Episode 1: Montreal

Sarah: 00:06
If you think back to like your last summer before you like had to work or become an adult, and when like it was like just like those dog days of summer, it was super long and you just were like existing. I feel like I get a tiny taste of that feeling again. In the summer, biking home at night. That’s why I like it.

Sam: 00:36
This is City Share, a podcast about how we move through cities and how cities move us. I’m Sam Her. Today, Montreal. Montreal is such an inviting city. It’s unpretentious. It’s both pretty and beautiful. It’s old and new. It’s the kind of place where nobody minds if you sit on their front steps. Here’s how one Montrealer puts it. I feel like Montreal likes people loitering.

Sarah: 01:12
Montreal likes people loitering.

Sam: 01:15
It likes people wandering down alleyways to look at graffiti and hanging out on the sidewalk. Today we’ll be wandering with our local guides, Sarah and Dana.

Sam: 01:27
Actually, I think my friend’s here now.

Sam: 01:32
I meet Sarah and Dana on a corner in Little Italy. Hi!

Sarah: 01:36
Hi, I’m Sarah. How are you? I’m Sarah.

Sam: 01:38
Sarah’s a teacher. She’s lived here for five years.

Sarah: 01:41
I was ushering my students out the door. They’re like, can we stay longer? I’m like, get outta here.

Sam: 01:45
and Dana’s a web developer.

Dana: 01:47
Hello, hello.

Sam: 01:47
Moved here from the US. We’re already rolling if you couldn’t tell. We just kind of like jumped into it.

Dana: 01:53
Get the right, the raw intro footage. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam: 01:57
I can tell Dana’s heard a podcast before.

Sam: 01:59
And you’re just like already pro.

Sam: 02:00
Sarah and Dana have planned a bike ride from Little Italy down to a brewery near the St. Lawrence River. Along the way, we’ll see their favorite city park, an underground punk venue, and the river promenade with great views of the old city. But we’ll start a ride at the sandwich shop that made Dana want to move to Montreal in the first place.

Sarah: 02:28
Oh yeah, I love this spot. Welcome to Le De Pickup.

Sam: 02:38
Inside there’s metal playing, tattooed workers behind the counter. This place is called Le Pickup.

Dana: 02:46
So yeah, it’s called Depeneur Le Pickup.

Sam: 02:49
It’s a depeneur, or as Montrealers say, a Dep. And by the way, please excuse my poor pronunciation of French words throughout this episode. I unfortunately don’t speak French.

Sarah: 02:59
It’s like, I don’t know, the bodega of Montreal. Um an iconic Montreal thing. Yep. You only have deps in Montreal. Yeah.

Sam: 03:09
But the thing about deps is that they don’t usually have food that’s this good.

Dana: 03:13
Yeah, my favorite sandwich to get here is the Halloumi sandwich. So it’s a block of Halloumi cheese, they grill it. Um they have like a slaw, a cabbage slaw that they put on there. Um it’s really, really good.

Sam: 03:25
Dana lives in the neighborhood, so she’s a regular. She comes here a lot.

Dana: 03:29
Yeah, one of my favorite spots and like a really special place in the neighborhood. And it’s one of the places that like gave me the first inklings of like maybe I should move to Montreal. Yeah.

Sam: 03:43
I don’t know that I’ve ever had a sandwich that was so good, it made me want to move to a different country.

Sam: 03:50
I’m gonna go with the chocolate chip cookie.

Sam: 03:54
We got some cookies made in house and head towards the bike share station. Which in Montreal is called Bixie.

Sarah: 04:04
There we go.

Sam: 04:09
We’re heading to La Fontaine Park, one of Sarah and Dana’s favorite parks right in the heart of the city. It’s about three miles or five kilometers from here. We hop on our bikes and ride through little Italy. The streets are quiet and green.

Sarah: 04:29
Lots of bike paths around here. You’ll we’ll see this ton it’ll be tons of people biking around.

Sam: 04:35
It’s a hot day, it’s sunny, we’re all in short sleeves. We turn on to Rue Saint-Urbain, and there’s a nice bike path protected by parked cars. Although recently, Montrealers have been fighting to keep it that way. Montreal was also one of the first cities to experiment with bike share in North America. The first Bixie stations popped up way back in 2009. Trailblazers. Over the years, Montreal has been steadily building out their bike path network, including an elevated bike path along a train track. And as we get onto this trail, Sarah tells me over her shoulder that this is where she had her first date with her partner, Dee Dee.

Sarah: 05:42
We just happened to be like living near each other, and we were like, oh, let’s just go for a walk. And so we walked all along.

Sam: 05:50
Sarah and Dee Dee found a gap in the fence and walked along the train tracks. Because Dee Dee told her, Don’t worry, trains don’t really run here anymore.

