Two Cities on One Island: How to Read Montreal Along the Main

Montreal is usually described as a bilingual city. That is true and it explains almost nothing. A more useful sentence is this: Montreal is two cities that agreed on a border, and a third city that grew up in the seam. The border is a street. Learn which side of it you are standing on and the whole island becomes legible.

The line was drawn in 1792

The street is Boulevard Saint-Laurent, universally called the Main. It runs north from the river straight up the spine of the island. In 1792, roughly thirty years after the British conquest of New France, the colonial administration designated Saint-Laurent as the official east-west axis of Montreal. Every address to the west of it is counted "Ouest," every address to the east "Est." The numbering resets to zero at the Main.

That administrative decision hardened into a social one. The English-speaking merchants, bankers and administrators who arrived after 1763 concentrated to the west, up the slope toward Mount Royal and the enclave of Westmount. The French-speaking majority, the descendants of the original colony, held the east. For most of two centuries the two populations shared an island, a river and a mountain without fully sharing a language, a school system or a parish. In 1945 the Montreal novelist Hugh MacLennan gave the arrangement its permanent name in the title of his novel Two Solitudes.

The seam had its own city

The interesting part is not the two sides. It is the middle. The Main itself belonged to neither solitude, which is exactly why it belonged to everyone who arrived after them. Successive immigrant waves landed first on Saint-Laurent and its side streets, because that was the neutral ground between two established communities that each already had a claim.

The largest of those waves was Jewish. Greater Montreal counted about 7,000 Jewish residents in 1901 and roughly 60,000 by 1931, according to Louis Rosenberg's Canadian Jewish Population Studies. In the 1931 census, 99.6 percent of Montreal Jews reported Yiddish as their mother tongue, and the wards straddling the Main, Saint-Louis and Laurier, were more than half Jewish. This is the world our Mile End history walk reconstructs stop by stop, from the schoolyard of Baron Byng High School to the wood-fired bagel oven that still runs on Saint-Viateur.

Later waves layered on the same corridor: Portuguese around the little park where Leonard Cohen would eventually live, then Greek and Italian further north. The immigrant city is not a footnote to the two solitudes. It is a third Montreal, built in the gap the other two left open.

Why writers keep crossing the line

The clearest illustration of the whole structure is a personal choice made by one man. Leonard Cohen grew up Anglophone in Westmount, the wealthiest English enclave on the western slope. As an adult, with the means to live anywhere, he bought a modest triplex at 28 rue Vallières, on the Francophone-and-immigrant side of the Main, across from a small Portuguese park. He crossed the line on purpose and stayed.

Half the writers who built Montreal's international image did the same thing. They wrote the city in English while living on streets the city counted in French. Cohen, the poet A. M. Klein, the novelist Mordecai Richler: all of them worked the seam rather than either side. Our Plateau walk is built entirely around this contradiction, the Anglophone city preserved as architecture inside the Francophone one.

How to use the map on any walk

Once you hold the line in your head, every Montreal neighborhood explains itself:

• Old Montreal is the first founding, the 1642 French Catholic mission that later became a port. It sits below the modern grid, east and south of downtown. Walk it and you are reading the original French city before the English one existed. That is the subject of our Old Montreal history walk.
• Downtown and the RÉSO underground city are the Anglophone commercial Montreal, built west of the Main by developers and architects working in the twentieth-century corporate register. A single American developer, William Zeckendorf, and I. M. Pei's office started the underground network under Place Ville Marie in 1962. See how the underground city grew by accident.
• The Plateau and Mile End, just east of the Main, are where all three cities overlap in a few blocks, and where the layering is easiest to read on foot.
• Mount Royal, the mountain at the center, is the one thing that belongs to no side. Everyone looks up at it, and the city eventually wrote it into law as a height limit no downtown tower may exceed.

Montreal is not confusing. It is layered, and the layers are ordered by a single street. Start at the Main, decide which way you are facing, and the city stops being a puzzle and starts being a map.

Comparing the routes? See our guide to the best self-guided walking tours in Montreal, or browse them by history and architecture.