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September 11, 2017: Wandering Around Montreal |
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Return to the Index for Our Trip to Montreal |
Today we will be leaving Montreal to head over to Quebec City, but before we do, we'll be making a visit to Chateau Ramezay, a museum just across Place Jacques Cartier. But also on this page I want to include those pictures we took over the last four days of our hotel and of Place Jacques Cartier itself. I also want to wrap up our visit to Montreal by including a slideshow of the large number of public art that we encountered during our stay- most of which is on display on the streets and in the public spaces around the city.
Chateau Ramezay
Right across the Place Jacques Cartier from our hotel is the Château Ramezay- a museum and historic building on Notre-Dame Street here in Old Montreal; it is also right across the street from the Montreal City Hall.
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In the aerial view, you can see not only the museum building, but also the garden behind it. We'll be walking through the garden before we head inside to see the museum.
Built in 1705 as the residence of then-governor of Montreal, Claude de Ramezay, the Château was the first building proclaimed as a historical monument in Quebec and is the province’s oldest private history museum. It was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1949.
Over the years, the Château changed owners and functions several times, with Ramezay's descendants selling the manor to the fur-trading Compagnie des Indes. It is still privately owned.
The Governor's Garden
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This was not a large garden, but very interesting, as different sections illustrated the use of different plants. Here is a diagram of the Governor's Garden:
You can see the orchard section at left (closest to our hotel), the ornamental garden in the middle, and the vegetable garden at the right. Based on the sketch, you will probably be able to orient many of the pictures you will find below that were taken in the garden.
I thought that the garden was interesting, as we all did, and between us we took quite a few pictures as we walked around. I have given some thought as to how to organize the pictures for this page.
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Imagine this garden two times wider and four times longer! This will give you an idea of the space it occupied in the 18th century. Its current layout is based on the gardens of the dignitaries in New France, with a vegetable garden, an ornamental garden, and an orchard in three equal sections.
The sign at left was near the garden entrance, and was intended as an introduction to the garden area. Let me use it as an intro to some of the pictures we took of the garden as a whole:
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There were also three other signs placed around the garden that introduced each of the three main areas- orchard, ornamental, and vegetable. I think the these three signs are a good way to organize the pictures. Each of those signs is below (with the title and English narrative off to the side), and thumbnails for the best of the pictures we took in or close to that particular garden area. So enjoy walking through this garden with us this morning, and have a look at as many of the pictures as you wish!
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Fruits were highly valued in New France and many species successfully adapted to the Montreal region. The orchard became a source of delicacies.
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With its beautifully symmetrical parterre, the ornamental garden must be pleasing to the mind. The colours and scents of its flowers and aromatic and medicinal plants delight the senses.
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Flowers, fruit and vegetables grow side by side in this French-style garden, in the agricultural and ornamental tradition of the 18th century. In New France, the garden played an essential role in nutrition.
In this part of the garden, Prudence got a nice picture of her sister Nancy, and Fred got the pictures below:
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By the time we'd wandered around the garden for a while, the museum was open, so we all walked up the garden ramp at the back of the building, went around to the front and then inside.
The Ramezay Chateau Museum
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From 1775, the Governor's house became the Canadian headquarters for the Continental Army when it seized Montreal. Benjamin Franklin stayed there overnight in 1776, while trying to raise troops to fight for the Americans in the American Revolutionary War. After the conquest and until 1849 the house was again used as a governor's residence, this time by the British governors. For official purposes it was known as Government House and was the governor's official Montreal residence which complemented his other residence in Quebec City (the Chateau St. Louis), and a country retreat in Sorel.
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Today, the museum's collection is composed mainly of gifts from private Montrealers and is estimated at 30,000 objects, including manuscripts, printed works, numismatic items, ethnological items, works of art, paintings, prints and furniture. To date the museum has greeted more than a million visitors- and we were seven more this morning. Between us, we took perhaps 200 pictures of the various exhibits, and I think the best way to allow you to look at them is via a slideshow. For my part, I tried to also photograph the descriptive plaques beside some of the exhibits, so that I would remember what they were. Not all of our pictures turned out well enough to include here; some rooms of the museum were quite dark and flash was discouraged. So I've taken all our pictures, weeded out the duplicates and those that didn't turn out well, and made slides out of them. When available, I've attached the information from the descriptive plaque to the slide. The slideshow is below. As always, you can move from slide to slide using the arrows at the bottom of each one, and you can track your progress with the index numbers in the upper left. I hope you enjoy wandering through the Chateau Ramezay museum with us.
