Montreal and Me

The first stop on my Olympic host cities tour is Montreal. I’ve been to the city on three separate occasions – once before it hosted the 1976 Summer Games and twice afterward. So, let’s get started.

My pre-teen excursion.

I first went to Montreal in the summer of 1967 when I was a lad of 12. The trip was made in conjunction with Expo 67 which had as its theme Man and His World.

[Map from Wikimedia Commons РBy Thomas R̦mer/OpenStreetMap.]

I honestly don’t have exceptionally vivid memories of that trip but I do recall that it was a bus trip sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Baltimore and that we spent the night in sleeping bags at the JCC in Albany. I also have vague memories that, although we slept in the gym, many of us stayed outside the building until late in the night counting not the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike but the trucks on the New York State Thruway.

Once at the Expo, I have some vague memories of riding a monorail through the U S Pavilion which was a huge geodesic dome. It evoked a memory of the Unisphere that was a symbolic part of the 1964 New York World’s Fair (that I’d visited with my parents) and that still stands in Flushing Meadows today. Because it was a JCC sponsored trip we visited not only the Expo but made the di rigeur visit to the famous (infamous) Habitat designed by the Israeli architect Moshe Sadfie.

[Photo from Wikimedia Commons – By Taxiarchos228, BY CC-SA-3.0].

People will come – but maybe not to Canada.

My second trip to the lovely city along the Saint Lawrence River occurred in the late nineties when I set out on a marginally ambitious plan to see a game in each of the 30 existing Major League Baseball stadiums. Once again, I traveled by road to Montreal. This was a much different experience since I drove my own car and completed the trip in a single day thanks to the Interstate Highway system that had been far from complete in 1967. I made the trip near the end of April and have a vivid recollection of feeling that I was traveling backward in time one week for each hundred miles or so as I noted the regression of the surrounding foliage that looked more and more like late winter or very early spring with each unit of that distance.

I saw the Expos play at the Stade Olympique (nicknamed The Big O) the oval shaped stadium which opened as an unfinished structure for the Olympic Games in 1976 and which had already cost nearly ten times the original estimate.

[Photo from Wikimedia Commons РBy-Yanik-Cr̩peau-CC-BY-SA-3.0].

By this time, the famous 165 meters tall inclined tower was complete and could, in theory operate the retractable Kevlar roof. However, high winds and other operational problems meant that the roof was closed only 88 times during the life of the stadium. The final cost of the structure (originally budgeted at 138 million Canadian dollars) totaled 1,470,000,000 Canadian dollars and was not completely paid until 2006. (The English speaking denizens unironically call it, the Big Owe).

All in the family.

My third and to date final excursion happened in the first decade of this century perhaps in 2004 because I don’t think the Expos had yet relocated to Washington to become the Nationals. This time I went to visit my sister and brother-in-law who had temporarily relocated there from Atlanta and were in the fourth or fifth year of John’s two to three year assignment. It was on this trip that I was able to really see and experience the pleasures the city had to offer.

I made no notes and took no photos so my recollection is blurry and unfocused. I remember visiting some local markets, eating at a café or two, and having at least one long walk along the Saint Lawrence River.  We also rode / climbed to the top of Mount Royal the geologic landmark from which the city draws its name. The intrusive rock hill was christened as such in 1535 by Jacques Cartier

[Cartier portrait from Wikipedia – Public Domain.]

who is the first known European to have scaled it. He called it Mont Royal to honor his patron, John Royal.

Cartier was among many seeking a short northern passage from Europe to east Asia and his first voyage took him across the Atlantic to the shores of Newfoundland and into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. On this venture, he reported three encounters with indigenous people with the last being a group of Saint Lawrence Iroquoians that came on the shore of Gaspé Bay (at the northeast corner of New Brunswick). It was here on 24 July 1534 that Cartier planted a cross and claimed the lands of Canada for France.

It was on the second of his three trans-Atlantic voyages that Cartier sailed south along the Saint Lawrence River stopping at the Iroquoian capital of Stadacona where he moored all but his smallest ship and sailed farther south to Hochelaga – a much larger and more developed settlement than Stadacona and the site of present day Montreal. It’s reported that more than 1,000 First Peoples met him at a site very near where the bridge that bears his name now stands

[Image from Google Maps.]

and I’ll have more to write about that in an upcoming supplement. But first, a brief Olympic Games review.