Montreal’s Square Mile: The Making and Transformation of a Colonial Metropole, edited by Dimitry Anastakis, Elizabeth Kirkland, and Don Nerbas, sheds light on the history of the Square Mile, a powerful symbol of wealth in Montreal’s urban landscape.
Listen to a Podcast Episode, featuring Dimitry Anastakis, Elizabeth Kirkland and Don Nerbas, as they talk about their book, Montreal’s Square Mile.
Read an excerpt of Chapter One, by Roderick MacLeod, below:
CHAPTER ONE
The High Ground: Mansions, Mythology, and the Mountain
By Roderick MacLeod
Above all, it is a place of romance.
For over two centuries we have been glamourizing Mount Royal and the well-heeled people who lived on its southern slopes to a degree that is out of proportion to the former’s modest size and the latter’s overall contribution to culture and social development. At the dawn of the British regime, artists such as Thomas Patten depicted Montreal as if it were on a South Sea island, the mountain’s stark cliff rising into the clouds, dwarfing the town huddled at the water’s edge (Figure 1.1). Subsequent visitors almost always noticed Mount Royal looming in the distance, and even that practical-minded Montrealer, the Reverend Newton Bosworth, referred to it as “a very conspicuous object.”1 The mountain has certainly been conspicuous in the city’s evolving self-image. The residents of the elaborate mansions built on its flank have also been highly conspicuous in historical literature and the popular imagination – especially the male residents, who are typically depicted as captains, barons, princes, and gentlemen of substance.2 This is the stuff of mythology.
Like all mythology, such depictions do contain a grain of truth, but in this case the task of separating truth from myth is hardly as interesting as exploring how the mythology itself works. Admittedly, there is much that bears demystifying behind the sober facades of both men and mansions, but this objective can be pursued even as one acknowledges the importance of mythology in understanding this infamous cohort. Indeed, the gentlemen who lived on the side of the mountain, and who figure so prominently in the city’s, and Canada’s, economic history, directly benefitted from this mythology, as did their families – and not just in hindsight. As we peruse the literature that romanticizes their lives, we learn that the people whose names are associated with lavish mansions and whose faces adorn commemorative volumes were also historical players who worked to shape this mythology, which in turn helped forge their fortunes and cement their reputations. To dismiss this romanticization as “myth” and therefore unworthy of serious study, as social historians are perhaps inclined to do, is to overlook a critical aspect of social formation and mutual self-promotion. Elites do not merely germinate in well-turned socioeconomic soil; they also benefit from fertilizer.
Mythology can involve statistics. For example, historically, it was in this elite area that 70 per cent of Canada’s wealth resided. This oft-repeated fact is possibly true, but its origins are very murky. I have yet to see it satisfactorily footnoted. Accurate or not, it serves as go-to information when referring to Montreal’s elite, and it is rarely accompanied by further probing into questions such as how this elite came to live where it did, and what it says about Canada that 70 per cent of its wealth should be located in one small area. What is always achieved by quoting this statistic is to reinforce the glamour inevitably associated with the sort of wealth that can power a country – not abstractly, as a class, but directly, as a relatively small cohort with apparently superhuman abilities. Mythology can be enhanced by the rather casual recourse to an info-byte that has enjoyed a very long shelf life.
The mythology around this elite extends to the names we have given to its geographical location. In the popular imagination, the familiar term is the “Golden Square Mile,” which conjures up visions of ornate mansions, elegant costumes, and sprawling gardens. This name is, of course, a relatively recent invention, as elderly residents (at any rate, those I encountered in the course of my doctoral work in the 1990s) would tell you. They preferred the less pretentious term “the Square Mile.” The academic world does too, partly because that term has a longer pedigree and partly because it eschews, or appears to eschew, the romanticism inherent in “Golden.” But this romanticism continues to resonate, today perhaps more than ever. Not so long ago, some advertising executive realized that reviving a vaguely historic-sounding name and applying it to an urban area long associated with wealth would make that area even more desirable. In real estate terms, the ensuing campaign was a matter of effectively gilding the lily – or in this case,
goldening the Square Mile.
