French Canada Road Trip: Day Five, Part Three (Mount Royal and Downtown Montreal)

(This post has been in my drafts for many, many months now, but I felt like I had to finish it. It's from my two week trip to Canada last fall, and this bit covers my last day in Montreal. Hopefully I'll ride this wave of motivation and round out the rest of the chapters, which will cover the final leg of the Canadian portion of my trip: up to Quebec City.)

Catch up on Day Five, Part Two here.

Road-weathered Carrera 4S in my parking deck in Old City Montreal, next to a sign urging its clean up.

Needless to say, day five was absolutely packed. Somehow, I put thoughts of my soon to be aching feet behind me and kept hitting the pavement. Most of my walking tour was spurred by Montreal's hodgepodge parking system. The parking decks are the only reasonable way to keep a car here if you're visiting. (if your hotel doesn't provide parking, that is--and most don't) Those parking decks make money as follows: if you park for longer than two hours, the hourly rate maxes out and you're charged as if you'd spent the entire day parked there. At roughly $18, this is a good deal, but only if you leave your car in the parking deck. If you're moving in and out, you could potentially pay two or three times the daily rate in the same time span.

So I decided, rather than throw more cash into that incinerator, I'd continue my trend of walking. I checked the map before leaving my hostel, a bit daunted at the four mile walk that lay between me and the Chalet du Mont-Royal, situated at one of the mountain's multiple peaks.

Mount Royal, to the resounding relief of my aching feet and back, isn't really a mountain. About 125 million years ago, this geological site was part of an active volcanic complex that eventually collapsed, forming the more modest hill we see today. Still, the small mountain attracts visitors and locals alike for its views of the Montreal skyline and Mount Royal Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.

I walked Rue Notre-Dame, passing the brilliant Cathedral du Notre-Dame for a third time, and followed it to Rue McGill. By this point, the weather was picture perfect, and I joined a steady wave of foot traffic through town. Montreal is an active city and I discovered, as I have many times before, taking the slowest method of transportation is the best way to take in all the sights.

Soon I reached downtown and was greeted with elegant department stores and tree-lined squares. I headed towards the McGill University campus. McGill, an English language university established by an 1821 Royal Charter, is ranked among the top 30 universities in the world. Its campus is perhaps even more interesting though, as the historic buildings used for student housing and the many colleges within the university line the route up the foothills of Mount Royal's eastern face.

I followed these buildings and the streets that climbed in a steadily vertical direction. Soon, I crossed parking lots that were almost bare, save a few wandering college students. Then I found the dorms, short blocks of buildings shrouded by the colorful trees that made up Mount Royal in the background. Now, my biggest task was finding a trail head.

Classroom buildings give way to dorms, and pedestrian traffic soon shrinks to post-apocalyptic levels.

A couple desolate parking lots later, I found my answer. Out of a heavily wooded bank popped the outline of some concrete steps leading up. I wandered into the brush and soon found a graffitied wall. Hey, it was an entrance, and made for a great picture. I kept going up and soon found the main trail.

In the center of Quebec's largest city, Mount Royal Park offers miles of shaded trails. Professionals have ample space to let off steam above the hustle and bustle of downtown.

Olmsted had a grand and ambitious design for this park. He penned the design for Mount Royal Park in 1874, 17 years after his designs for Central Park in New York City. A seasoned designer by this point, Olmsted came to the project with a set of beliefs that drove his designs. He was very much a Victorian romantic, thus he believed that the beauty of nature had a profound effect upon the people who experienced it, and that effect would ultimately lead them closer to the divine spirit. For city dwellers especially, he believed nature could be an effective means of therapy. His design for the park included an aggressive vegetation revamp, which would exaggerate the mountainous terrain; more lush at the bottom and gradually thinning out towards the summit. At the top, he also envisioned a grand promenade with a reservoir and large shade trees.

Unfortunately, politics got in the way. In 1873, the United States forced a switch to the gold standard, devaluing silver and causing panic in the market place. This caused a shut down of world stock markets and a depression that lasted several years. And, in combination with local politics, this meant that most of Olmsted's design plans were not followed.

This made sense as I followed the winding trail towards the summit. All the way to the top, giant, densely clustered trees lined the paths. These displayed bright, golden leaves that littered the ground, but going up gave you no real sense of how far you were going.

Eventually, I reached my destination, a lodge constructed in 1932 called the Chalet du Mont-Royal. The chalet was a Great Depression project headed by then-mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde.

