Plateau Mont-Royal
NO NEIGHBOURHOOD captures the essence of Montreal more fully than the Plateau. Its main thoroughfares are lined with bistros, bookstores, boutiques, and sidewalk cafés.
Nightclubs veer from the eccentric to the classic, and eateries from snack bars and sandwich shops to some of the best dining locations in the city. Jazz bars, too, are popular in this area and range from the decorous to the distinctly shady.
The area’s residents are a mix of students, working-class French-speakers, trendy young professionals, and ethnic families with roots in Europe and Latin America. They congregate either in Parc Lafontaine, a neighbourly expanse of green with an outdoor theatre, or in ‘‘Balconville,’’ a distinctly Montrealer institution linked to the duplexes and triplexes that many residents live in.
To save interior space, these stacks of single-floor flats are studded with balconies linked to the street by fanciful, wrought-iron stairways. Although treacherous in winter, in summer they are decked with flowers and barbecue grills, and become centres for parties, family gatherings, and picnics.
The large working-class families for whom these homes were built in the early part of the century lived very modestly, but they managed to amass enough money to build impressively large and beautiful parish churches, notably the Eglise Saint-Jean-Baptiste.
The Catholic bourgeoisie lived just a little farther south, in gracious Second-Empire homes on Rue Saint-Denis or Carré Saint-Louis, one of the prettiest squares in the city.