In nineteenth-century Canada, the Square Mile was an elite residential district in Montreal that represented a dramatic new concentration of wealth. Montreal’s Square Mile chronicles the history of the neighbourhood, from its origins to its decline, including the diverse and far-reaching sources of its making and its twentieth-century transformations. Spanning the interconnected worlds of family and home life, business and high politics, architecture and urban redevelopment, this interdisciplinary and richly illustrated volume presents a new account of the Square Mile’s history and an investigation of the neighbourhood’s impact beyond the immediate urban environment.

This book sheds light on the history of the Square Mile, a powerful symbol of wealth in Montreal’s urban landscape.

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Dimitry Anastakis, Elizabeth Kirkland, and Don Nerbas

The Square Mile: A Singular Topography
(Vignettes by Julia Gersovitz)

Part I: Frameworks and Perspectives

1. The High Ground: Mansions, Mythology, and the Mountain
Roderick MacLeod

First Development: From Apple Orchards to Building Lots

2. Property and Power: Connecting the Dots
Sherry Olson

Widening Influences

Part II: Constructing Business Networks and Institutions

3. Others of More Enterprise: Thomas Morland and the Formation of Montreal Rolling Mills, 1858–68
Jean-Philip Mathieu

McGill University

4. “Dear Richard… send us a few buffalo tongues”: Donald Smith’s Fur Trade Contacts and Personal Credit Networks
Max Hamon

Row and Terrace Housing

Part III: Family, Gender, and Property

5. Marriage, Property, and the Law in a Square Mile Family: The Case of Annie Stevenson Anderson vs David Morrice, 1884–85
Peter Gossage and Lisa Moore

Hugh Allan and Ravenscrag

6. Searching for Intimacies beyond the Notman Photographs: The Case of Amy Redpath Roddick
Elizabeth Kirkland and Mary Anne Poutanen

The Creation of Mount Royal Park

7. Gender and Social Relations in the City above the Hill
Robert C.H. Sweeny
Houses of Worship

Part IV: Professional and Business Worlds in Transformation

8. Max Aitken in Montreal: Financial Innovation and Creative
Gregory P. Marchildon

Destruction in the Laurier Boom

The Stanley Street Presbyterian Church

9. “Glad of your help”: Scottish Architects in Montreal, 1860–1940
Annmarie Adams

The Art Association, Phillips Square

10. The Changing of the Guard: Bartlett McLennan, Roy Wolvin, and the Leveraged Buyout of the Montreal Transportation Company, 1903–21
M. Stephen Salmon
Architects Unite

Part V: Crisis and Decline-

11. Crossing Imperial Boundaries and Constructing Intimate Linkages: Reading Soldiers’ First World War Letters
Nicolas Kenny

A Consistent Material Palette

12. The Death of the Golden Square Mile? Understanding the Transformation of an Urban District, 1945–85
Harold Bérubé

1920s: Beginning of the End

Afterword
Brian J. Young

Index

“A significant contribution to its field, this collection of essays combines detailed local investigation with consideration of the broad structural forces that made, remade, and unmade  Montreal’s Square Mile. ”“Montreal's Square Mile makes a significant contribution to the story of Montreal, its Anglo-Protestant elite, their place in the economy of the nation state of Canada and of the wider British world, and the history of how Square Mile families constructed their private and public images. No other study in the field of Canadian history is at once so wide-ranging and comprehensive in its approach to a city’s past.”