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We left the museum around eleven to return to the hotel to collect our luggage and head to the central train station. Between the museum and the square proper we encountered one more interesting sight.
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It wasn't until we left the chateau and came around in front of the statue that we found out who it was.
Jean Drapeau (1916-1999) was a Canadian lawyer and politician who served as mayor of Montréal from 1954 to 1957 and 1960 to 1986. In 2001, this bronze statue of him was placed here at the side of Place Jacques-Cartier, adjacent to the Chåteau Ramezay museum.
The kind of maze garden he overlooks is harder to explain; indeed, there was no signage to describe it, and I have not been able to locate anything about it on the Internet. It was a kind of maze, because you could follow the paved, curved walks to try to get to the small boulder hill in the center.
Place Jacques Cartier
This old public square here in Montreal separated the Hotel William Gray from the Chateau Ramezay and the various shops and restaurants on the other side of the square. We walked through the square numerous times during our stay; this section will have all the pictures we took of it on the various days of our stay.
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The broad, divided street slopes steeply downhill from Montreal City Hall and rue Notre-Dame to the waterfront and rue de la Commune. During the high tourist season, the street hosts many street artists and kiosks. During the Christmas season, the street is lined with lighted trees. At any time of year, one can find restaurants on both sides of the street and many more on the surrounding streets of Vieux Port, notably on Rue Saint-Paul.
As I mentioned, we walked through this square numerous times; being right outside the doors of our hotel, I would have been very hard not to. The last time we walked through it was after our visit to Chateau Ramezay, when we walked past the Drapeau statue and the maze garden on the way back to our hotel.
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Place Jacques Cartier is a car-free zone in the summer. During the summer season, Jardin Nelson offers a garden restaurant on Place Jacques-Cartier. Other restaurants (and our hotel) similarly offer classical Parisian-style "terraces" for taking a drink or dining in the open air. And on the other side of the place, the famous restaurant Saint-Amable (the oldest restaurant in town, and the one we had dinner in last night) welcomes Montreal celebrities and locals in a crooner jazz atmosphere.
Near Place Jacques-Cartier on rue de la Commune, an original piece of the wall of the old fortified city can still be seen in the basement restaurant of the Auberge du Vieux-Port. At the upper end of the Place stands Nelson's Column, built in memory of Admiral Horatio Nelson. The statue was removed in 1997 to preserve it from the weather, and was subsequently replaced with a copy.
Public Art in Montreal
I have mentioned on earlier pages that in our walks through Montreal we came across an incredible number of art installations- sculpture, murals, bronzes, etc.- that were located on city streets, in building plazas, in parks, and in squares like Place Jacques Cartier. One of the most interesting was one we first saw on the afternoon of our first day here in Montreal- The Illuminated Crowd by Raymond Mason.
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Mason is known for his sculptures of tightly packed people made from clay, and his works can be found on McGill College Avenue here in Montreal (The Illuminated Crowd); in the Tuileries in Paris; in Washington, D.C.; and on Madison Avenue in New York. His controversial 1991 work, Forward in Birmingham's Centenary Square was destroyed by arson in 2003. The statue carried a reference to DNA ("the secret of life") in connection with Maurice Wilkins, the scientist and close friend of Mason, who went to school in Birmingham and worked at the University of Birmingham.
Mason was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for "services to sculpture and to Anglo-French relations" in the 2002 New Year Honours. He died in Paris in 2010 at the age of 87.
As I said, we walked by this sculpture three times during our stay. Guy, Fred, and I stopped by it on our first day when we hopped off the tour bus and walked back to the William Gray. We walked by it on another of our walks as well, and, finally, when I walked to the Museum of Fine Arts with Prudence, Ron, Karl, and Nancy, we stopped by it yet again. It was extremely interesting (and quite a large installation) and we took lots of neat pictures of it.
