Trifter

I find it very difficult to think of Montrealers as subterranean people. Every visit to the festival city confirms for me what everyone in Canada already knows – the second largest French-speaking metropolis in the world is home to the country’s most cosmopolitan people. Chic, slim, bilingual and sexy, this youthful and creative city always provides Canada its first glimpse at what’s new and hip from Europe and Asia, and is home to the world’s top labels alongside the country’s most avant-garde designers. Montreal is city where the style quotient is high, and the well-dressed locals are always in search of an audience. For eight months of the year their stage is RESO, Montreal’s Underground city. 

You may find it odd to learn that the people in Montreal spend so much time indoors with such a beautiful city to enjoy, but know these two things – temperatures in this part of Quebec drop lower than Moscow during the winter, and in Montreal, the weather never got in the way of being seen in the city. Here, people enjoy life underground because the city has miraculously designed the biggest, most luxurious underground boardwalk in the world, filled with high-end shopping, art and pedestrian walkways that at times feel like catwalks. And when Montrealers don’t have to dress for the weather, they dress to impress. True locals all-but live in RESO en hiver (in winter) for it’s social life and controlled climate – while visitors can, regardless of the season, quench their own insatiable thirst to shop, be entertained and have life at their fingertips.

As we prepared to leave the hotel our concierge at the Bonaventure Hilton explained how the incredible ‘city below’ began in 1962 beneath Montréal’s first high-rise as an underground shopping centre at Place Ville-Marie. The city was booming at the time, and creative approaches to city design were being implemented all across the city. He told us that its success led to the building of the other malls and passageways that today form the modern underground city.

This is where we would start our experience – at Place Ville-Marie, the symbol of Montréal inspired by New York’s Rockefeller Center. We’re going to put the Underground City through its paces, to see how the spacious atriums, sculpture and art installations, boutiques, restaurants and architectural design coexist with the beautiful city outside (without our coats).

Exploring the Underground City

As we begin to explore the vibrant life in Montréal’s huge underground world, used daily by some 500,000 people, we quickly come to appreciate the importance of Canada’s largest subterranean city to locals. It feels like a vast, man-made world, but it comes blessed with unique architectural approaches throughout that give it character, warmth and interconnectivity to the city above. RESO appears to make life uncomplicated and comfortable – thousands of people live in apartments linked to the network and work in the heart of town, which means they can work, shop, dine and go to movies, museum or a hockey game all winter without putting on a coat. In many ways RESO is an extension of the lives of the people living within, giving it a distinct feeling of home. 

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve always believed that getting lost in a new city is always the best way to explore – why should underground cities be any different? The main sights in the central segment of the RESO are laid out in a U-shape. As it is, our hotel is at the bottom of the U, we’re at Ville-Marie in the center, so to see the sights, we’re going to head south and make the turn east towards the section located between Place-des-Armes and Place-des-Arts, what we’re told is the cultural heart of Montréal. The weather is particularly crisp and the style mavens appear be out in full force today, so yes, we’re dressed to impress.

The historic Place Ville-Marie is a cruciform office tower, and arguably the most distinctive building in Montreal. A rotating beacon on the rooftop lights up at night, illuminating the surrounding sky with up to four white horizontal beams that can be seen as far as 50 km away. These beams are nowhere in site as we begin our walk – but we laughingly realize if we ever get lost we can retreat to the surface and look to the sky for directions. 

This area is obviously the largest and busiest section – we find great shopping and debonair shoppers all throughout at La Baie, Les Promenades de la Cathédrale (a shopping mall built below an 1857 Cathedral), Place Montréal Trust and Cours Mont-Royal. The palatial Eaton Center is here as well – one of the largest open-air malls in the country, full of local boutiques for Canadian-made garments and souvenirs. 

As we continue south through Central Station towards Place Bonaventure and our hotel, it becomes increasingly obvious the special care taken in designing RESO. It is at once a very familiar experience and an alien one – you tend to forget after shopping along the concourse that you’re underground, and it isn’t until you spill out into the busy atriums that you realize the extent of the world created beneath the city. Even the walkways between sections have been designed to engage travelers with art and high-concept design. Never claustrophobic, the mood between shoppers is actually quite breezy, as people whisk about unencumbered by outerwear.

We follow a brown brick corridor and glass skywalk to the Place d’Armes metro station, which continues to the Palais des Congrès in the International Quarter. Renovations on both the Palais des Congrès and neighboring the Caisse de Dépôt building were recently completed in 2002. It is a stunning achievement in that the two buildings and the park in between cover the Autoroute Ville-Marie, a 10-lane highway which previously separated the old town from downtown. Now it’s an easy walk from the International Quarter to Vieux Montreal.

We abruptly encounter the four façades of the colorful Palais des Congrès next and are hypnotized – the surreal nature of the angular building is made more dramatic by the modern architecture and art within. The Lipstick Forest installation of mock pink tree trunks is a joy – as are the multicolored windows facing Place Jean-Paul Riopelle that on this sunny day created rainbow squares across the escalators and floor.

From the Palais des Congrès we cross underneath the Place Jean-Paul Riopelle toward the Montreal World Trade Center. The newest halls incorporate public art as well as installations featuring various local and international artists. These tranquil hallways are the most photographed in RESO – they are also free of shops, and by this point in the day the quiet is a welcome reprieve.

From the Palais des Congrés, the RESO enters the World Trade Center complex through a peaked glass portal whose angle preserves the back wall of the historic St. James Hotel. We emerge into what used to be Fortification Lane. The old walls to the old city once stood here. To the right is the InteContinental Hotel, and on the left is the St. James Hotel, also known locally as the “movie star hotel” and the most expensive in Montreal. An escalator leads down us down to the shop level where we take pictures next to a piece of the Berlin Wall.

Image via Wikipedia

After a quick rest, we continue towards the Complexe Desjardins, which is linked to the Place des Arts, our final destination. This visual and performing arts complex includes five performance halls and the incredible collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, all accessible from the indoor atrium. This winter Monday the museum was closed, but we got a taste of what’s inside at La Boutique, the museum gift shop. The 2,900-seat Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, the largest multi-use concert hall in Canada is also here, home to the Opera of Montreal, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal. The smallest of the concert halls, the Cinquième salle or fifth hall, never got a proper name. We locate it by scattering of backwards 5s on the floor leading to the entrance. 

It was a fascinating subterranean trip through Montreal’s modern catacombs. As we sit in Place d’Arts reflecting on our view of Montreal from below, we notice Claude Bettinger’s cylinder of curved glass panes that reach above the ceiling. Looking closely, we can see the reflection of words etched in reverse: “L’artiste est celui qui fait voir l’autre côté des choses” (The artist is one who makes you see the other side of things). During our shopping adventure turned cultural odyssey, we definitely feel we’ve been introduced to Montreal’s other side. It seems the fashionable people are not the only ones on display in this underground city – artists, architects and planners are showing us their best side of Montreal as well. It together creates a creative, cosmopolitan underground city that has forever opened our eyes to the possibility of life way down town.