[Acajack]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

I just spent the month of July touring the three cities that make up my autobiography in Canada. This is the longest time I have spent in the country since 2011.

It was a real eye-opener and it didn't go as I thought it would.

Montreal

I lived in Montreal for 17 years and will always have a special place in my heart for the city. It is Canada's oldest and first metropolis, it is the single nail holding the federation together, and it is a strange and mythic place.

My visit to Montreal was enormously disappointing.

I had expected to visit my city in a boom period; I had thought the new building projects and urban initiatives would see the city in finer form that I had ever experienced it. Maybe this is true, or maybe it will be true very soon when a few of the major ones are complete. At present, the place is a big construction site.

Unfortunately, it is also running very visibly at something like 70% capacity.

The only major thoroughfares running in anything like top gear are Sainte-Catherine and Mont-Royal, and the former is not active or central-feeling enough to contend with other, similar streets. Saint-Laurent is dreary and sleepy; Saint-Denis is full of holes. Notre-Dame has its pockets, but it lacks any continuity.

The city is visibly poorer and smaller than the cities I have traditionally considered its peers and rivals. Copenhagen and Stockholm exceed its vitality at half its size. In North American terms, it can't really be ranked alongside places like Boston at the moment, but instead exists somewhere between that and maybe St. Louis. I have always been proud of Montreal and I don't like saying this.

I didn't like feeling it either.

The Old Port is impressively vital, and busier than I have ever seen it. Unfortunately, the urban connective tissue joining it to the greater central area is very poor with the area between Beaver Hall and Bleury as the only real strip of living tissue. There are a lot of good things afoot in Montreal but they have not fully materialized as of yet; the impression I was left with was of just how scarred the city's admittedly vast central area is... the 20 tunnel, the suburbanization of Burgundy, the inner south-east... it's like Berlin.

Montreal is doing all the right things but it started so late. The continent's 21st century is only starting to arrive. In order to regain its rightful stature, enormous structural shifts have to occur, including an overall closing of the gap between French and English Canada in household income terms.

Although I had allowed for 10 days in Montreal, we left after five.
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This almost sounds like Paris Depression Syndrome suffered by Japanese tourists.