Four of Montreal's museums are worth a visitor's time: the Museum of Fine Arts, Pointe-à-Callière built over the spot where the city was founded, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Montréal Science Centre down at the Old Port.
All four have grown or been renamed since most published accounts of them were written, and the Science Centre has not been called "iSci" since 2002.
Founded in April 1860 as the Art Association of Montreal, which makes it the oldest art museum in Canada — a narrower claim than "oldest museum", which is what older accounts tend to say.
It is no longer the two buildings joined by a tunnel that older accounts describe. There are now five pavilions, strung along and across Sherbrooke Street West:
The collection runs to something close to forty-seven thousand works, not the twenty-five thousand older accounts give. The strengths are Old Masters and nineteenth-century European painting, a serious Canadian and Quebec holding, Inuit and First Nations work, and a decorative arts collection that came from the Musée des arts décoratifs de Montréal when its collection was transferred here in 2000.
The main entrance is at 1380 Sherbrooke Street West. Older accounts give 1379, which is close to the Hornstein Pavilion's own address but is not where visitors go in. Metro Peel or Guy-Concordia; there is no museum car park.
Properly Pointe-à-Callière, Montréal Archaeology and History Complex, and built directly over the ground where Ville-Marie was founded in 1642. It opened on 17 May 1992, the city's 350th anniversary, and the date was chosen deliberately.
The point of it is that the archaeology is in situ. Visitors descend below the modern street into the crypt and walk among foundations, the first Catholic cemetery and sections of the town's defences, with objects displayed where they were found rather than in cases elsewhere.
It has expanded considerably and now runs to seven linked components, including the Mariners' House, which opened in 2013, and two additions made for the city's 375th anniversary in 2017: a pavilion over the remains of Fort Ville-Marie, and a stretch of the city's first collector sewer, which visitors walk through — a hundred metres of 1830s brick vaulting under the old town, and much the strangest thing in any Montreal museum.
It is at 350 Place Royale — with the final e, and not "rue Royal", which appears in a good many accounts and is not an address in the city. Metro Place-d'Armes, in Old Montreal.
Spelt Centre, always. It was founded in 1979 by Phyllis Lambert — a trained architect as well as a patron, daughter of Samuel Bronfman of Seagram, and the person who persuaded her father to hire Mies van der Rohe for the Seagram Building, then served as its director of planning.
The institution is both a museum and a research library, and the building is two buildings.
The library holds somewhere around a quarter of a million volumes, well up from the figure usually quoted. Exhibitions are scholarly and change; the Centre has shown Mies van der Rohe material and, in 2001, a substantial exhibition on Sir John Soane — which is the name older accounts garble into "John Sloan", an American painter with no connection to the place.
The building is at 1920 rue Baile. Melvin Charney's sculpture garden is across Boulevard René-Lévesque on the escarpment edge, not across Baile, and is open to walk through.
On King Edward Pier at the Old Port, at 2 rue de la Commune Ouest. It opened on 1 May 2000 as the iSci Centre and was renamed in 2002, so any account calling it "iSci" or "I-Sci" is more than twenty years behind.
Everything else older accounts say about it has also gone. The exhibitions they name — Eureka, Technocity, Information Studio, Matter Works — have all been replaced; the current permanent galleries are different in both name and subject, and there is no point listing them here because they will change again. It is a hands-on science centre aimed squarely at families, and it is good at that.
Two specific corrections. The IMAX cinema is open, with a seven-storey screen and seating for a little under four hundred, re-equipped with laser projection in 2017 — though it runs a reduced timetable outside the school holidays. There has never been any audience voting on how the film unfolds, which older accounts describe in some detail. And the claim of six hundred thousand square feet of exhibition space is off by a factor of ten or more; the building is a converted pier shed.
The Fine Arts museum and the architecture centre are both in the downtown west, within a long walk of each other. Pointe-à-Callière and the Science Centre are both in Old Montreal, a few minutes apart on the waterfront. All four are indoor, which matters between December and March, and all four connect to the Metro. General practicalities for the city are on the Montreal page.