Since its opening, the chalet has been used mainly for special events, but its vast belvedere is what I was there for. This vast pavilion overlooks downtown Montreal and 3800-foot Jay Peak in northern Vermont, and dozens of people were walking around taking pictures of the skyline and giving their feet a rest.

After taking a few obligatory skyline shots and buying some souvenirs from the gift shop, I headed to another part of the park. Here, part of Olmsted's reservoir was constructed as a quaint pond with an adjacent walking path around. You can see a bit of connection to Central Park here, but its location is far enough out of the way that not many people were in this part of the park. From here, I decided to head back down the mountain and take the long walk back through downtown.

Sadly, even my walk was hampered by construction, as the most direct path down the west side of the mountain was closed. So I took the trail back up, wound around, and eventually ended up back on the outskirts of the university.

I used a slightly different route to get back to the hostel, which took me through a much busier part of downtown. Past the Modern Art Museum, I ducked into one of the seemingly-ubiquitous indoor malls.

A portion of the Underground City that connects to Montreal's Metro.

This astonishing display of New Deco (a term I just made up) is one of the dozens of modern marvels built for locals to dodge harsh Montreal winters. An entire network, dubbed the Underground City, connects office towers, hotels, malls, apartment buildings, and universities in downtown Montreal. There are no fewer than 120 public access points you can use to get into the Underground City, and its maze of tunnel linkages stretches over 19 miles.

 Back outside the mall, I kept walking toward the hostel and through the Entertainment and Shopping districts. These sidewalks were packed with people and lined with stores like H&M and Cartier.

There was also this multilingual flower shop, housed in a Victorian row house.

Back in Old City, I found this Formula One themed souvenir shop and was tempted to take a look, but also exhausted, so a picture would have to suffice. The Canadian Gran Prix takes place just a few miles away on Ile Notre Dame.

To round out my time in Montreal, there was one more place I had to visit. While walking earlier, I'd come across a sign for a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit. As luck would have it, the Montreal Fine Art Museum was open late, so I had an hour and a half to try and take in as much as I could.

Mapplethorpe lived in New York during a landmark time for the city. He came of age in the 60s and 70s, when New York could be called a city in turmoil. In 1977, the city suffered a complete power grid failure, during which gobs of looting took place. Many parts of lower Manhattan featured burned out buildings on every block; a economy meant homelessness was at an all-time-high.

But New York City was also in an artistic Renaissance at the time, with Mapplethorpe as one of its more outlandish characters. While Andy Warhol tried to rub shoulders with pop royalty at Studio 54, Mapplethorpe was developing a form central to his ideas about being a gay man in mid-century New York.

He started with iconography from his Catholic upbringing, using found items to create jewelry and altars, one of which was for his new friend in New York, Patti Smith. Mapplethorpe met Smith at the Chelsea Hotel, a well-established--if not necessarily glamorous--refuge for starving artists. During that time, they met Warhol, along with other rising names like William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg.

Soon, Mapplethorpe turned exclusively to photography, and male subjects became his main focus. He started off photographing friends and lovers, often focusing on the male form, often including the most sexual details of that form.

Every photograph reflected an intense attention to detail, from the pose of the model, to the lighting used, to the wardrobe. Some featured men rejecting stereotypical masculine roles, like "Two Men Dancing," while others featured men embracing them.

Portrait of Deborah "Debbie" Harry of the band Blondie, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Interspersed with this work were his portraits of friends. Given the time period, most of these friends, like Deborah Harry--the Miami-born waitress who'd join the group Blondie--would turn out to be icons in their own right.

In 1979, Mapplethorpe met bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, just after she'd won the first Women's World Pro Bodybuilding Championship. She became his most photographed subject, as Mapplethorpe was fascinated by her blend of masculine and feminine qualities.

Mapplethorpe died in 1989 due to complications from HIV/AIDS. He was 42, and his exhibit The Perfect Moment, was sent around the country posthumously that summer. Controversy would follow him long after his death, with debates raging from outside and within the art community, regarding work that depicted BDSM and other "not-safe-for-work" material.

Montreal is a city I'll miss dearly, mostly because of its focus on art and culture. Yes, the streets are garbage and everything is under construction, but there's so much beauty in the street life, food, architecture, and visual art surrounding it that it's hard to care.

Hopefully I'll be able to finally wrap up this trip coverage, now almost a year (!) later. Life is tough, and it certainly catches up to you, but I'm trying harder than I have before to make a life for myself that I'll enjoy, be it through writing, photography, or something else. I hope you'll stay tuned.

Check out Days 6 and 7, Quebec City.