Sarah: 05:59
And then as soon as we were done our day, a train went by, and we were like, no. And Dee Dee texted me and said, Oh my goodness, like, I endangered our lives on our first date. That’s hilarious.

Sam: 06:15
Five years later, Sarah and Dee Dee are still together. We’re riding on the gravel path, we pass graffiti and warehouses. Sarah and Dana tell me that slipping fences is actually a really common thing in Montreal. People cut holes in the chain link fence and then tell everyone else where they are.

Sarah: 06:47
I feel like most people have like chats where we know it’ll be like, oh, it’s cut here, it’s cut there, and like you’re always keeping an eye out for like where the chain link fence is open. Because it’s so much easier. It like saves you like 20 minutes for sure!

Sam: 07:01
We get closer to an overpass from the highway, and there’s a little skate park underneath. There’s a guy skating alone, doing tricks. We’re in a bit of a no man’s land.

Dana: 07:12
Um, and yeah, right here where we are, we’re like under the overpass.

Sam: 07:16
But Dana stops to point something out.

Dana: 07:18
Sometimes they do punk shows here. Um, so yeah, it’s really, really cool. Like they’ll have a full drum set, like amps, guitars set up, and they’ll just be like a ring of people around watching. Like, people will sit up on this thing.

Sam: 07:32
Dana stumbled on this underground venue by accident years ago. One night she was just walking through the Mile and neighborhood, and she could hear the far-off sound of music.

Dana: 07:47
I can just like hear the music guiding me, and I was like, I don’t know where I’m going, and I’m simply using my senses to navigate. I’m getting closer to the music. Is it over here? Is it in the skate park? No, it seems like it’s across the the rail track, so how do I get there?

Sam: 08:09
Dana might have had to do the Montreal thing and slip some fences, but eventually she found it.

Dana: 08:22
There’s like, you know, a full band and people like moshing at this little show. I think that was probably my first summer in Montreal, and it just felt really special.

Sam: 08:42
Yeah, one of the chain link spots you’re talking about.

Dana: 08:45
We ride to the end of the gravel path, passing all of these holes in the chain link fence that I hardly noticed before. But now I’m looking at them like portals to other parts of the city, but also to an important part of real everyday Montreal life. The long gravel path ends and we zigzag through some back streets in the plateau neighborhood.

Dana: 09:18
What’s this term, the plateau?

Sarah: 09:20
The plateau is another area I live in there. That’s where a lot of um people from France live. I I’m not from France, so.

Sarah: 09:27
The plateau is hip, artsy. We’re passing cafes, bookstores, people sipping beer on patios.

Sarah: 09:33
It’s called the plateau because it’s I think probably the flattest part. Oh, there’s a dog in the window. Nice.

Sarah: 09:40
The neighborhood also has great bike paths. Right now we’re on a bike path built up on the sidewalk, elevated off the street. We’re getting close to the park now.

Sarah: 09:49
Yeah. You’ll even see like kids biking on the roads with their families from as early as like I swear, like three. You’ll see them like on the roads with their little helmets.

Sam: 10:01
Probably because Montreal’s bike paths are so good. But there’s also lots of other bike traffic on these paths, so you still have to watch out for other bikers.

Sarah: 10:11
Oh look, coming down. There’s someone such classic Montreal biking, but has a huge…

Sam: 10:16
At one point when we’re riding, we see a guy biking while carrying a massive cardboard box.

Sarah: 10:22
It’s like bigger than he is. He’s carrying it on his shoulders. It looks like a mattress box. One hand on there, biking along. Amazing.

Sam: 10:36
We arrive at La Fontaine Park.

Sarah: 10:37
So this is La Fontaine Park.

Sam: 10:39
One of Sarah and Dana’s favorite parks in Montreal. We dock our bikes and head into the park on foot. Kind of like a little reprieve from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Sarah: 10:52
Joggers, there’s people out on dates, there’s families. I feel like we’ve seen a couple of dates for sure. Sure, we’ve seen a couple of dates. Heck yeah. Yeah, I hope it’s going well, my friends.

Sam: 11:03
The centerpiece of La Fontaine Park is a pond right in the middle.

Sarah: 11:08
And the cool thing about Montreal is in the winter, basically every park will have an ice rink. Uh, they just create them, they’re free.

Sam: 11:18
We get down to the pond and it’s really long. Sort of like snaking through the hills.

Sarah: 11:24
This is where we go skating. Potentially the first time we met might have been here. Could have been, yeah. Don’t remember.

Sam: 11:33
In the winter, there’s a weekly skate club. That’s where Sarah and Dana really became friends.

Sarah: 11:38
Anyone’s invited. Sunday mornings, we get together, we skate for about two hours. We’ll eat baked goods, we’ll chat, anyone can come and go.

Sam: 11:51
They bonded over falling on the rock hard ice in the bitter cold of winter.

