Plateau Mont-Royal
"The Plateau is the version of Montreal that convinced me the whole city was worth taking seriously."
Spiral staircases, painted triplexes, and a bar for every possible mood — the neighbourhood where Montreal's bohemian reputation actually holds up.
Lia and I rented an apartment on the Plateau for a week rather than staying downtown, mostly because the listing photo showed one of those exterior spiral staircases and I couldn’t resist living inside the cliché for a few days. The staircases are everywhere here — a 19th-century workaround for a municipal tax that once charged based on interior floor space, so builders put the stairs outside instead, and the result is one of the most photographed architectural quirks in Canada, iced over and genuinely treacherous every winter, apparently, though we had the mercy of visiting in September.
Avenue du Mont-Royal and Rue Saint-Denis are the neighbourhood’s two commercial spines, and they carry different registers of the same energy — Mont-Royal scrappier and more local, Saint-Denis a little more polished, both lined with vintage shops, natural wine bars, and restaurants that seem to open and close with a churn rate that would terrify a city planner but apparently keeps everyone here perpetually curious about what’s new. We ate at a tiny Portuguese-Québécois place on Rachel that had no sign I could find on any map, only a friend-of-a-friend recommendation and a queue that formed entirely by word of mouth.
Parc La Fontaine anchors the eastern edge of the neighbourhood, a proper green lung with a pond that becomes a skating rink in winter, and on the warm evening we walked through it, every bench and patch of grass held some configuration of people eating, drinking, or simply lying still in the particular unhurried way Montrealers seem to treat a nice evening as a civic obligation. I understood, watching it, why people describe this neighbourhood as having more life per square block than almost anywhere else in the city.
The murals are the other thing — Montreal’s mural festival, Mural, has left a permanent gallery of building-sized paintings scattered through the Plateau and neighbouring Mile End, and walking a few blocks off the main streets turns into an accidental art crawl. I kept stopping mid-sentence with Lia to point at another wall, which she found funny for about the first six times.
When to go: June through September for terrace season and Parc La Fontaine at its fullest. The Mural festival takes over Boulevard Saint-Laurent in June with live painting and concerts. Winter has its own charm if you don’t mind the cold — the staircases iced over are a genuine spectacle from a safe distance.