The cachet surrounding this part of town derives largely from our inexhaustible fascination for its great mansions, a few of which continue to dot the urban landscape. When the Montreal Gazette referred to “Golden Square Mile splendor” in a 2009 article about a renovated home, readers had a good sense of what was meant.3 The commercial appropriation of the area’s cachet has meant not only the addition of “Golden” to an older term but also the removal of “the.” Advertisements refer to “Living in Golden Square Mile” as if it were an actual neighbourhood or borough. Even Google Maps clearly indicates “Golden Square Mile” as a district apparently on a par with “Downtown Montreal,” labelled with the same font. There is even a “Golden Square Mile Tourism Development Society” whose mandate is “to promote the Golden Square Mile district, in downtown Montréal, as a unique destination with respect to eight pillars: architecture, art, business, education, fashion heritage, history, hospitality and nature.”4 The term clearly isn’t going away anytime soon.
In my 1997 doctoral thesis on the area, I used “Golden Square Mile,” and most frequently the acronym “GSM.”5 This was not laziness: my background in urban history convinced me that Montreal’s wealthy nineteenth-century uptown neighbourhood needed to be demystified and depicted as generic. I saw parallels in other cities in which such elite spaces appeared: London’s Mayfair, Edinburgh’s New Town, New York’s Upper East Side, Philadelphia’s Society Hill, Boston’s Beacon Hill, and Madrid’s Barrio de Salamanca. These cities all had their own Golden Square Miles, as it were. A GSM, I suggested, should be a geographical term akin to CBD (central business district). That idea has not caught on, and it is very good that it hasn’t, since I now think the idea of the Golden Square Mile is infinitely more interesting as a specific cultural phenomenon than as a generic geographical reference.
My attitude towards this area on the side of Mount Royal is similar to my interpretation of the historical nature of Quebec society. I also think it is more interesting, and that it offers a deeper vein of historical gold (pun intended), to see Quebec as a distinct society rather than view it as quelques arpents d’amérique, a corner of North America that just happens to speak French.6 It is quite reasonable to argue that the cultural differences between Quebec and the rest of the continent are sufficiently negligible as to permit historians to apply general models to an interpretation of the Quebec experience, and by extension to use the Quebec experience, even the Anglo-Quebec experience, as a case study for proving larger theories. That was essentially what I attempted with the GSM. But this approach overlooks a long history of religious and legal exceptionalism that will, at the very least, muddy attempts to generalize. By the same token, my thinking about the Golden Square Mile has evolved considerably since completing my thesis, notably in that now I doubt it can serve as a case study of anything. Instead, I see it as distinct from elite communities in other cities that it might resemble. It is distinct both because of the mountain on which it sits, with all its inherent romantic associations, and because it evolved within a society that is itself distinct within North America in terms of its particular combination of language, religion, and law. The Golden Square Mile was overwhelmingly English-speaking and Protestant, characteristics that must inevitably colour any discussion of class tensions, gender relations, and cultural expression.
Learn more about Montreal’s Square Mile.
Don’t forget to check out the Podcast Witness to Yesterday, featuring Dimitry Anastakis, Elizabeth Kirkland and Don Nerbas, as they talk about their book, Montreal’s Square Mile.
Notes
1 Newton Bosworth, Hochelaga Depicta: The Early History of Montreal (Montreal: William Grieg,
1839), 88.
2 See, for example, Richard Feltoe, A Gentleman of Substance: The Life and Legacy of John Redpath,
1796–1869 (Toronto: Natural Heritage/Natural History, 2004).
3 Stephanie Whittaker, “Golden Square Mile Splendor,” Montreal Gazette, 9 May 2009, F1.
4 “The Golden Square Mile Tourism Development Society,” Bonjour Québec, accessed 7 February
2023, https://www.quebecoriginal.com/en/listing/tourist-information/local-tourism-promotion-agencies/golden-square-mile-tourism-development-society-387765744.
5 Roderick MacLeod, “Salubrious Settings and Fortunate Families: The Making of Montreal’s
Golden Square Mile, 1840–1895” (PhD diss., McGill University, 1997).
6 Gérard Bouchard, Quelques arpents d’Amérique: Population, économie, famille au Saguenay,
1838–1971 (Montreal: Boréal, 1996)
