Montreal: Exploring a historic city with new eyes

Some cities are best approached from above, a sweeping view of the skyscrapers giving way to a soft landing in the suburbs. Not so Montreal. Here, the reveal is most impressive looking straight up, ideally from the west. Driving in from the airport on Autoroute Ville-Marie, it’s all industrial outskirts, church steeples and warehouses in a nondescript landscape, until suddenly there’s an off ramp and a dramatic left turn, just before you enter the downtown, when the skyline towers above you.

Thirty years ago, when I first came to Montreal, this was the sight that struck me. I had come from tiny Sackville, N.B., population 4,000, to study at McGill. That left turn and the towers soaring into view served notice that I was in the big city now.

Though back to the same streets, this morning’s arrival could hardly be more different. I’m here with my daughter to see McGill, where she hopes to go when she finishes grade 12. This is to be a fun weekend, not a tour of old haunts, but having barely been back since I graduated, it’s hard not to cast around in wonder, on what’s changed, what’s remained the same, and whether everything will seem so different today.

Of course, in one sense, nothing is the same. My home then was a shared apartment, one of the ubiquitous walk-ups, behind the Montreal Forum. I remember arriving to a row of transport trucks lined up around the building. Pink Floyd was performing that night and I couldn’t get over the notion that one of the world’s biggest rock bands could be playing inside and not a note of it heard on the sidewalks. Even that Pink Floyd could be just in there seemed inconceivable.

The next night Wayne Gretzky was participating in a training camp at the Forum, but by then I’d already come to accept that being ‘nearby’ meant something distinctly different in a big city, and that a building, no matter how storied, is just four walls, especially if all of the magic unfolds inside.

When I was a student, the four walls I often found myself in weren’t exactly the finest the city had to offer. Cockroaches in the kitchen were simply the norm, or maybe it was just in the places I could afford to stay. Turning on the light in the morning, the surface of the counters would momentarily flinch, freeze and then scatter. Similarly, misadventures took on a certain routine. Once the old man living above me apparently went “off his meds,” flooding his apartment and sending water streaming down my walls in the middle of the night. Another time, when my fridge died, I was handed the key of a stranger’s apartment down the hall, and told to make do for the next few weeks. (I never knew who lived there, or where they were.)

This weekend we’re staying in infinitely loftier digs.

We have the good fortune to be hosted by the Renaissance Hotel, now only in its fourth week of operation. ‘Lifestyle’ brands are the norm these days for the major chains. The Renaissance is intended to be an ‘intriguing, indigenous and independent’ extension of the Marriott brand. Generally, this stuff rolls forth as just more corporate bumf, but in this instance, the hotel actually exemplifies much of the cool that is Montreal. Massive screens in the lobby showcase photos of the city, a swing hangs nearby, there’s a DJ spinning music in a glass booth overhead and graffiti-inspired art is featured here and throughout the building.

On the 12^th floor there is a rooftop terrace with a bar and a stainless steel plunge pool that’s scheduled to be opened shortly, when the outdoor heaters are installed and idea of lounging outside is again fathomable. This weekend we’re about 50 C away from that happening.

Part of the appeal of the Renaissance is that it’s in the heart of the downtown, two minutes away from St. Catherine Street and less than 10 minutes by foot from McGill. Yet that closeness is also so much of the charm of Montreal. From the yoga studios and charcuteries of St. Laurent Street to the nightclubs of Crescent Street to the cobblestones in Old Montreal, everything is within a half-hour’s walk.

At the beginning of my time as a student, McGill was a 25-minute walk away, due east. There was no bad way to get there, though the route I liked best was along Sherbrooke Street, past the mansions, stately apartments and private art galleries. I’d later learn about the Beaux-Art style architecture that exemplified the Golden Square Mile, but at the time, I was just dazzled by how dignified it all seemed.

My favorite stretch was walking past the Ritz-Carleton where you could peer into the windows of its street-facing café for a chance to spot Pierre Trudeau or maybe Mordecai Richler. I never did. You could never actually see anything. Still, you could look, and wonder.

As well, there was the Church of the Redeemer, a Unitarian church that was torched in my second year by the organist, burnt to the ground and then turned into condos, and which stays with me only because of a signboard out front that featured thoughts of the day. “What if everybody did what you wanted to do” was one that I mulled over for ages, mostly because I was 18 and had never thought of things that way, and also because I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

The last memory, and this stretches back to my very first walk to campus, is coming upon a confused, bedraggled woman, patting her pockets hopelessly, explaining that she had lost her bus fare to get back home. Being a good New Brunswick boy, I quickly came to her rescue, and felt very good about the whole thing until, of course, I saw her the next day in the same spot with the same story.

