Montréal: Places to Explore

The Plateau, Outremont, Mile End, and Little Italy

Plateau Mont-Royal—or simply the Plateau as it's more commonly called these days—is still home to a vibrant Portuguese community, but much of the housing originally built for factory workers has been bought and renovated by professionals, artists, performers, and academics eager to find a place to live close to all the action. The Plateau is always bustling, even in the dead of winter, but on sunny summer weekends it's packed with Montrealers who come here to shop, dine, and observe each other.

The gentrification of the Plateau has pushed up rents and driven students, immigrant families, and single young graduates farther north, following the main thoroughfares of boulevard St-Laurent as well as St-Denis. Above the Plateau and next to Mont-Royal, Outremont has long been Montréal's residential Francophone enclave (as opposed to Westmount, always stubbornly English right down to its neo-Gothic churches and lawn-bowling club). It has grand homes, tree-shaded streets, perfectly groomed parks, and two upscale shopping and dining strips along rues Laurier and Bernard. Rue Bernard is particularly attractive, with wide sidewalks and shady trees. The eastern fringes of Outremont are home to Montréal's thriving Hasidic community.

Bordering Outremont is the funky neighborhood of Mile End, historically home to Montréal's working-class Jewish community and now full of inexpensive, often excellent restaurants and little shops selling handicrafts and secondhand clothes. In recent years Mile End has become one of the hippest neighborhoods in town. By day it's a great place to take a stroll or sit in a café's terrasse to watch its residents—from artsy bohemians to Hasidic Jews—pass by.

Farther north is Little Italy, which is still home base to Montréal's sizable Italian community of nearly a quarter of a million people, and though families of Italian descent now live all over the greater Montréal area, many come back here every week or so to shop, eat out, or visit family and friends, and the 30-odd blocks bounded by rues Jean-Talon, St-Zotique, Marconi, and Drolet remain its heart and soul. You'll know you've reached Little Italy when the gardens have tomato plants and grapevines, there are sausages and tins of olive oil in store windows, and the heady smell of espresso emanates from cafés.

Many of the older residences in these neighborhoods have the graceful wrought-iron balconies and twisting staircases that are typical of Montréal. The stairs and balconies, treacherous in winter, are often full of families and couples gossiping, picnicking, and partying come summer. If Montrealers tell you they spend the summer in Balconville, they mean they don't have the money or the time to leave town and won't get any farther than their balconies.