Mont Royal was landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, but the hillside looks undisturbed, without the sculpted feel of Central Park or the National Zoo.
You climb up through a thick forest.
Near the top.
A view of the Oratoire St.-Joseph, a place of pilgrimage.
Turning away from the river, you ride uphill into the Plateau neighborhood, the residential heart of the city.
New-world architecture with flourishes.
The neighborhood seemed intimate yet worldly. I found a shop on the corner where I ordered a croissant, because that was the only word I knew how to say, and everything seemed perfect.
The edge of the district is at the foot of the city's high point, Mont Royal.
Continuing farther along the river, you reach the old city.
This is where you find restaurants, novelty items, tea shops.
In the place where the city was founded, a colonial building was replaced by a modern museum. For Montreal, this seems appropriate.
The interior of the Notre Dame Basilica is decorated with a 19th-century lack of restraint. Here, one of the biggest events in recent decades was Celine Dion's wedding.
This window depicts the beginning of the city in, I believe, 1604.
Instructing the natives: in what, I'm not sure.
Twice a year in New York, the setting sun is perpendicular to east-west streets, and it is called Manhattanhenge. In Washington, unlike Manhattan, the streets are on a perfect east-west axis, so Washingtonhenge (or D.C. Henge) occurs on the equinox. If my math is correct, this means the sunrise and sunsets both align on the same days in D.C.; whereas in New York, the two sunset alignments are in the summer and the two sunrises are in the winter. This is the best my camera phone could do.
I don't know what this is, but it's why we go shopping.
Along the river you pass Moulin Fleming, the only windmill in Quebec that is "of Anglo-Saxon design."
Then you reach an island and migratory bird sanctuary.
And you encounter the rapids.
The rapids are called "Lachine" because they were once thought to be on the way to China.
There are rose bushes on land.
The river shapes the city and is a focal point of activity, in contrast, once again, to many U.S. cities where the body of water is afterthought. There are boardwalks and piers; there is outdoor recreation and riverside cafes, islands and beaches, museums and swimming pools and an amusement park. The city's most famous street is called the boulevard Saint-Laurent.
When the bike trail rejoins the canal, you have made a loop and have a view of downtown.
Montreal is so good at bikes that it might as well be part of northern Europe. Every few blocks, you'll find another rental stand where, for a small fee or annual membership, you can ride a bike to a destination of your choice. As we speak, D.C. is installing a bike sharing system using the same technology and bike models. What D.C. does not have quite yet are two-lane bike boulevards, which you can find in Montreal with barriers separating them from the major streets. You can pick up a bike at midnight and ride home as the downtown traffic flies past you. How liberating it feels. Or perhaps the word I'm looking for is "mobile."
So these next few installments will follow a bike around on a photo tour of the city. At certain undisclosed points, this will become a fictitious bike tour, as I was not actually biking at the time. (But I could have been!)
So to continue, there is a canal through the city center. Its heyday was in the Industrial Revolution, but the water's edges are still devoted to industry.
In the course of the 19th century, people migrated to the city from rural Quebec to work by the canal. Until then, Montreal had been dominated by English speakers; it is striking to look at old photographs and see downtown signs in English. The influx of the working class made the city Francophone again, and along with the Quebecois (and I'm not clear on the precise sequence of events) came the Irish. We saw an exhibit at the McCord history museum that opened with the kind of artistic touches that would never occur to anyone at the Smithsonian: atmospheric embellishments that draw you into a historical period without detracting from the educational experience. With the sound of waves and anchoring ships in the background, you see a photo tour of Irish immigrants in Quebec, followed by biographical stations detailing their activities and hardships. A panel on the blending of folk music from Ireland and New France, though I didn't understand all of it, was especially interesting.
Griffintown, a historically Irish neighborhood along the canal, is now up for a major revitalization project, or gentrification or demolition, depending on the point of view. Somehow related is a plan to tear up a highway that now goes through the downtown, and replace it with a boulevard that would become Montreal's Champs-Élysées.
There was English-language graffiti along the water, urging revolution of some sort; the exact objectives were unknown to me, but the general tenor was circa 1968.
The canal meets the river at an old fur trading station.
And boats start their journey down the St. Lawrence.
Here, the river widens into St. Louis Lake.
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