Montreal: The City That Built Itself Twice

Author: Finn O'Sullivan
Category: Culture & History
Reading Time: 10 minutes

Montreal does not apologize for being confusing. The street signs switch languages mid-sentence. The metro stations look like spaceships from 1967. You will walk down a cobblestone lane in the Old Port, turn a corner, and find yourself staring at a brutalist concrete apartment block the size of a small town. This is the point. The city was founded in 1642, burned to the ground in 1760, and spent the next two and a half centuries arguing with itself about what to build next. The result is a place where a Irish pub sits three doors down from a French patisserie, where a Ukrainian church shares a block with a Vietnamese banh mi shop, and where the locals will correct your French with a smile, then switch to English without missing a beat.

How to Read the Streets

Start with the basics. Montreal is an island, shaped like a boomerang, sitting in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. The mountain—Mont Royal, the namesake—sits in the middle. Everything orients around it. Streets run east-west, avenues run north-south, and the locals use "up" and "down" to mean north and south. If someone tells you to go "up St-Laurent," they mean north. Do not question this. Just go.

The neighborhoods have distinct personalities, and they shift fast. The Old Port feels like a European city center that got frozen in amber, then sprouted cafes. The Plateau is where students, artists, and the permanently young live in narrow row houses painted in colors that would get you fined in a homeowners association. Mile End is the current center of gravity for musicians and startup employees, a place where you can buy a fifty-dollar bagel and a three-dollar coffee within sight of each other. The Village is one of the largest gay neighborhoods in North America, and it hosts the kind of street festivals that shut down traffic for blocks and nobody complains.

The French Question

Here is what you need to understand about the language situation. Quebec is a French-speaking province in an English-speaking continent. Montreal is a bilingual city in a French-speaking province. This creates layers. The metro announcement comes first in French, then English. The street signs are in French. The person serving your coffee might greet you in either language, and they are watching to see which one you pick. Do not make a big deal about this. Attempt the French if you have it. If not, English is fine. The only thing that annoys a Montrealer is a tourist who treats the French requirement as an inconvenience.

The independence movement peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with two referendums that failed by narrow margins. The scars are still visible if you know where to look. There are neighborhoods where the Quebec flag outnumbers the Canadian one ten to one. There are restaurants where the staff will pretend not to understand English, though they speak it perfectly. There is also a generation of younger Montrealers who have moved past the old battles and treat bilingualism as a practical advantage rather than a political statement. The city is calmer now than it was in the nineties, but the tension between the two languages, the two histories, is part of what gives Montreal its energy.

What to See Without the Crowds

Everyone goes to the Notre-Dame Basilica. It is worth it—the interior is Gothic Revival done with enough gold leaf to embarrass a Byzantine emperor—but go at opening, 9:00 AM, before the tour buses arrive. The evening light show, Aura, runs Thursday through Saturday and costs thirty-five dollars. Skip it unless you really need the Instagram photo. The church is better in natural light, and you can sit in a pew for twenty minutes without anyone rushing you out.

The real religious architecture in Montreal is not the cathedral. It is the neighborhood churches. St. Joseph's Oratory sits on the slope of Mont Royal and looks like a spaceship landed on a Renaissance palace. The dome is the third-largest of its kind in the world. You can climb the prayer steps on your knees if you want the full experience, or you can walk up the side path and get the same view without the penance. The oratory gets nearly two million visitors a year, but most of them cluster at the bottom. Walk to the top terrace. The view of the city spreading east toward the river is the best orientation you will get.

For something quieter, find St. Michael's Ukrainian Church in the Mile End. The blue onion domes rise above the street like something transplanted from Kiev. The interior is covered in icons painted by refugees who arrived after the Second World War. It is not on the tourist maps. You might have the place to yourself on a weekday morning.

The Underground City

Montreal has a second city beneath the first. They call it the Underground City, or RÉSO, though the locals just say "the underground." It is not a city, exactly. It is a network of tunnels connecting metro stations, shopping malls, office buildings, and hotels, stretching for twenty miles beneath the downtown core. It was built because of the weather. January temperatures regularly hit minus twenty Celsius, and the wind coming off the river makes it feel worse. In the depths of February, you can walk from the train station to a concert hall to a hotel to a restaurant without ever putting on a coat.

The underground has a reputation for being soulless, and parts of it are. The corridor between McGill metro and Place Montreal Trust is basically a shopping mall with no windows. But there is also public art down there—murals, sculptures, installations that rotate on a schedule. The corridor connecting Place-des-Arts to the museums has a ceiling lined with thousands of colored glass panels that shift the light as you walk. The best time to see it is late afternoon, when the sun angle turns the whole tunnel amber.

Where to Eat Without the Tourist Menu

Montreal bagels are a religion. They are smaller than New York bagels, denser, sweeter, and baked in wood-fired ovens. The two temples are St-Viateur and Fairmount, both in Mile End, both open twenty-four hours. St-Viateur has the original location on St-Viateur Street, unchanged since 1957. Fairmount has the better sesame seed coverage. The locals have strong opinions about which is superior. The correct answer is to try both.

