The Anglophone City Inside the French One: A Companion to the Plateau Walk

The Plateau history walk is short, four stops, but it carries the single most important idea about Montreal in a few blocks: half the writers who built the city's international image wrote it in English, on streets the city counted in French. The Plateau is where that contradiction is still standing, as architecture, and Leonard Cohen is the person who makes it human.

The line the walk keeps crossing

Everything on this route is oriented to one street: Boulevard Saint-Laurent, the Main. In 1792, after roughly thirty years of British rule, the colonial administration made Saint-Laurent the official east-west boundary of Montreal. West of it, the city leaned Anglophone and wealthy. East of it, Francophone. The Main itself was the immigrant corridor in between. The lower Plateau, where this walk takes place, sits just east of the line, which is exactly why it is such a good place to watch the two solitudes overlap. For the full geography, read how to read Montreal along the Main.

Carré Saint-Louis: the bourgeois square

The walk opens at Carré Saint-Louis, a leafy Victorian square ringed by the ornate row houses that give the Plateau its picture-postcard face. This is the neighborhood at its most self-consciously grand, built for a rising Francophone middle class in the late nineteenth century. It sets up the contrast the rest of the walk exploits: the Plateau looks like a settled bourgeois quarter, but the story running through it is one of outsiders and border-crossers.

The Main and the mountain

The second stop places you at the intersection of Saint-Laurent and the axis toward Mont-Royal, the practical center of the immigrant Main. This is the seam city: the corridor where Jewish, then Portuguese, then Greek and Italian arrivals settled because it belonged to neither established side. The walk uses this stop to make the abstract dividing line concrete under your feet.

Schwartz's: the surviving fragment

The third stop is Schwartz's, the Hebrew delicatessen founded in 1928 at 3895 Boulevard Saint-Laurent by a Romanian immigrant named Reuben Schwartz. The walk does not narrate the menu. It uses the deli as the last standing institutional fragment of the Jewish wave that peaked at roughly 60,000 people in greater Montreal in 1931, when the wards around it were more than half Yiddish-speaking. Schwartz's is the archaeology of the seam city. The same story, told through food, is the subject of our companion piece on the Montreal deli and the bagel.

Cohen's house: the choice that names the walk

The route ends at 28 rue Vallières, the triplex Leonard Cohen owned across from a small Portuguese park just east of the Main. This is the thesis in a single address. Cohen grew up Anglophone in Westmount, the wealthiest English enclave on the western slope, with the means to live anywhere in the world. He chose a modest house on the Francophone-and-immigrant side of the line and kept it for the rest of his life. He crossed the border on purpose.

That choice is the whole walk. The Plateau is not simply where Anglophone writers happened to live. It is where they went to live inside the other Montreal, and the architecture, the triplex, the outdoor staircase, the corner deli, is what that choice looked like on the ground.

If Cohen is the walk's endpoint, Mordecai Richler is its northern cousin. His four blocks are the subject of our Mile End walk and the streets Richler wrote. Compare all six routes in our best walking tours in Montreal overview.