The Plateau is a working-class grid that turned itself into the most photographed neighbourhood in Montreal, and it did it with paint and staircases. Triplexes in every colour, their outdoor stairs spiralling up the front like a builder's afterthought that became the city's signature. Four kilometres of side streets, the Main, and one garden square.
Start on Avenue du Mont-Royal, the loud commercial artery — coffee first, then turn off, because the avenue is the spine but the cross streets are the walk. South onto Rue Saint-Hubert and Rue de Bullion, where the staircases curl up to every second floor and no two front doors are painted the same. The stairs are a tax dodge and a space-saver that turned, somehow, into the thing tourists come for.
West to Boulevard Saint-Laurent — the Main, the line that splits the city — and the MURAL walls, repainted every summer, several storeys high. End at Square Saint-Louis, the Victorian garden square the writers and singers all lived around, fountain in the middle. Sherbrooke station is a short walk downhill from its gates.
