Downtown Montreal

Downtown (also known by its French name, Centre-ville) is the business center of today's Montreal. Not as distinctive-looking as Old Montreal it nevertheless contains quite a few architecturally significant buildings, especially if you're into modern architecture. Rue St-Catherine or at least, its downtown portion, is the main shopping artery of the city. It is nearly always brimming with people.

Places to Visit

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is Montreal's biggest museum. Its principal building, which sits directly opposite the original 1912 pavilion, was built by Montreal's most famous modern architect, Moshe Safdie in 1991.

Downtown business core consists of skyscrapers built from the early 1960's to the late 1990's, mainly along Boulevard René-Lévesque. Among them, Place Ville Marie (I. M. Pei and Henry N Cobb, 1962) is perhaps the most recognizable.

» Our list of selected Downtown Montreal Places to Visit (2)

Places to Eat, etc

Both studenty (thanks to two major campuses - Concordia and McGill) and business-oriented, Downtown Montreal is actually a rather sparse neighborhood for good dining, but it has its pockets of activity - for example, Peel Street above St-Catherine and Crescent Street.

» Our list of selected Downtown Montreal Cafés and Restaurants (5)

Related Articles

The voting process for the name of Montreal's citywide bike rental program is over and the winner is chosen. The system is going to be called "BIXI".

Over the next month, demo bikes will be wheeled around the city and public demonstrations will be held. According to the city's mayor, Gérald Tremblay, by next spring Montreal will count 2,400 bikes at more than 300 solar-powered stations...

Read the rest of: "BIXI: Bike, Taxi, Montreal"»

Construction crews are still crawling over the central tower of the new Hilton Garden Inn on Rue Sherbrooke, but the hotel is already open for business, as made evident not only by the banner that says as much, but also by a quasi-permanent line of cabs picking up departing guests...

Read the rest of: "New Hilton Garden Inn / Centre-ville"»

Back in July, Apple opened a flagship store in Montreal of which yours truly has already had an opportunity to be a customer.

The store is ninth in the list of Apple's flagship stores world-wide (the others are in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, London, Tokyo, Osaka and New York) and the first of the kind in Canada...

Read the rest of: "Apple Opens Montreal Flagship Store"»

Many tourists (not to mention the residents) find the lack of direct transport links between Downtown and Old Montreal inconvenient. Sure, the métro is there, but because of the U-shaped configuration of its lines, a traveler who wants to go from centrally located Peel Street to no less central Old Montreal would have to travel a few stops west (or east) on the green line, switch to the orange line, then essentially come back to the geographic center of the city albeit 10-15 blocks south. Annoying.

Fortunately, the city is aware of that - in fact, many recent proposals for building a tramway line cited this very inconvenience as the major reason for building it. Well, the tramway, if it's ever built, is still years away, but something much more feasible is already coming, the Gazette reported: Old Montreal and Downtown Montreal are to be linked by a new bus route...

Read the rest of: "Downtown, Old Port To Be Linked By New Bus Route"»

I am not exactly a frequent visitor at tea salons - a fact pretty much ensured by the very presence of the Y chromosome in my DNA.

Yet, since about a year ago, I regularly find myself at a place that ranks suspiciously well on the tea connoisseurs' list of Montreal cafés and restaurants. And what do I order there? Tea. And cookies...

Read the rest of: "Tea and Cookies at Nocochi"»