Railway Stations in Quebec and Montreal

Gare du Palais, Quebec

In the 19th century, Montreal boomed as an industrial railway hub while Quebec City fell into obscurity. Quebec remained poorly connected by rail to the rest of the continent until the 20th century. A grand chateau-style railway station, called Gare du Palais, was built in 1915 to inaugurate the new railway line crossing the recently-completed Quebec Bridge. A small park with a brutalist fountain by Charles Daudelin was added to the front in 1999, and for some strange reason the contrast works. There’s something grand to this area, leaving you with the misleading impression that Quebec is an important railway hub. But the cavernous emptiness of the halls reveal the truth - only four trains come into the station per day.

Gare du Palais, Quebec

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The Revolving Fortunes of Rotating Restaurants

From the 1940s to the 1980s, vast areas of North American cities were demolished and replaced with freeways and large concrete skyscrapers. This process, which came to be known as Urban Renewal, did not hit Quebec City quite as hard as Montreal or other cities in Canada. Though the old city was left untouched, over 1,200 homes were demolished to widen boulevards and make way for skyscrapers in historic neighbourhoods immediately outside the city walls. In 1974 alone, four of the city’s ten tallest skyscrapers were inaugurated. One of these was topped with a revolving restaurant on the 31st floor.

The restaurant in question, L’Astral, tops the Loews le Concorde hotel. The Italianate home of Cyrille Duquet, little-known inventor of the double-ended telephone handset, once stood on the site of this hotel. Promotional literature of the time claimed Le Concorde provided the “sophistication of the vieux regime with a bold contemporary statement.” Though it’s difficult to see the link between a mass of brutalist concrete and the traditions of New France, there’s no doubt that the building was bold.

I went to this rotating restaurant for the first time a few weeks ago. The whole idea of lunching at L’Astral had always seemed a bit corny. A few work colleagues managed to talk me into it with promises of nice views. To be fair, it was better than other tourist traps on the same strip, and it got me mind thinking about revolving restaurants.

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Quebec City Tour #7: Montcalm

To many people in Quebec, Montcalm ward is synonymous with old money and big houses. It is actually quite a diverse and interesting area, with everything from cheap student flats to landscaped boulevards with mansions. The term “climbing the social ladder” takes on a rather literal meaning here—the lower part of Montcalm is more modest than the streets fronting the Plains of Abraham at the top.

Montcalm is located immediately west of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and about a twenty minute walk from Vieux-Québec. This is too far for most tourists, which is a shame as the area has lots to offer. The few tourists who do make it out tend to come for the National Museum of Fine Arts and the Plains of Abraham, but a walk through its architecturally diverse streets is worth the detour.

In the middle of the 19th century, Montcalm was located outside Quebec’s city limits. A tiny settlement of tax dodgers sprung up on its edge, called Faubourg Guenette. Most of the land in today’s Montcalm was originally owned by wealthy English-speaking lumber barons. These gentleman-farmers built picturesque villas on large estates overlooking the cliffs, living out the romantic ideal and fleeing the cholera and typhus of the dense centre.

Traces of the old Faubourg Guenette, along Rue Crémazie

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Wolfe vs. Wolfe-Montcalm

The Plains of Abraham are famous for the confrontation between the armies of Wolfe and Montcalm, a decisive battle leading to Britain’s conquest of New France.

Several centuries later, a confrontation over a street name is taking place on this lamp-post bordering the park. Federal and Municipal authorities can’t agree on whether to call the street “Wolfe” or “Wolfe-Montcalm”. It seems likely that the disagreement reached a stalemate several decades back. Nowadays, the two names coexist and most people are either indifferent or unaware.

There are legitimate reasons for both names. The city named the avenue “Wolfe-Montcalm” first, in 1901, a politically correct decision to commemorate both victor and vanquished equally. The National Battlefields Park was created in 1908 when Federal authorities saved the area from residential development and turned it into a commemorative park. The disagreement probably arose because the short avenue has always led to a monument on the spot where Wolfe fell in battle; the street has no link whatsoever with Montcalm. To complicate things, recent municipal mergers have resulted in the fact that a Wolfe Avenue now exists elsewhere in the city (home to an English-language, formerly Irish Catholic, elementary school).

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Finding Your Way in Quebec City

I tracked down five types of street signs within the traditional limits of Quebec City. The oldest signs are these attractive blue and white ones. The highest concentration of such signs are in Saint-Jean-Baptiste.

This type of sign with a curious mix of embossed lower case and capital letters is the next in our chronological progression. Saint-Sauveur is where most of these are located.

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Looking for Chinatown

“There’s no Chinatown in Quebec City. There’s never been one,” snapped a research assistant at the city archives. It sounded as if I wasn’t the first to come asking for information. “There were a handful of Chinese-owned stores in the lower city, but it was hardly a ‘Chinatown.’”

Had I been misled all these years? I had first heard about Quebec City’s former Chinatown in the NFB documentary Pâté Chinois. Articles mentioned it in Le Devoir and the Globe and Mail. I’d heard local Chinese reminiscing about it on the six o’clock news. Louisa Blair devotes a chapter to Quebec’s Chinatown in The Anglos.

Then there’s star playwright Robert Lepage, who staged a six-hour opus called La Trilogie des Dragons. It begins in a Lower Town parking lot where the kids, poised to dig to China, realize they don’t have to dig too deep to find it. They discover instead that memories of opium dens, mah-jongg, and Chinese laundries exist very close to the surface. “It used to be a Chinatown,” the play ends, “now it’s a parking lot.” Was it all just exaggeration, someone digging for a story? Well yes—and no.