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| The Illuminated Crowd (1985) "A crowd has gathered, facing a light, an illumination brought about by a fire, an event, an ideology- or an ideal. The strong light casts shadows, and as the light moves toward the back and diminishes, the mood degenerates; rowdiness, disorder and violence occur, showing the fragile nature of man. Illumination, hope, involvement, hilarity, irritation, fear, illness, violence, murder and detah- the flow of man's emotion through space." |
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The Illuminated Crowd was just one of the many, many art installations that we saw during our stay here in Montreal. I am pretty sure no city I have ever been to has had so many sprinkled around.
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You will notice as you go through the slides that a few of them have two images; I combined them when I could just to keep the number of slides more manageable.
As usual, you can move through the slides by clicking on the little arrows in the lower corners of each one, and you can track your progress by referring to the index numbers in the upper left.
We hope you enjoy having a look at some of Montreal's public art!
Before we leave Montreal, you might want to have a look at the Hotel William Gray.
The Hotel William Gray
The Hotel William Gray is an extremely nice boutique hotel (not part of a chain) in Vieux Montreal, and at the outset Fred and I want to thank Prudence for treating us to our stay here. (We will be similarly thanking Nancy for our hotel in Quebec City.)
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The composite picture at left shows the hotel as seen fron Rue St. Vincent. The hotel is housed in two historical buildings – the Maison Edward-William Gray (the white building) and the Maison Cherrier (the darker building at right), both of which date back to the 18th century. I have no aerial view to show you, as the most recent one I can find still shows the hotel under construction. The Hotel William Gray consists of a new glass tower sitting atop these two historic buildings.
Edward-William Gray was a sheriff and merchant who built this property in two stages around 1785. The northern part served as both a warehouse and shops for the auction of goods, while the southern part served as a residence for Gray. Of all the buildings remaining from the period before 1800, these two structures are rare in that their exterior appearance has been virtually unchanged. These two buildings are also the only living examples of an 18th-century property that combines residence and work, common at the time.
After Gray’s death in 1810, his wife Margaret Oakes (the namesake of the main restaurant) remained the owner of the building until her death in 1825. She bequeathed this property to her nephew Frederick William Ermatinger, Gray’s successor as sheriff of Montreal. After his death in 1827, the property was sold to Seraphino Giraldi, a hotelier and shopkeeper.
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The buildings were used for a variety of uses after that time, including a printer, shops, stable, restaurant and brasserie. Following a fire in March 1968, the owner restored the two buildings according to their original appearance. It was classified as a historic monument in 1969. The corporation formed to create the new hotel bought both properties in 2012, and spent a great deal of time drawing up plans for the new hotel; these plans had to incorporate the historic buildings rather than replace them.
The new hotel buildings sit atop and just behind the historic The center of the block was hollowed out and the new hotel constructed in and atop the old buildings. Guests can now walk directly through the hotel from Rue St. Vincent to Place Jacques Cartier. When you do, you first pass the front desk and then the elevators. Next, in the center of the hotel complex, there is a large atrium and outdoor seating area and some other stuff we'll see presently. Then down the wide corridor past a couple of shops and then, oddly enough, past the meat cooler where the restaurant keeps its prime cuts of beef, pork, and lamb.
Then you are through the middle of the restaurant and out into the square. Above, right, you can see Fred and Nancy standing in Place Jacques Cartier, just outside the Restaurant Maggie Oakes.
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The center of the building was a large, partially covered atrium, which was three floors high. Inside, there was a library and game area, while outside there was a seating area and a small pool. A covered hallway led across towards St. Vincent to the well-equipped exercise room and locker facilities. Here are some of the pictures Fred took in and around the atrium:
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Our room on the fourth floor was a nice one, with a corner window looking out into the courtyard area in the center of the block north of us. This new hotel is very modern inside; our room had exposed concrete walls. We didn't take many pictures in the room, but here are a couple:
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That pretty much complete it for our stay in Montreal. If you'll return to the index, you can come with us to Quebec City- a trip which will begin with a train ride from Montreal Central Station.
You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.
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September 11, 2017: Wandering Around Montreal |
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Return to the Index for Our Trip to Montreal |
