to witness and paint. The eclipse happened. He died that morning. The painting was never made.

The building's rooftop terrace gives you a view across Place des Arts and the cultural quarter Montréal assembled for itself in the nineteen sixties — a concentration of theatres, concert halls, and museums that functions as a physical manifesto of French-Canadian ambition. The buildings are not individually spectacular, but together they make an argument. Step outside, take in the panorama, think about what it meant to build all of this in a decade, then come back inside and spend time with the Borduas collection. Those paintings will stay with you longer than the view, and that is exactly what Borduas would have wanted.

Leonard Cohen grew up on Esplanade Avenue, about a fifteen-minute walk directly north from where you are standing. He studied at McGill, wrote his early poems in the cafés of the Plateau, and spent the rest of his life in a complex orbital relationship with Montréal — living in Greece, then New York, then a Zen monastery in California's San Gabriel Mountains, always returning. His relationship with this particular city was affectionate and occasionally bitter, marked by the tensions between his anglophone Jewish background and the French-Catholic city that both shaped and marginalised him. There is a mural of him on Crescent Street in the downtown core, twenty storeys tall, and the scale of it is a measure of how completely a city can claim a son it did not always celebrate when he was living. He died in twenty sixteen, back in his Montréal home, in the early hours of the morning.

The outdoor plaza in front of you fills from June through August with festival stages, free concerts, and the particular energy of a city that understands collective pleasure as a public good. The Jazz Festival, the largest outdoor jazz festival in the world, occupies this space and the streets around it for eleven days every summer, and most of it costs nothing. The comedy festival Just for Laughs follows immediately after, filling theatres and outdoor stages across the quarter. In between and around those, a dozen smaller festivals of French song, film, circus arts, and electronic music fill whatever gaps remain in the calendar. Montréal in summer is essentially one long festival interrupted occasionally by the obligation of ordinary life. The rest of the year, the city is busy getting ready for the next one.

The Jazz Festival was founded in nineteen seventy-nine by Alain Simard and André Ménard with a genuinely radical idea: make the vast majority of it free. Put the world's best jazz musicians on outdoor stages and charge nothing for the privilege of hearing them. Trust that Montréalers, given the opportunity, would fill the streets. They were right. Today the festival brings more than two million visitors over eleven days, with over three hundred concerts, most of them free, on outdoor stages within walking distance of where you are standing. Oscar Peterson — arguably the greatest jazz pianist of the twentieth century — was born in Montréal, in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood to the southwest. The festival's premier award bears his name. His statue in the nearby park shows him at his bench with the stillness and focus of a man who understood exactly what his hands were doing.

Just for Laughs, founded in nineteen eighty-three, has grown into the largest comedy festival in the world — a showcase that launched or amplified the careers of Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, Jim Carrey, and hundreds of others who came through Montréal unknown and left famous. The Francofolies celebrates French-language music from around the world — Quebec chansonniers alongside artists from Senegal, Martinique, Belgium, and France. The fact that all of this fits into one square kilometre and somehow coexists without collapsing is not an accident. It is the product of forty years of infrastructure investment and the particular Montréal conviction that culture is not a luxury but a utility.

The process is not complicated, but it is precise and it is slow. The brisket is rubbed with a dry cure of salt, sugar, garlic, black pepper, coriander, bay leaf, and a combination of other spices that Schwartz's has never fully disclosed to anyone and has no intention of disclosing. It cures for ten days. Then it is cold-smoked over hickory wood for six to eight hours. Then it is steamed until the fat softens and the meat yields without resistance. The result is sliced by hand — always by hand, never machine, because the thickness matters and only a person can get it right — and piled onto rye bread with yellow mustard. That is the complete dish. Order medium fat. The lean is for people who have not yet understood what they are eating. The extra fat is for special occasions. Medium fat is the correct answer every time.

The restaurant itself has barely changed in nearly a hundred years. Communal tables mean you sit beside strangers who become, briefly, fellow pilgrims. The servers will tell you to order faster. The smell of hickory smoke and hot fat and fresh rye bread hits you when the door opens and stays in your jacket until you wash it. Céline Dion is a part-owner. The late Anthony Bourdain called it one of the greatest restaurants in the world, full stop, not qualified by city or country. Neither of those facts fully explains why the smoked meat tastes the way it does — deeply seasoned, smoky, yielding, absolutely specific to this place — but both of them confirm that you are not imagining it.

Sit down. Order the smoked meat sandwich, medium fat, with a half-sour pickle and a black cherry soda. Eat it while it is hot. Then, if there is any room at all, order one more.

The Plateau is one of the most densely populated urban neighbourhoods in Canada. The streets are narrow, the lots are small, the houses are built right to the property line, and the whole effect is European in a way that has nothing to do with trying to look European. Montréal was simply built by French people and their descendants, and the built environment reflects that without self-consciousness. The dépanneurs — corner stores, the word borrowed from French — are open late and sell beer and wine alongside bread and eggs. The terrasses fill the moment the temperature crosses ten degrees. Conversations switch languages mid-sentence. This is normal here.

This tension between French and English, between secular and Catholic, between Canada and Quebec, is not a flaw in the city's character. It is the engine that runs it. Montréal is the only major city in North America where those questions remain genuinely unresolved, where the answer to "What country is this?" is still being argued in the streets and the legislature and the kitchen tables of this neighbourhood. Cohen wrote songs about it. Richler wrote novels about it. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Haiti and Algeria and Portugal and Vietnam have navigated it and made it their own. And the Plateau, with its staircases and its smoked meat and its terrasses and its extraordinary, contentious, generous density of lived life, is where you feel all of it most clearly. This is Montréal. Enjoy every minute of it.