Boston Globe: How Montreal’s churches are being reborn as libraries, gyms, concert halls, and more
Sam Boskey
How Montreal’s churches are being reborn as libraries, gyms, concert halls, and more
The dome of the
Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral is a
distinctive part of the Montreal skyline.Alex PulaskiMark Twain is credited with labeling Montreal the “city of a hundred steeples,” saying in 1881 that “you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window.”
The nickname stuck, even as bank towers and hotels crowded the skyline. Even as the Quiet Revolution’s secularism swept through the city in the 1960s and ‘70s, leaving church buildings by the dozens abandoned and in disrepair.
In recent decades, amid a movement to preserve the structures’ history and beauty, instead of being torn down, they are being converted to gyms, event spaces, libraries, and more.
A definitive examination of the repurposing of Montreal’s churches concluded that more than 240 had been sold since 1900. About 4 in 10 reopened to other denominations; of the others, about half were destroyed, and the remainder found new earthly uses.
As first-time visitors to Canada’s second-largest city, my wife, Mica, and I set out to explore nearly 20 churches — stalwarts and converts both — over a four-day weekend last fall.
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Listen up, Boston. Montreal is ready to show you how to embrace winter, not shun it.I know what you should do next summer: a Montreal beach vacation in the city’s hottest new neighborhoodIn one ear reverberated whispers from residents that “we don’t believe in God anymore,” and “we are no longer Catholic.” In the other, church bells sounded regular reminders of time and timelessness.
Heeding their insistence, we turned our steps inside. We found an organist swaying, smelled incense drifting behind a marching cross, broke bread where priests once slept, and sat in a concert-hall pew that will never witness another sermon.
The kitchen at
Candide restaurant. Alex
PulaskiPreserving the past in new form
Montreal was founded as a Catholic missionary outpost in 1642, and by the 20th century welcomed nearly 600 churches of various denominations, mostly Catholic. But the recent math is daunting: In 1950, about three-quarters of the city’s residents were Catholic. Today, about one-third are.
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Urban renewal projects in the 1970s resulted in the destruction of several church buildings. But a backlash ignited historical preservation efforts.
Over a decade ago, as architects wrestled with how to cram 3 million square feet of hospital into two square Montreal blocks, they had to weigh preserving or demolishing a historic church on the site.
Their solution: dismantling the 1865 Holy Trinity Church’s steeple, and reassembling it block by block. When the university hospital known as CHUM opened in 2017, there on a corner near an entrance stood the historic steeple, an anachronistic orphan leaning against the modern hospital’s façade.
Bourgie Hall, a
concert hall reborn from an 1890s church’s
nave, features Tiffany stained-glass windows.Alex
PulaskiSimilarly, just a short walk away, the bell tower and transept of the Saint-Jacques Church, completed in 1860, were blended into designs for a brick university pavilion constructed in 1979.
But these marriages of century-old buildings with new construction have proven more the exception than the rule. More typically, surviving church buildings have been repurposed for entirely new uses. A few examples:
- Espace Tomas is a fitness club, converted from a Dominican church in 2012. Now it’s dedicated to the temple of the body, with punching bags, weight rooms, saunas, and outdoor therapy pools — including a view of the rusting steeple. “The only sin here,” their website proclaims, “is a skipped workout.”
- Bourgie Hall, remade in 2011 from the nave of the 1890s-era Erskine and American Church, lives on as a concert hall. The building’s stunning stained-glass windows, including 20 attributed to Tiffany Studios, were salvaged from a Presbyterian church demolished in the 1930s. Hearing a piano concert while gazing at the windows’ angelic faces feels simply heavenly.
- The Mordecai-Richler Library opened in 1993 in what had been the Church of the Ascension. The bright white interior, lined with rows of books, remains accented by the church’s colorful stained-glass windows.
- The Salon Richmond 1861 event space, with its gleaming wood floors and painted ceiling, was remade from an abandoned church. A bustling farm-to-table restaurant, Candide, is gaining acolytes in what used to be the church’s rectory.
Danielle Bitton founded the production company renting the salon space and partnered in opening the restaurant in 2015. The building’s owner, a friend, had wanted to convert the church into condos. But the city balked.
