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.....

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.....

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.....

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.....

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.....

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 .....