Poutine is the other required food. Fries, cheese curds, gravy. The curds must squeak when you bite them—that means they are fresh. Every chip stand in the province claims to have invented it, and nobody really knows the truth. For the classic version, go to La Banquise on Rachel Street. They have thirty varieties, but the original, with just the three components, is the one you want. It is open until 3:00 AM and gets crowded after midnight with people who have made questionable decisions.

For something more substantial, Montreal has one of the best food scenes in North America, and it is not expensive by the standards of Toronto or New York. L'Express on Rue Saint-Denis does French bistro cooking that would hold its own in Paris. The steak frites costs thirty-two dollars, and the zinc bar has been polished by three generations of elbows. For Vietnamese, head to the Plaza Saint-Hubert, where the families who fled in 1975 have built a food corridor that rivals anything in Hanoi. Pho Tay Ho at the corner of Belanger does a beef noodle soup that costs eleven dollars and will ruin you for the American version.

The Seasonal Rhythm

Montreal is a different city in every season, and the locals will tell you that you picked the wrong time to visit regardless of when you arrive. Summer is festival season. The Jazz Festival in late June shuts down ten blocks of downtown and brings in two million people. Just for Laughs in July is the largest comedy festival in the world. Osheaga in August fills Parc Jean-Drapeau with music fans who camp in the mud and pretend to enjoy it. The city feels electric in summer, but it also feels crowded, and hotel prices double.

Fall is the secret season. September and October bring crisp air, changing leaves on the mountain, and a city that has recovered from festival madness but has not yet descended into winter hibernation. This is when the locals will tell you that you picked the right time, which means it is probably the best time.

Winter is not for everyone. The temperature drops, the snow piles up, and the underground city becomes essential rather than optional. But winter also brings Igloofest, an electronic music festival held outdoors in January, where twenty thousand people dance in snow pants and parkas. It brings the Montreal En Lumière festival in February, with light installations and food tastings and a city that refuses to admit that winter has beaten it.

Spring is mud season. The snow melts, the streets flood, and everyone is grumpy until the first warm day, usually in late May, when the terraces open and the city remembers why it stays here.

Getting Around

The metro is clean, fast, and covers the core areas well. A single ride costs three dollars and fifty cents. A three-day pass is twenty-one dollars and worth it if you are staying central. The green line runs east-west through the downtown core. The orange line forms a rough U shape and connects the main train stations. The blue line serves the Plateau and Rosemont. The yellow line is just three stations long and exists mainly to get people to the casino on the island's south shore.

Buses fill the gaps, and the BIXI bike share system operates from April to November. The city has been adding bike lanes at a rapid pace, and cycling is now a viable way to get around in the warmer months. Just watch for the potholes. Winter freezes and thaws tear up the asphalt, and the city patches rather than repaves.

Walking is the best way to see the neighborhoods. Montreal is compact. You can walk from the Old Port to the Plateau in forty-five minutes, and you will pass through three distinct districts along the way.

What They Do Not Put in the Guidebooks

Montreal has a complicated relationship with its own history. The French colonial period produced beautiful architecture and a cultural identity that persists. It also produced a system that treated the Indigenous population with the same brutality found everywhere Europeans settled. The city is only beginning to acknowledge this. The Pointe-à-Callière museum has added exhibits on the Mohawk and Huron-Wendat peoples who lived here before Champlain arrived. The annual Indigenous Peoples Day gathering at Place du Canada gets larger every year.

There is also the corruption. Montreal spent years in the headlines for municipal scandals—contract fixing, mob connections, mayors resigning in disgrace. The Charbonneau Commission hearings in 2013 exposed a system where construction contracts were awarded based on bribes rather than bids. The city has cleaned up significantly since then, but the attitude remains: Montrealers expect a certain level of dysfunction from their institutions and are pleasantly surprised when things work properly.

Practical Notes

The legal drinking age is eighteen, not twenty-one. The wine and beer selection at the government-run SAQ stores is excellent, though the prices are higher than in the United States. The strip clubs on Rue Sainte-Catherine are world-famous, or infamous, depending on your perspective. They are also expensive and aggressive with the upselling. If you must go, set a budget beforehand and stick to it.

Tipping follows the North American standard: fifteen to twenty percent at restaurants, a dollar per drink at bars, a few dollars for hotel housekeeping. Sales tax is nearly fifteen percent and is added at the register, not included in the marked price. This shocks European visitors.

The city is safe by the standards of any major North American city. The usual rules apply: do not leave valuables visible in cars, stay aware of your surroundings after midnight, avoid the small area around the Main and Ontario Street after dark if you are alone. The metro stops running at 12:30 AM on weeknights and 1:00 AM on weekends. After that, the night buses run limited routes, or you can use Uber, which operates legally here unlike in some other Canadian cities.

The Last Word

Montreal is not trying to impress you. It has seen empires come and go, has burned down and rebuilt, has voted on whether to stay part of a country and decided by a whisker to give it another try. The city has nothing to prove. What it offers instead is a place where you can eat a two-dollar bagel at 3:00 AM, where you can hear five languages on a single street corner, where the architecture clashes beautifully and nobody minds, where the people have learned to be French and English and something else entirely, all at once. Come in the fall if you can. Walk up the mountain at sunset. Look down at the grid of streets, the river curving around the island, the orange glow of the streetlights coming on. The city will not ask you to love it. It is too busy being itself.