Montrealers are quick to make light of authority and the trappings of power. This is best epitomized by the two large, bronze statues of a man and a woman in the Place d’Armes. They are each holding their little dogs in their arms, while the man thumbs his nose at Notre Dame Cathedral and the woman thumbs hers at the Bank of Montreal. That said, Montrealers have wholeheartedly embraced the “nanny state” mentality. They seem to have a rule for everything, like big fines for turning right on red, and no plastic bags at the stores. They have initiated Draconian smoking restrictions – even outside. And people zealously enforce the rules. My sense was that they like to talk a lot about freedom, but they really like law and order.
Montrealers are courteous but aloof, and like Parisians, slightly snooty; industrious but inefficient; free spirits but wedded to the rules; and they really want to be French but they live in an English nation, so they have a chip on their collective shoulders. In short, they are a mixed bag all tied up in knots.
And their business sense seems very haphazard and not very well thought out. For instance, all of the museums are closed on Mondays. Rather than get together and stagger their days off so that there is always an open museum, they all close up shop on the same day, leaving tourists in the lurch every Monday. This has to translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue.
And down along the St. Lawrence River waterfront, at the Vieux Port (Old Port), which is undergoing a remarkable transformation, with zip line parks that look like pirate ships, trendy restaurants, the glittering Science Center, and tour boat terminals, they have several gigantic areas where cargo ships once docked that are entirely vacant. It is hard to imagine such prime real estate being left unused in any other cosmopolitan city on earth.
Montreal boasts that it is the world’s biggest Festival City. They even have a section of town called the Festival Quarter where there is always some sort of festival happening. Fashion Week was in full swing while we were there.
The Festival Quarter is home to Canada’s largest outdoor music venue that can seat 8,000 people. The biggest jazz festival in the world takes place there each year. They also have one of the biggest comedy festivals. All in all, they have more than sixty venues for the arts around the Quarter des Spectacles. And this area is also home to several amazing art museums, like the Museum of Fine Art, where we spent a rainy afternoon, and one of the world’s biggest contemporary art museums.
Montreal’s 375th anniversary is this year and “everything has to be just perfect.” That translates into more street construction, going 24/7, than I have ever seen in any big city on earth. It resembled a giant blast zone. There were gaping holes in the street everywhere we went. Montrealers joke that it is the Orange Cone Festival, and it runs every single day of the year.
But jokes aside, the arts reign supreme in Montreal, from the countless murals, to their glorious fountains and sculptures, and 1 percent of city budget goes to art each year.
And they have all sorts of interesting interactive playgrounds scattered throughout the city, like the Classical Music Swings, where the harder you swing the louder the classical music plays.
We did a lot of walking during our visit and cruised most of the neighborhoods. And they run the gamut, from rich to poor, though the poor have been better integrated into the cityscape than in most big cities I’ve visited.
There’s Habitat ’67, a science fiction-looking public housing complex along the waterfront that was designed by a McGill graduate student. It was going to become a model for affordable housing around the planet. But it never caught on. To be honest, it looked weird as hell.
Recognizing that cities are often food deserts, especially for the poor, there are more than a hundred communal vegetable gardens around most of the public housing communities so that people can grow their own food.
We learned that you can tell renters from residents in Montreal by the balconies. The homeowners have the balconies, many of them ornate, wrought iron beauties like down in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
And they also have what they call Montreal Stairs that are outside the front of each building, leading up to the second floor. They do this in order to reduce heating costs in winter. But they are usually made of metal, and when it snows and gets icy, they must be loads of fun to deal with.
The most celebrated part of Montreal outside the Old City, is the Le Vilage, where the gays reside. Because it’s on the west side of town, most people speak French. There are pink and rainbows flags adorning almost every building. St Catherine Street bisects the community and is just for pedestrians. And there are splendid shops and cafes, with streamers running the length of the street adorned with little, pink plastic balls, creating a whimsical swaying roof effect.
One of the most interesting sites in the Gay Village (It is actually labeled that way on Google maps!) was the Church of St. Peters the Apostle Roman Catholic parish church. It is known locally as the Gay Lesbian Catholic Church.
I talked to an old docent from Columbia about how the church can still be sanctioned by the authorities in Rome if it allows gays into its congregation. He chuckled and then offered up several clever dodges:
• The rainbow flag hanging over the alter is not a gay flag, but rather, celebrates diversity.
• You can take Communion because the priest doesn’t know that you are gay unless you tell him.
• The parish priests do not openly embrace the gay lifestyle, but they do welcome any and all who want to worship in their church.
And while I don’t know this to be true, I’ll bet you that because the church is so popular, they probably take in a lot of money, which in turn, gets sent to the diocese. With religion, as with most things in life, you should always follow the money.
If I had to pick one word to describe the Gay Village, it would be tolerant. But just like the Castro District in San Francisco, there is a sort of militancy about being gay that permeates the whole community. And this leads to a weird dynamic in which you have a whole section of Montreal where gayness is like a badge of honor and a constant celebration. The Gay Village is culturally separate from the city, like Little Italy or the Latin Quarter. It’s on all the maps. The tour buses cruise through it like it’s some sort of amusement park attraction. And I find this approach very odd because rather than integrating into the whole city, the gay people of Montreal have decided to all congregate together in one special place. And proudly plant their flags.
