The silent-movie house that Little Burgundy refused to let die. The Beanfield Theatre at 2490 rue Notre-Dame Ouest opened on 11 November 1912 as the Family Theatre, designed by Joseph-Cajetan Dufort and Louis-Theophile Decary for silent film with live accompaniment - orchestra pit at the footlights, dressing rooms tucked beneath the compact stage. Sold in 1923 and renamed the Corona, it gained its lasting interior from decorator Emmanuel Briffa: Corinthian columns, allegorical paintings, stencil.....
Canada's largest casino keeps a jewel-box theatre wired with technology few concert halls can match. The Cabaret du Casino de Montreal sits inside the Casino de Montreal at 1 Avenue du Casino on Ile Notre-Dame in Parc Jean-Drapeau, the former French pavilion of Expo 67 that Loto-Quebec converted into a gaming palace in 1993. The Cabaret emerged from the casino's multi-year renovation program and reopened in its current form in 2015 after an extensive rebuild, re-engineered as a genuinely multipu.....
The Electric Buttocks has been Montreal's temple of the underground for four decades. Les Foufounes Electriques - Cabaret Fouf or simply Foufs to the city - opened in spring 1983 at 87 Rue Sainte-Catherine Est in the Quartier Latin, founded by Norman Boileau, Francois Gourd and Bernard Paquet, three friends from a musical theatre troupe who took over the former Zoobar and turned it into a hybrid nightclub, performance-art laboratory and stage for emerging musicians. The provocative name came fro.....
A student cafeteria protest in 1967 produced one of Montreal's most durable nightlife institutions. Cafe Campus was born on 17 February 1967 when Universite de Montreal students, angered by the closure of their cafeterias, opened their own cafe on Chemin Queen-Mary - which promptly grew a discotheque, a self-management philosophy and a mandate to guarantee student jobs and gender equity. The workers bought the business from the student association in 1981, formalising the workers' cooperative th.....
The last light of Montreal's Red Light District refuses to go out. Cafe Cleopatra at 1230 Boulevard Saint-Laurent occupies a building from 1895 that has housed show bars almost continuously since it went up - the Club Alhambra, the Sailor's Dining Room, the Cafe Parthenon, the Riviera Grill and the Cafe Canasta all preceded the current name, adopted in 1976 - making the address arguably the longest-operating show bar in the city. It stands on the Lower Main, the stretch of Saint-Laurent that fro.....
Canada's largest indoor arena carries the heaviest banner collection in hockey. The Bell Centre - Centre Bell - at 1909 Avenue des Canadiens-de-Montreal opened on 16 March 1996 as the Molson Centre, replacing the sainted Montreal Forum as home of the Montreal Canadiens. Construction had begun in June 1993, two weeks after the club's 24th and most recent Stanley Cup, and the building was threaded ingeniously into the downtown core above the historic Windsor Station, with direct connections to the.....
The Clock Tower at the eastern end of the Old Port of Montreal is a slender white memorial tower rising some forty-five metres above the waterfront, built in the early 1920s as a monument to the sailors of the Canadian merchant marine who lost their lives in the First World War. Completed in 1922 and dedicated by the Prince of Wales, the tower was conceived both as a working clock and as a war memorial, its mechanism modelled on the principles of London's famous Big Ben, and it stands at the tip.....
Modern Quebec stand-up comedy was born on this stage on a Monday night in February 1983. Club Soda opened in November 1982 at 5240 Park Avenue in Montreal, where Guy Gosselin, filmmaker Andre Gagnon and Martin Despres had converted a reception hall into a new kind of cabaret, inaugurated by soul singer Boule Noire. Three months later came the first Lundis des Ha! Ha! hosted by Ding et Dong - the duo of Serge Theriault and Claude Meunier - drawing 700-plus people with 400 more turned away, and la.....
Dorchester Square is a large public park at the centre of downtown Montreal, a green and leafy space ringed by historic and modern buildings that serves as a gathering place, a starting point for city tours and a quiet refuge amid the surrounding bustle. The square occupies ground that was once a Catholic cemetery, used in the first half of the nineteenth century and including victims of cholera epidemics, before the burials were relocated and the land was laid out as a public square in the latt.....
The theatre came first: the hall beneath this church opened five months before the church itself, and it has now been staging performances for 160 years. Le Gesu, at 1202 rue de Bleury in downtown Montreal's Quartier des spectacles, pairs one of the city's oldest performance halls with its only fully Baroque-style church - both built in 1865 for the Jesuit-run College Sainte-Marie. The amphitheatre was inaugurated on 10 July 1865 with an academic debate, originally holding close to 1,200 seats .....