The Chinese first began arriving on the West Coast during the 1850s gold rush. A second wave came in the 1870s, cheap labour for the cross-country railway, where they earned ten to twenty times what they could earn in Guangdong. The last spike in the CPR railway was driven in 1885, and a discriminatory Chinese head tax was implemented that same year. This made further immigration difficult. Anti-Chinese sentiment ran high and many landlords would not lease apartments to them. They banded together and created Chinatowns.

Some Chinese fled discrimination by coming east in the 1890s. A trickle made it to Quebec City, but most settled in larger cities. In 1911, there were 68 Chinese in Quebec City while 1,200 had settled in Montreal. Nevertheless, their presence was visible. Most ran laundries or restaurants.

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Street Market Quebeciana

Some of the fine Quebeciana for sale at the Grand Marché aux Puces du Quartier Montcalm

Bibliothèque de Charlesbourg

Though Quebec City can’t boast of a building like Montreal’s Grande Bibliothèque, the Bibliothèque de Charlesbourg, inaugurated last year, makes a worthy little cousin. Winner of a 2004 Canadian Architect Award of Excellence, it’s a fantastic example of a functional and sustainable new building that takes into account the history of the site. I rank it as my favourite new building in the city.

The library’s design may be contemporary, but it nevertheless references Charlesbourg’s past. Most towns in Quebec were initially laid out along a linear strip. Charlesbourg, now a suburb with an old historic core situated a few kilometers north of Quebec proper, was different from other towns. Its Jesuit founders experimented with a more community-oriented radial plan, drawn up in 1627. Settlers were given pie-shaped slices of land and built their homes around a central square that included a church and common pasture lands.

This urban layout was still visible until the 1950s. Since then, buildings and parking lots sprouted up in this central area and the original urban plan was muddled in the throes of suburban expansion. The construction of the Bibliotheque, with its publically-accessible sloping green roof, is an ingenious attempt to evoke the pasture lands that were once at the core of the community. It is one of the largest public green roofs in North America and will make a lovely public park when completed.

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Quebec City Tour #6: Limoilou

Poster advertising keytar legend “Gils” at Limoilou’s Pub Chez Jean

The image above summarizes my perception of Limoilou: a neighbourhood locked in time where mullets, keytars, and bikers rule. I don’t go there often, and when I do I always experience culture shock (but I suppose it also makes me laugh).

Largely planned and built in the early 20th century, Limoilou looks more like Montreal’s triplex neighbourhoods than any other part of Quebec City. Spiral staircases, tree-lined streets, and a “balconville” atmosphere reigns. Locals in Nordiques caps and short shorts drink Labatt Bleue on their balconies. It could almost be Rosemont/Petite Patrie or Hochelaga/Maisonneuve, but not quite.

In order to get a different perspective on the place, I asked my British friends Tom Welham and Judith Kirby why they live there. After circling the world a few times and cycling across Australia, Tom and Judith decided Limoilou was the best place on earth. They immigrated from England, bought a flat here, and intend to stay.

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Caution: Satan at Work

Retro Malls and Department Store Kitsch

Like many teenagers in suburbia, I spent too much time in shopping malls. Unlike others, there was a purpose to my wandering. My goal was to find the quintessential department store restaurant. This dream restaurant would have a somewhat dated charm: brown and orange wallpaper, faux-traditional 1970s furnishings, waitresses with Marge Simpson hair, Jell-O cube parfaits, and pumped-out muzak with French horns galore. I scoured the Quebec City region’s K-Mart Kafeterias, Woolco Grilles, and the sketchy department stores in St. Roch.

Then, sometime in 1994, I came across the Sears Café at Place Fleur-de-Lys. It exceeded all my expectations. The walls were dark brown, the lighting was muted and I dined enveloped in the sounds of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass. The furniture was the finest from Sears’ colonial revival series circa 1975. The menu was unreal: you could eat a “veal steakette” and top it all off with Jell-O parfaits in a variety of colours. The daily special even came with its own retractable plastic lid. My dream had come true. I had reached restaurant nirvana.

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The Old Town and the Sea

The St. Lawrence River in Montreal. Photo by Matt Hobbs

If we don’t get a handle on runaway greenhouse warming, sea levels are predicted to rise by approximately 20 feet, or seven meters. If you think this won’t affect Quebec, think again. Using the Google Maps API and NASA climate projection data, a clever person has put together a site to show exactly what will be flooded when sea levels rise.

In Quebec City, most of Lower Town will be underwater and significant portions of the islands and riverbanks will be lost. The region around Sorel-Tracy, mostly farms, will be completely flooded. Montreal and the South Shore will lose a lot of riverfront, and in general, many of the low-elevation islands such as the Iles de Boucherville will lose huge amounts of their surface area. Even municipalities along the Richelieu will also suffer a good deal of flooding, for instance, near Chambly.

And that, in part, is why I voted Green yesterday.

Quebec City Tour #5: Saint Sauveur

Saint Sauveur, like neighbouring Saint Roch, has a tangible working class past, but this is where similarities end. Saint-Roch is in the throes of gentrification and is rapidly becoming a new downtown. Saint-Sauveur has retained its modest rundown feel, but is one of the few places attracting a noticeable immigrant presence in lilywhite Quebec City. This is the neighbourhood to hit for asian markets, african shops, and latino grocers. They’re right there in between the old-school Roi de la patate, Au Royaume de la Tarte, and Tabagie de l’ouvrier.

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Quebec City Tour #4: Rue Couillard

One of my favourite streets in old Quebec is rue Couillard. It is narrow, mostly residential, and less than 0.2 km long. The street lies on a wavy tangent off the main tourist strip. There are surprises around every bend: New France cottages built in the 1600s, Victorian-era monasteries, and early 20th-century apartment buildings. Let’s go for a walk.

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