Largest French-speaking city outside of Paris
A heady mix of Europe and America, Montreal blends the best of Paris and New York, with quaint little streets and quality French restaurants, as well as a thriving commercial and industrial economy, great nightlife, busy shopping and a real buzz to the place. The biggest port on the St Lawrence River, all shipping between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic passes through this very pleasant city.
Montreal was an unexpected place to me, I knew next to nothing about it before arriving for a short trip in the summer of 2000, and it turned out to be one of my favourite places in North America. Through a family connection, I was able to visit a container yard and ship as well – a true highlight for an engineering nerd such as myself.
Montreal is named after Mont Real, the royal mountain in the centre of Montreal Island, an easy walk from the downtown district. Here I stand at its summit, as a fresh-faced eighteen year old and just about to start university at the time.
The Sun Life Building, once the largest building in the British Empire, a mighty edifice and representative of the architecture in Montreal from the early part of the twentieth century. It was completed in 1931 and rises 24 storeys.
The Queen Elizabeth Hotel, my home for the few days I was in town. Although it looks quite forbidding, it was a pretty fancy place, and has hosted many celebs including John Lennon and Yoko Ono for their 1969 “bed-in”. The experience of staying in such a place did nothing to endear me to the Glasgow student accommodation I moved into a couple of months later.
The domes of Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral dominated my view, with the cheese-grater façade of the Marriott behind. The cathedral frontage is visible in the previous photo, and dates to 1894.
Behind the cathedral is Le 1000, the tallest building in town at 205 metres, meeting the exact same elevation as Mont Real above sea level, beyond which no tower is permitted to extend. There is a popular ice rink in the basement.
The view from my hotel room also included the postmodern IBM building in downtown Montreal. I was impressed with the modern architecture of Montreal, and indeed at the time that such buildings existed outside of the USA.
Place Ville Marie, one of Montreal’s most distinctive buildings in cruciform shape. It opened in 1962 and is a key exchange in the Underground City, a complex of 20 miles of tunnels and retail connecting the city beneath the harsh winters, similar to that of Toronto. There was also a searchlight that would rotate above the city from the nightclub on the roof of this building each night, which eighteen-year-old me thought was the coolest thing ever.
Being eighteen, and being in North America in 2000, I was inordinately excited to see some of the exotic cars, not least this example of the legendary Dodge Viper parked on Rue Crescent.
Another very cool car, this one a kind of hot-rod wedding limousine, spotted outside Montreal’s City Hall.
We spent an afternoon visiting the nearby container yard, including the chance to step onboard the container ship Canmar Fortune, which was loading up in preparation for her next voyage. Like many vessels, she has since been renamed several times, but was built in South Korea and is just over two hundred metres long.
Prehistoric container loaders in the port area of Montreal, poised and ready for the next deliveries to come in.
The loaders are capable of grabbing forty-foot containers at each end off the back of an articulated lorry. Watching them at work was like watching steel dinosaurs go about their business.
Loading reefers onto the Canmar Fortune, the gantry cranes are remarkably quick at doing so. Reefer is slang for refrigerated container, as referenced in the classic trucking song “Convoy”. Loading containers such that the fewest have to be stripped out at each port is part logistical science and part art.
Montreal’s Olympic Stadium boasts the world’s tallest inclined tower at 175 metres. It was built for the games in 1976, not long after the city hosted the Commonwealth games in 1967.
Created 2001 | Updated 2018, 2023
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