As you make your way around Montreal, you keep hearing about the Underground City. “You have to see the Underground City,” people kept telling us. The name certainly sparked our curiosity.
Because of their long, cold winters the Montrealers have built nineteen miles of underground city filled with shops and offices, but no residences, divided into six unconnected sections around the city center. There are more than 200 access points down into the Underground City. Some look like the entrance for a Metro station, while others connect through above ground buildings. The entrances are marked in large blue signs that say RES. This sounds cooler than it really is. I expected a cavern or tunnel town, but it’s just a glorified underground mall, and it didn’t look or feel different than any other mall I had ever been in – other than you take an escalator down to the “Underground City”.
As we covered the city on foot and by tour bus we found many delightful places to explore.
There was the Latin Quarter, a vibrant middle class area near the Gay Village and the Festival Quarter, with Victorian style architecture, a major university, the city’s biggest library, murals and a happening art district. And this is where you will find one of Montreal’s most popular nightspots, Charlie Biddle’s House of Jazz with the Blues Brothers statues jamming on the roof. Charlie learned his trade in Philadelphia, arrived in Montreal in 1948, after serving in World War II, and ended up staying because he liked the refreshing and open-minded attitude of the Montrealers toward African-Americans.
Many locals were always using the twenty mile bikeway along Boulevard de Maisonneuve, running east to west through the heart of the city and open all year round. In addition, there were the Manuvie Bike Share stations conveniently located wherever you go, allowing you to ride around the whole city for $5, just as long as you bring the bike back to a station every thirty minutes. That can become a bit of a pain, but it’s still a great way to get around town cheaply and we saw many people utilizing the three-speed green and white bikes – including ourselves the day we decided to do the six mile ride over to the incredibly beautiful and expansive Botanical Gardens. The gardens are next door to the Olympic Stadium that was built for the 1976 Summer Olympics. There is a monstrous white tower next to the stadium that houses the world’s largest elevator and leaning structure.
Montreal is home to the Molson Brewery, the oldest in North America, rising like a red brick block of rock adorned with the distinctive white Molson logo next to the colossal blue Jaques Cartier Bridge over the St. Lawrence. In my humble opinion, Molson has never been the same since Adolph Coors made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Montreal has one of the biggest Chinatowns in North America. There were four massive gates into each side of Chinatown, but they were all under construction and encased in construction wrap, so we really couldn’t see them. Our Uber driver one day was a structural engineer from Palestine who had worked in Dubai before coming to Montreal and he marveled that they could take a year to restore an arch. I told him that it seemed like it took a long time to finish almost every construction project around the city. He laughed and said, “In Dubai, we build skyscrapers in less time.”
There has always been a big Scottish presence in Montreal. Some of the city’s wealthiest businessmen were Scots. The Complexe Le Gleneagles, in the British enclave of Westmount, near the top of town, was built with stones taken from the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. Westmount is where the rich Brits live and is technically outside the Montreal city limits, though it is surrounded by the city.
As we slowly ascended the steep Chemin de la Cote-des-Nieges, one of the city’s busiest streets and traffic-snarling construction zones, we came to my favorite church in Montreal. St Joseph’s Oratory – St Joseph of Mount Royal which sits atop a dark volcanic sill on the Westmount Summit. Not only does it have the third largest dome of its kind in the world, but the story of the church is one of miracles galore.
In 1904, a small church was constructed on the slopes of Mount Royal near Notre Dame College. A young man named Alfred Bessette came to work as the doorman at the college. He spent the next forty years, welcoming the crippled and the sick from around the world who came to the small shrine to be healed. He would help lead them up the steep hill to the church and people said that they felt good when they were around him. Soon, the word spread that he was a healer, and he became Brother Andre. Eventually he was put in charge of the Oratory. There is a huge banner of a smiling Brother Andre hanging from the front entrance of the now massive church. Since the beginning of the last century, Indians, Africans and Latinos from around the globe have been making the pilgrimage to this holy shrine which is purported to be a place of great healing powers for the common man. Their crutches line the inside walls of the huge multi-leveled church as a testament to the power of faith. There are three long flights of steps that begin at the lovely gardens at the base of the hill, with three side-by-side staircases leading up to the top of the hill. It’s quite the climb. The middle staircase is not made of stone, but rather, wood painted a light gray. People pay penance by going all the way to the top, step by step on their knees. There was a middle-aged man from Mexico doing it the day we were there and it took him forever.
There was the stunningly beautiful Gardens of the Way of the Cross beside the church, built into the surrounding black stone with large white sculptures scattered throughout the hilly garden, mostly comprised of sad people lugging big crosses and Jesus being crucified.
It took sixty years to build the shrine that stands today because of winter, money and the depression. At first, there was just a small church and a statue of St Joseph on the top of the mountain. According to legend, the word went out around the world, telling people that if God and his children wanted it so, St. Joseph would one day get a roof over his head, which he did in the 1930’s. Today, St. Joseph’s Oratory is Montreal’s most visited site. Over two million visitors flock to the church each year.
Brother Andre died in 1937, at the ripe old age of 91. And in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI canonized him as a saint. Saint Andre (the Doorman).
