Golden Square Mile

The Golden Square Mile (French: Le Mille Carré Doré) or more simply the "Square Mile" was the nostalgic name given to a small neighbourhood developed between 1850 and 1930 at the foot of Mount Royal, in the west-central section of downtown Montreal, Canada. From the 1930s, Montrealers began to refer to it as the "Square Mile", but the addition of 'Golden' was a comparatively modern twist added from the 1950s by Montreal's real estate world. By 1983, only 30% of the luxurious homes in the northern half of the Square Mile had survived demolition; and only 5% survived south of Sherbrooke Street. The remaining houses that once stood along tree-lined streets and avenues are today mostly owned by McGill University and are found interspersed on tree-less streets, dwarfed by concrete tower blocks that have become the more familiar sight.

As a neighbourhood, the Square Mile came into its own around 1850. The anglophone captains of industry (many of whom were closely connected to the men of the Beaver Club before them) started to look beyond Old Montreal, building new homes on the farmland of the slopes of Mount Royal north of Sherbrooke Street - then nothing more than a quiet country lane. The houses they built there came to represent a period of prosperity when Canada was at its economic peak and Montreal was its unrivalled cultural and financial capital.

The controllers of the overwhelming majority of Canadian rail, shipping, timber, mining, fur and banking consisted of a small group of about fifty men who called the Square Mile 'home'. An often-cited statistic is that from about 1870 to 1900, 70% of all wealth in Canada was firmly in the hands of this small group. By 1900, the Bank of Montreal's assets and transactions were equal to any of its counterparts on the New York Stock Exchange, and those assets were twice that of the Bank's nearest Canadian competitor.

The Square Mile was a neighbourhood of an opulence and architectural audacity until then unknown in the Dominion of Canada, and never seen since. But, by 1930, following the Great Depression, and with the dawn of the automobile and a demand for more heat-efficient houses, the younger generations of the families that had built these homes largely decamped for Westmount. During the Quiet Revolution, the businesses created in Montreal on whose fortunes the Square Mile had been built uprooted to Toronto and demolition of the area reached its peak. The face of it was changed irreversibly, which led to the creation of Heritage Montreal. Vestiges remain, but its life, grandeur and elegance has long since disappeared.