Behind a Plaza Saint-Hubert storefront, Montreal's next headliners learn to fill a room. Ausgang Plaza at 6524 rue Saint-Hubert is a 4,500-square-foot multifunctional venue holding up to 450 people, carved out of the storied shopping street best known for its bridal boutiques - and for a decade it has run one of the city's most influential experiments: find the DJ collectives and emerging acts capable of packing a small bar, and hand them a 450-person floor to grow into. The formula built a leg.....

Punks Don't Bend - the name is a mission statement with a chandelier attached. Bar Le Ritz PDB at 179 rue Jean-Talon Ouest in Montreal's Mile Ex began as the Zebra Bar, bought in 2008 by the Blue Skies Turned Black promoter crew who tacked a stage onto the awkward little room; in 2014 promoter Meyer Billurcu bought out his partners and rebuilt it properly with Thierry Amar and Efrim Menuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, creating the snug, deliberately unfancy venue whose glittery chandelier ove.....

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 centre court where Canada watches world tennis sits on the bones of the Expos' first ballpark. IGA Stadium at 285 Rue Gary-Carter in Montreal's Jarry Park is the main stadium of the National Bank Open, the ATP Masters 1000 and WTA 1000 event that alternates its men's and women's draws between Montreal and Toronto each summer. The site's sporting pedigree predates tennis: Jarry Park Stadium hosted the Montreal Expos from 1969 to 1976, and the tennis stadium's south seating remains a remnant o.....

In the heart of Montreal's Mile End district, Theatre Fairmount is an intimate live-music venue with a long and colourful history at its address on Avenue du Parc. The room first rose to prominence in the early 1980s as the original Club Soda, later operating as Kola Note and Cabaret du Mile-End before being extensively renovated and reopening under its current name in 2015 as a modern home for independent and alternative music. The venue is primarily a standing room holding around six hundred .....

Jarry Park is a large and much-used public park in the Villeray district of Montreal, a green expanse of lawns, paths, ponds and sports facilities that serves the surrounding neighbourhoods as a place for recreation, relaxation and community life. One of the larger parks in the central city, it offers a broad range of amenities spread across its grounds, including playing fields, a large pond popular with walkers and home to ducks and other birds, picnic areas, playgrounds, cycling and walking p.....

The Jean-Talon Market is one of the largest and busiest public markets in North America, an open-air food market in the Little Italy district of Montreal that has been a centre of the city's culinary life since it opened in 1933. Set under a long roof open at the sides, the market is a riot of colour and abundance through the growing season, its stalls heaped with fruit and vegetables, much of it brought in fresh by local farmers from the surrounding region of Quebec, alongside flowers, herbs an.....

La Fontaine Park is one of the largest and most popular parks in central Montreal, a leafy expanse in the Plateau Mont-Royal district laid out in the formal nineteenth-century manner around two linked ornamental ponds, and a favourite gathering place for the dense, lively neighbourhoods that surround it. Covering a substantial area, the park is organised in two contrasting halves, one designed in a formal French style with straight paths and symmetrical plantings and the other in a more naturali.....

The bassist of Godspeed You! Black Emperor needed a bigger room for an Arab Strap show - so he knocked on the door of the Spanish Social Club, and Montreal got its most storied indie concert hall. La Sala Rossa, upstairs at 4848 Boulevard Saint-Laurent in Mile End, has been the 250-capacity red room at the heart of the city's independent music scene since 2001. The building carries ninety years of community history: completed in 1936 to a design by Max Kalman - one of the first Jewish graduates.....

Thirty-eight steps down from the Main, under the red room, Montreal keeps its rawest stage. La Sotterenea - the basement of La Sala Rossa at 4848 Boulevard Saint-Laurent - is a 220-capacity underground venue where the city's emerging bands, experimental composers and DIY promoters get their first real sound system. The space belongs to one of Montreal's most historied buildings: the 1936 Art Deco hall built for the Arbeter Ring Jewish workers' society, later the rehearsal home of Les Grands Bal.....