The district of Ville-Marie (Downtown Montreal) is more than one simple arrondissement(district), it is at the same time the center of Montreal and also the economic center of the province of Quebec.
The Ville-Marie district was not always the economic center of Montreal; in fact this status is recent on the scale of Montreal history. First’s large buildings built at the beginning of the Thirties weren’t in the downtown area but concentrated in the current Old Montreal. Buildings such as the Sun Life building and the Bell building started a trend that the great depression drastically stopped. It is with the opening of the Central train stations that the current Downtown took place.
With the project of covering the enormous trench left open by the entering of the tunnel under the mountain builds by Canadian Northern Railway the current downtown area really started to take its place. The project of the Place Ville-Marie and the Bonaventure place (both built over the rails of CN) literally polarized the development of the Montreal’s downtown town toward north; projects then came at a frightening speed for the metropolis.
Today Ville-Marie district knows a major rebirth with arrival of Apartment skyscrapers, many are luxury which will come to populate more Montreal’s downtown and thus to make a city more alive.
1621 Pictures of Downtown, Montréal.
