History
The Plateau was formerly a working-class neighbourhood, with the Eastern part being largely Québécois, and the Western part largely Jewish. The neighbourhood was the childhood home of Quebec writers Michel Tremblay and Mordecai Richler and both have set many stories in the Plateau of the 1950s and 60s.
The Plateau is characterized by brightly coloured houses, cafés, book shops, and a laissez-faire attitude. It's the location of some famous attractions on Saint Laurent Boulevard, including Schwartz's Deli (famous for its Montreal smoked meat), and a weekend street fair during the summer that sees extremely crowded streets. In 1997, Utne Reader rated it one of the 15 "hippest" neighbourhoods in North America.
In the 1980s, the area's bohemian aura and proximity to McGill University attracted gentrification. As rents increased, many of its traditional residents and businesses were dispersed to other parts of the city. For example, a historic local grocer, Warshaw, has recently been replaced by a Pharmaprix. The neighbourhood continues to gentrify, and it is now home to many upscale restaurants and nightclubs, and any number of trendy clothing stores have their place along this strip of St-Laurent and St-Denis.
Read more about this topic: Le Plateau-Mont-Royal
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“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)