What's in a name

  • In the modern Iroquois language, Montreal is called Tiohtià:ke. Other native languages, such as Algonquin, refer to it as Moniang.
  • 1535 – October 3, Jacques Cartier climbed up the Montreal mountain and name it Mont Royal. He wrote: "Nous nommasmes icelle montaigne le mont Royal." (We named the said mountain mont royal.) The name Montréal is generally thought to be derived from "Mont Royal", the name given to the mountain by Cartier in 1535.
  • 1556 – On his map of Hochelega, Italian geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio wrote Monte Real to designate Mont Royal.
  • 1575 – In his Cosmographie universelle de tout le monde, historiographer François de Belleforest was the first to use the form Montreal with reference to this area. In translation it would read: "let us now look at Hochelaga, ... in the midst of the countryside is the village, or Cité royale, adjacent to a mountain on which farming is practiced. The Christians call this city Montreal...".
  • 1601 – On his map, Guillaume Le Vasseur wrote Hochelaga for the inhabited area and called the hill mont royal.
  • 1609 – Marc Lescarbot called the settlement: "Hochelaga, ville des Sauvages".
  • 1612 – On Champlain's map the mountain is called Montreal.
  • 1642 – The mission named Ville Marie was built at Place Royal.
  • 1705 – Montreal is now the official name for the city formerly named Ville-Marie.

Nicknames

  • The City of Saints
  • "The city of a hundred bell towers" - Mark Twain in 1881.
  • La métropole (in French)
  • Sin city - During the period of Prohibition, because of the Montreal night life, it became well known as one of North America's "sin cities" with unparalleled nightlife.

Modern times

War & depression

Montrealers volunteered to serve in the army to defend Canada during World War I, but most French Montrealers opposed mandatory conscription. After the war, the Prohibition movement in the United States turned Montreal into a haven for Americans looking for alcohol. Americans would go to Montreal for drinking, gambling, prostitution, greasy spoons and poutine, unrivalled in North America at this time, which earned the city the nickname "Sin City." Despite the increase in tourism, unemployment remained high in the city, and was exacerbated by the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. However, Canada began to recover from the Great Depression in the mid 1930s, and real estate developers began to build skyscrapers, changing Montreal's skyline. The Sun Life Building, built in 1931, was for a time the tallest building in the Commonwealth. During World War II its vaults were the secret hiding place of the gold bullion of the Bank of England and the British Crown Jewels. Canada could not escape World War II. Mayor Camillien Houde protested against conscription. He urged Montrealers to ignore the federal government's registry of all men and women because he believed it would lead to conscription. Ottawa, considering Houde's actions treasonable, put him in a prison camp for over four years, from 1940, until 1944, when the government was forced to institute conscription (see Conscription Crisis of 1944).

Quiet Revolution

By the beginning of the 1960s, a new political movement was rising in Quebec. The newly elected Liberal government of Jean Lesage made reforms that helped francophone Quebecers gain more and more influence in politics and in the economy, thus changing the face of the city. More businesses were starting to be owned and by francophones as Montreal became the center of French culture in North America. A two-year period from 1962 to 1964 saw the completion of four of Montreal's ten tallest buildings: Tour de la Bourse, Place Ville-Marie, the CIBC Building and CIL House. Montreal gained an increased international status due to the World's Fair of 1967, Expo 67. During the 1960s, mayor Jean Drapeau carried out a series of infrastructure upgrades throughout the city such as the construction of the Montreal Metro while the provincial government built much of what is today's highway system. Like many other North American cities during these years, Montreal experienced massive growth too quickly for its infrastructures to satisfy its needs.

Economic recovery

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Montreal experienced a slow rate of economic growth.. By the late 1990s, however, Montreal's economic climate had improved.
New firms and institutions began to fill the traditional business and financial niches. As the city celebrated its 350th anniversary in 1992, construction began on two new skyscrapers : 1000 de La Gauchetière and 1250 René-Lévesque. Montreal's improving economic conditions allowed further enhancements of the city infrastructure, with the expansion of the metro system, construction of new skyscrapers and the development of new highways including the start of a ring road around the island. The city also attracted several international organisations to move their secretariats into Montreal's Quartier International. With proposed revitalization of the harborfront, the city is regaining its international position as a world class city.

