Outremont: the leafy town within the city
Avenue Laurier's shops, the garden parks, the grand houses, and the Hasidic lower slope. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Avenue Bernard
Start on the broad, tree-lined commercial avenue with its wide median and its terraces. Coffee here before you wander; the street has the unhurried tempo of a town that thinks of itself as separate from Montreal, which it once legally was.

2. Avenue Laurier
The smarter shopping street one block south — patisseries, a cheese shop, the kind of bookstore window you stop at. Window-shop the full stretch; this is Outremont's high street and the heart of its bourgeois self-image.

3. Parc Outremont
A small formal park built around a pond, ringed by the grandest houses on the hill. Sit a moment by the water. The point is the setting — stone mansions with deep gardens looking onto a green square, a pocket of calm two streets off the shops.

4. Avenue du Mont-Royal & the grand houses
Walk uphill past the largest of the residences — gabled stone, wrought-iron gates, old money kept quiet. Read the slope: the higher you climb, the bigger the lots. This is the wealthiest residential pocket on the island, worn lightly.

5. Parc Pratt & the Hasidic streets
Drop down toward the lower slope around Hutchison and Saint-Viateur, where Outremont's large Hasidic community lives — synagogues, families walking to shul on Saturday, modest shopfronts. Walk respectfully and quietly; this is a neighbourhood at home, not a sight.

6. Saint-Viateur & the edge of Mile End
End where Outremont blurs into Mile End at Saint-Viateur, the bagel street. The famous wood-fired bagels are a block or two over the line — a fitting end, and Édouard-Montpetit or the bus takes you on from here.

Outremont: the leafy town within the city