“She had tears in her eyes, and she said, ‘I’m going to lose the building,” Bitton recalls. “I told her that in Europe they had had success in converting churches in a respectful way — so that’s what we did.
“We ended up calling this project, in French, ‘How to bring people back to church.’”
Other churches have remained open but engaged in projects that supplement income or attract visitors for reasons other than worship. For example, the Aura Experience fills the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal with a light and sound spectacle during evening shows.
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The Church of the
Ascension in Montreal was converted into the
Mordecai-Richler Library in 1993. Alex
PulaskiOr at Le Balcon, a cabaret dinner theater tucked into a space at St. James United Church, a dinner of vegetable soup and duck confit preceded a band’s opening rendition of “Hallelujah,” the anthem written by Montreal’s native son, Leonard Cohen. Quickly thereafter, the tempo and volume rose, disco lights flared, and band members veered hard into “Disco Inferno.”
“Burn, baby, burn,” they urged us, their words echoing off the dance floor and into the sanctuary.
Lingering in the shadow of skyscrapers
Amid all these conversions, there remain standing dozens of Montreal churches — large and small. Some are superlative, others simple. Even the largest ones seem to huddle in the shadows of the steel-and-glass skyscrapers.
From our 26th-floor view room at the modern Montreal Marriott Chateau Champlain, the enormous green copper dome of the Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral still commands the eye. One of Montreal’s best-loved churches, it is less than 150 years old and was patterned after Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica. It is stunningly ornate.
Similarly, the plain gray exterior of St. Patrick’s Basilica only hints at what awaits inside. It was constructed in just four years in the 1840s amid a typhus epidemic that killed thousands of new Irish immigrants. The basilica’s white oak beams are plastered and painted to mimic marble; the tall stained-glass windows are awe-inspiring.
Without question, the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal, dominating the Place d’Armes square in Old Montreal, has served as the city’s beating religious heart since the 19th century. It draws more than 1 million visitors annually.
“The challenge for the Church is real,” local guide Marie-Hellène Lemay of MTL Detours told us. “How do you keep up a sanctuary for pilgrims, welcome thousands of visitors, and still keep it a church?”
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The Espace Tomas
fitness club is in a converted church. Alex
PulaskiPatterned after the vibrant and gilded Saint-Chapelle in Paris, the basilica’s magnificent interior took a half-century to complete. Religious history marches on in the stained-glass windows ringing the lower level, and the altarpiece includes Old Testament lessons and Jesus crowning Mary as heaven’s queen. The organ numbers nearly 7,000 individual pipes.
Pilgrims and visitors also regularly stream to St. Joseph’s Oratory, completed in 1967. I found the massive interior’s concrete finish cold, but the tiny Votive Chapel, where discarded crutches crowd the altar, tells a warmer tale.
Though the basilica is dedicated to a saint from two millennia removed, it is as much associated with the faith and works of another, since decreed a saint. Brother André Bessette, a frail orphan in his youth, spent his life ministering to the afflicted. He is renowned for helping the lame walk by rubbing them with lamp oil, but steadfastly credited prayers to Saint Joseph for the cures.
Another remarkable individual, Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys was a French missionary and teacher who founded the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel. It is much smaller than the city’s enormous cathedral, also dedicated to Mary. It is also Montreal’s oldest chapel, rebuilt in 1771-73 after the original burned down. Known as “the sailors’ church,” it holds a mesmerizing presence, inside and out.
On the exterior, a statue of Mary, arms extended toward the harbor, welcomes sailors returning to port. On the inside, miniature votive vessels carry candles signifying a sailor’s prayer for safe passage.
Just to the left of the altar rests Saint Marguerite’s tomb. Before it, in a Plexiglas box, petitioners deposit their prayers, penciled onto 3-by-3-inch notecards. One, written in a child’s hand, begins: “Dear God, keep my parents safe, please.” Hundreds more, folded and packed, sail petitions heavenward as expectantly as the small votive boats hanging from the ceiling.
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After absorbing these demonstrations of faith amid so many city monuments dedicated to the Almighty’s glory, I wondered what Twain would make of them today. Perhaps, as he once described rumors of his own demise, he might say that reports of God’s death had been exaggerated.
Or maybe, accounting for how many churches have carried on or been reborn in new guises, he might conclude — as I did — that Montreal is witnessing a resurrection.