The arrival of the French

The first European to reach the area was Jacques Cartier on October 2, 1535. Seventy years after Cartier, Samuel de Champlain went to Hochelaga but the village no longer existed. He decided to establish a fur trading post at Place Royal on the Island of Montreal, but the local Iroquois successfully defended their land. It was not until 1639 that a permanent settlement was created on the Island of Montreal by a French tax collector named Jérôme Le Royer. Under the authority of the Roman Catholic Société Notre-Dame, missionaries Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, Jeanne Mance and a few French colonists set up a mission named Ville Marie on May 17, 1642 as part of a project to create a colony dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In 1644, Jeanne Mance founded the Hôtel-Dieu, the first hospital in North America, north of Mexico. Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve would act as governor of the colony. On January 4, 1648, he granted Pierre Gadois (who was in his fifties) the first concession of land - some 40 acres. In November of 1653, another 140 individuals arrived to enlarge the settlement. By 1651, Ville-Marie had been reduced to less than 50 inhabitants by relentless attacks by Iroquois. Maisonneuve returned to France that year with the intention of recruiting 100 men to bolster the failing colony. He had already decided that should he fail to recruit these settlers, he would abandon Ville-Marie and move everyone back downriver to Quebec City. (Even 10 years after its founding, the people of Quebec City still thought of Montreal as "une folle entreprise" - a crazy undertaking.) These recruits arrived on 16 November 1653 and essentially guaranteed the evolution of Ville Marie and of all New France. Marguerite Bourgeoys would found the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Montreal's first school, in 1653. In 1663, the Sulpician seminary became the new Seigneur of the island. Ville Marie would become a centre for the fur trade. The town was fortified in 1725. The French and Iroquois Wars would threaten the survival of Ville-Marie until a peace treaty was signed at Montreal in 1701. With the Great Peace, Montreal and the surrounding seigneuries nearby (Terrebonne, Lachenaie, Boucherville, Lachine, Longueuil, ...) could develop without the fear of Iroquois raids.

Surrender of the colony

Ville-Marie remained French settlement until 1760, when Pierre François de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal surrendered it to the British army under Jeffrey Amherst. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended the Seven Years' War and ceded Canada and all its dependencies to the Kingdom of Great Britain. American Revolutionists under General Richard Montgomery briefly captured the city during the 1775 invasion of Canada. Now a British colony, and with immigration no longer limited to members of the Roman Catholic religion, the city began to grow from British immigration. In 1775, the Continental Army briefly held the city but soon left when it became apparent that they could not take and hold Canada. More and more English-speaking merchants continued to arrive in what had by then become known as Montreal and soon the main language of commerce in the city was English. The golden era of fur trading began in the city with the advent of the locally-owned North West Company, the main rival to the primarily British Hudson's Bay Company. The town remained populated by a majority of Francophones until around the 1830s. From the 1830s, to about 1865, it was inhabited by a majority of Anglophones, most of recent immigration from the British Isles or other parts of British North America. Fire destroyed one quarter of the town on May 18, 1765. Scots constructed Montreal's first bridge across the Saint Lawrence River and founded many of the city's great industries, including Morgan's, the first department store in Canada, incorporated within the Hudson's Bay Company in the 1970s; the Bank of Montreal; Redpath Sugar; and both of Canada's national railroads. The city boomed as railways were built to New England, Toronto, and the west, and factories were established along the Lachine Canal. Many buildings from this time period are concentrated in the area known today as Old Montreal. Noted for their philanthropic work, Scots established and funded numerous Montreal institutions such as McGill University, the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec and the Royal Victoria Hospital.

A city is born

Montreal was incorporated as a city in 1832. The city's growth was spurred by the opening of the Lachine Canal, which permitted ships to pass by the unnavigable Lachine Rapids south of the island. Montreal was the capital of the United Province of Canada from 1844 to 1849, bringing even more English-speaking immigrants: Late Loyalists, Irish, Scottish, and English. Riots led by Tories led to the burning of the Provincial Parliament, forcing the government to choose another city to represent the capital of its colony. The decision was taken to move the capital to Toronto. The Anglophone community built one of Canada's first universities, McGill, and the wealthy built large mansions at the foot of Mont Royal. Palace of Justice, 1880 These linked the established port of Montreal with continental markets and spawned rapid industrialization during the mid 1800s. The economic boom attracted French Canadian labourers from the surrounding countryside to factories in satellite cities such as Saint-Henri and Maisonneuve. Irish immigrants settled in tough working class neighbourhoods such as Point Saint Charles and Griffintown, making English and French linguistic groups roughly equal in size. The growing city also attracted immigrants from Italy, and Eastern Europe. In 1852, Montreal had 58,000 inhabitants and by 1860, Montreal was the largest city in British North America and the undisputed economic and cultural centre of Canada. From 1861 to the Great Depression of 1930, Montreal went through what some historians call its Golden Age. St. James Street became the most important economic centre of the Dominion of Canada. The Canadian Pacific Railway made its headquarters there in 1880, and the Canadian National Railway in 1919. At the time of its construction in 1928, the new head office of the Royal Bank of Canada at 360 St. James Street was the tallest building in the British Empire. With the annexation of neighbouring towns between 1883 and 1918, Montreal became a mostly Francophone city again. The tradition of alternating between a francophone and an anglophone mayor thus began, and lasted until 1914.