Griffintown: the Irish quarter and the canal
Brick foundries under new condos, the Lachine Canal edge, and a coal-gas works turned nightclub. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Rue Notre-Dame Ouest galleries
Start where the antique dealers and design showrooms line the old commercial street. The mix is the point — a foundry façade next to a furniture gallery. Walk it slowly south; you're crossing from the modern city into the faubourg the rail and the canal built.

2. New City Gas
The vast brick coal-gas works of the 1850s, where Montreal made the gas that lit its streetlamps, now an event hall and nightclub. Walk the length of the Romanesque arcaded façade on Rue Ottawa; the scale of Victorian industry is the lesson here. You can't always get in, but the building does the work from outside.

3. St Ann's Park / Église Sainte-Anne footprint
The outline of the demolished Irish church, marked in stone where the pews once stood — a quiet memorial to the famine-era community that filled Griffintown. Sit a moment; this is the soul of the old quarter, kept as an absence.

4. Horse Palace / the stables block
One of the last of the working stables that served the canal-side carters, a low brick survivor among the towers. The neighbourhood kept horses into living memory. Look up and you can read how much of Griffintown is brand-new glass over a thin layer of brick.

5. Lachine Canal edge
Drop down to the canal that made all of this — the waterway that carried grain and coal past the Lachine rapids and powered the mills along it. The towpath is now a cycle-and-walk corridor. Turn west along the water; the old factory backs face you across it.

6. Atwater Market
End at the 1933 Art Deco market hall on the canal bank, its tower visible from a distance. The food stalls and the butchers are the reward; buy something to eat by the water. Charlevoix metro is a short walk inland when you're done.

Griffintown: the Irish quarter and the canal