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 For example, a historic local grocer, Warshaw, has recently been replaced by a Pharmaprix.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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)