Old Montreal

How old is old

A good many accounts claim the quarter has been continuously occupied since 1611. That overstates it. Champlain named Place Royale in 1611 and a trading post operated there, but it was abandoned, and there was no permanent settlement until 17 May 1642, when Ville-Marie was founded. Thirty years is the gap, and the distinction matters because almost nothing visible predates the eighteenth century.

What stands now is largely post-fire stone from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a scattering of genuinely older houses. The quarter went into decline for most of the twentieth century, which is precisely why it survived — nobody thought it worth demolishing until it was protected.

The streets and the squares

• Rue Saint-Paul is the oldest street in the city and the one most visitors walk, cobbled and lined with galleries and places to eat.
• Place Jacques-Cartier runs down towards the river, filled in summer with terraces and street performers — the jugglers and mimes that older accounts promise are still reliably there.
• Place Royale, correctly spelt with the final e, is the founding site and now sits above the archaeology museum.
• Place d'Armes holds Notre-Dame Basilica and the city's oldest skyscraper on its north side.
• City Hall on Notre-Dame Street East is the balcony from which de Gaulle made his "Vive le Québec libre" speech in 1967. The Old Custom House of 1838 stands on Place Royale.

Two buildings worth getting right

Marché Bonsecours — with the final s, which older accounts drop — was built between 1844 and 1847 to William Footner's design, and served for a time as the city hall. It is no longer a food market. The farmers' market closed in the 1960s, and the building now holds a modest number of craft and design boutiques, somewhere to eat and rented exhibition halls. Accounts suggesting a morning trip to buy produce there are decades out of date; the dome and the facade are the reason to go.

The Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel, further along rue Saint-Paul, genuinely is the sailors' church. Mariners hung votive ship lamps in it, and some still hang there. It is now presented together with the Marguerite-Bourgeoys historic site next door, and the tower gives a view over the port.

The Old Port

The working port moved downstream, and the old quays were redeveloped from the early 1990s into a waterfront park about two kilometres long. It is where the city goes on a summer evening.

• The Montréal Science Centre occupies King Edward Pier. Older accounts call it "iSci" or "I-Sci" — that name was dropped in 2002, so a guide still using it is more than twenty years stale. Its IMAX cinema is open, though on a reduced timetable outside the holidays and the summer. There is more on it with the museums.
• Cirque du Soleil still raises its big top here for a summer residency. The company's headquarters are in the Saint-Michel district well to the north, not at the port, and the two are often conflated.
• The waterfront itself carries cycle paths, a beach, a zip line and in winter a skating rink, and costs nothing to walk.

The Clock Tower, which cannot be climbed

The tower at the eastern end was built between 1919 and 1922 — the Prince of Wales laid the first stone — and it is properly the Sailors' Memorial Clock, a war memorial to Canadian merchant seamen lost in the First World War. It is not a decorative harbour clock, and it is worth knowing what it is before walking past it.

It has 192 steps, and older accounts invite visitors to climb them for the view. It is closed to visitors and has been for some time. The point of land around it, with its urban beach, is open and free.

On the water

All of these are seasonal, running broadly from May to October.

• Bateau-Mouche operates glass-roofed river cruises and dinner cruises from Jacques-Cartier Pier.
• Le Petit Navire — not "Navier", as older accounts have it — runs quiet electric boats, both short harbour trips and a longer run onto the Lachine Canal that passes through a lock.
• Saute-Moutons takes jet boats up into the Lachine Rapids from the Clock Tower Pier, and has done for over forty years. Older accounts give it the generic label "Jet Boating Montreal", which is not the company's name. Passengers get thoroughly wet; this is the point.

Habitat 67

Visible across the water from the port, and now more accessible than older accounts suggest. Moshe Safdie designed it out of his McGill master's thesis, and it was built as a pavilion for Expo 67 — stacked concrete boxes, 146 dwellings, each with a roof terrace on the flat of the one below. The residents bought it in 1985 and it has been a protected monument since 2009.

It is no longer a building that can only be looked at from outside: official guided tours run from spring to late autumn, by advance reservation, and include Safdie's own former flat. Anyone interested in twentieth-century architecture should book rather than photograph it from the bridge.

The Lachine Canal

The canal begins at the western edge of the quarter and runs south-west out of the city, and it is the reason Montreal industrialised where it did. The towpath is a flat, uninterrupted cycle route from the Old Port out to Lake Saint-Louis, and walking even a short stretch of it is among the most rewarding things to do here.

It has a page of its own: the Lachine Canal, covering why it was cut, what it closed for, and what is now along it.

Position

Old Montreal is reached on the Metro at Place-d'Armes or Champ-de-Mars, and the whole quarter is walkable from either. Square-Victoria–OACI is the station for the canal's lock sector at the western edge. General practicalities for the city are on the Montreal page.