Sarah: 11:57
The worst falls I’ve ever had are on this lake.

Dana: 12:01
Oh no. 100%. That’s the thing with the like the natural rinks is that it’s just like a little harder to maintain a perfect surface. There might be a rock frozen into the lake.

Sarah: 12:12
So sticks, cracks, flaky ice, like all sorts of things. It’s actually made me a better skater, I think.

Dana: 12:24
Yeah, you have to keep your eyes on your feet.

Sam: 12:27
We walk around the park and then grab some more Bixie bikes and keep riding along the park edge. The park then ends, and it’s definitely feeling busier now. Biking right downtown. While we’re riding, I noticed lots of apartments have these big, steep staircases out front leading to the upper floors. In most cities, these stairs would be inside, but in Montreal, they’re outside.

Sarah: 13:00
The iconic Montreal House is the house where there it looks like a townhouse and there’s the spiral, colorful staircase going up. Usually you have minimum three families living, one in the bottom, one in the middle, one on the top.

Sam: 13:13
They started building these iconic staircases during a housing boom in the late 18 to early 1900s. Space was an issue, so they put the staircases outside so apartments would have more square footage and so people didn’t have to heat shared stairwells in the winter. These staircases are beautiful, but unheated stairs get pretty icy.

Sarah: 13:36
How you truly know if you live in Montreal is once you’ve fallen down those stairs.

Dana: 13:42
Fallen on the ice.

Sarah: 13:44
You’ve fallen all the way down the stairs at some point. Then you’re like, ah yes, I’ve been accepted. Monty is here.

Sam: 14:02
Even though we’re biking on a warm spring day in Montreal, winter never seems to be that far from Sarah and Dana’s minds. That’s because Montreal is a winter city. It just is. For almost half the year, the city is a block of ice. And it takes a certain type of person to withstand that. To fall on the ice while ice skating over and over. To fall on your butt all the way down the steps and laugh about it. So for a few months of the year when it’s actually warm, Montrealers are out in full, soaking it up, hanging out, loitering exquisitely, just like Montreal wants them to.

Dana: 14:50
I mean, that’s definitely part of the beauty of Montreal summers is that people really live as if every day is meant to be savored.

Sam: 15:15
We ride down Riberi to the old port, the old city down by the St. Lawrence River, and then to the river itself. Once we hit the river, there’s a long promenade. Promenade du Viewport that continues for as far as the eye can see along the river and along the canals. It’s beautiful. The whole view just opens up here. We take the bike path all the way to the brewery. We bike for a while without talking, just taking in the views and the fresh air with no stoplights or cars to worry about.

Sarah: 16:02
If you think back to like your last summer before you like had to work or become an adult, and when like it was like just like those dog days of summer, it was super long and you just were like existing. I feel like I get a tiny taste of that feeling again. In the summer, biking home at night. That’s why I like it.

Sam: 16:30
Finally, we arrive at Messorem Brewery, built in an old brick warehouse.

Dana: 16:36
Yeah, fun place to meet up, yeah.

Sam: 16:39
And uh Sarah, you’ve never been here?

Sarah: 16:41
No, I’ve not been here. I’m excited. Ooh, look at this place.

Sam: 16:45
We grab some beers and sandwiches inside and head out back to the lively beer garden to enjoy them together.

Sam: 16:52
This route would be good for intermediate bikers, but it’s also easy just to do parts of it like Le Pickup to La Fontaine Park or the Promenade to Messorem Brewery, and then you can take the metro back. I got to see a lot of Montreal, which I hadn’t spent much time in before, and I absolutely loved it. Sarah and Dana were the perfect tour guides, and I’m so grateful they were willing to spend one of these warm spring Montreal days with me… just existing.

Sam: 18:01
In the next episode, we’ll be in Tucson with David. We’re going to find the best Sonoran hot dog. So good.

Sam: 18:10
And learn how to navigate the back streets like a desert coyote.

David: 18:13
I mean, they’re they’re everywhere. You hear them everywhere. They they navigate through the washes, through the alleys, you know. Kind of the same way I navigate the city. I’m like all over the place, you know.

Sam: 18:28
City Share is brought to you by the North American Bikeshare and Scootershare Association and is supported by the Better Bike Share Partnership. Huge thanks to Better Bike Share Partnership. They do amazing work. Another big thanks to Sun Tiki Studios in Portland, Maine, who donated the studio time and space for us to record this podcast. They are awesome. Cityshare is reported and produced by me, Sam Herr. I’m also the executive producer for the show. Our other producer and fact checker is Ariel Knoebel. Our editor and mix engineer is Peter Lang-Stanton. Our show art is by Ariel Knoebel. Sound effects are from Freesound.org. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Additional sound effects by M. Boscolo, Jeff Bremner, and Artie Chris. And once again, I’m your host, Sam Herr. Thanks for listening.