There will be no such welcome to Montreal stories for my daughter. A mid-town Toronto teen, none of the stuff that was so startling to me will be new for her. But still, so much awaits.

This morning starts with a tour of the campus where a guide will show us the library, the student union building and one of the lecture halls, before showing our group one of the residences and a dining hall. To my shock, nothing appears changed. From the art to the flyers on the wall, it all seems perfectly preserved from the late ‘80s. Even the presence of fierce looking security guards, in this instance because of United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s visit to campus, feels so familiar to my days when dignitaries seemed always about; that’s what made McGill so exhilarating.

Less dignified and definitely not on the official tour, but not without its own sense of occasion, is my old fraternity, Sigma Chi. Though technically off-campus, it is uncomfortably close to the administrative building and offices of the principal, who has traditionally not been a particularly energetic supporter.

I couldn’t resist trying the door. If much of McGill feels unchanged, my fraternity seems exactly as I last left it, with the same landfill-ready couches, smeared with cold pizza and covered in empties. Calling it a disaster would be charitable. Still, the guys who showed us around could hardly have been more welcoming. It was wonderful to be back, briefly.

Ideally, you endure all of that to be able to return, years later, wealthier and wiser for the experience. And while a certain authenticity is nice, my daughter’s deprivations can wait until she’s moved here.

For now, she can join me in indulging in some of the updated restaurants that Montreal has to offer these days. Given Montreal’s tradition of delis, and it’s more recent culinary feats, most notably, Martin Picard’s ode to carnivores, Au Pied de Cochon, it’s a nice twist to note a vegetarian haven. Lola Rosa didn’t exist when I lived here but is now a fixture near the university, with a second location in the Plateau, serving up the standard favourites of burritos, nachos and burgers in ample sizes. Over our three days in the city, I heard Lola Rosa repeatedly recommended as a veggie place for non-vegetarians. This was presumably a backhanded way of saying that there’s more here than brown rice, lentils and incense. I think it would be fairer to say it’s just very good.

As compact as the downtown remains, it was shrunk even further when I was a student and life revolved around the campus. This weekend’s aim was to reach a bit further, making it at least to the upper reaches of the Plateau, a funky medley of cafes, bookshops and boutiques, if not all the way around and up the mountain to the lookout point. The view across the city, over McGill, directly below, to the Olympic Stadium in the east, and the St. Lawrence River straight ahead is always spectacular.

Alas, with the wind chill, the temperatures ranged from -35 to -41 C, so there would be no aimless ambling past the Plateau around Mile End, or meandering down the mountain and back to McGill. It was near-frantic, heads down, hands-in-pockets scurrying from our hotel to hot yoga to warm up, and then back, although usually with one or two stops at a café for momentary warmth.

One such reprieve came from Juliette et Chocolat, a small but burgeoning chain famed for its pastries, pancakes and brownies. There are six across the city, four in the downtown core. We went to the St. Laurent location, its entrance shrouded in billowy red drapes, which were meant surely to keep out the cold but served to funnel you into an inner sanctum of caramel and lattes. We went with the waffles, which promised strawberries, whipped cream, chocolate ganache and chunky chocolate pearls, making me think our plates would be spilling over. In fact, the portions were small, but spectacular.

It’s premature to add East to list of local institutions, having been open less than a month, but in the spirit of checking out something promising and new, the house restaurant of the Renaissance Montreal arrives with a master mixologist in Lawrence Picard and a pan-Asian menu, featuring a fusion of Thai, Chinese and Japanese. The décor evokes Old Shanghai… with flat screen TVs playing highlights of the Habs. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Her ardor for the city beginning to chill, my daughter asked whether Montreal was always like this in the winter. I’m hesitant to tell her how there would be a few weeks every year when the wind chill would sink so absurdly low that your jeans would freeze stiff and your face be too frozen to speak.

And then, inevitably, it passes, and winter melts into a very momentary spring before summer arrives and the city is in full swing again. Soon Montreal will cease to figure chiefly for me as the place I went to school, my passage into a vastly more interesting world. Instead it will belong to my daughter and her classmates. That’s the hope. She won’t have the same naïve epiphanies as me, yet she’ll discover, like all who come here, a city that’s tempting in all directions, and no matter how bracing in the chillier times, will leave her yearning to return.