Montreal City Hall
The balcony where Charles de Gaulle delivered his "Vive le Québec libre" speech in 1967.
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Canada's first city hall built solely for municipal administration, finished in 1878 in Second Empire style. A 1922 fire gutted everything except the outer walls. Architect Louis Parant rebuilt the interior around a new steel structure, modeling the result on the city hall of Tours, France. The building that stands today is structurally 1920s inside a 19th-century shell, a National Historic Site since 1984.
What to look for
- The copper roof — it replaced the original slate tiles when the Mansard roofline was remodeled into a Beaux-Arts profile after the 1922 fire
- The front balcony, facing Notre-Dame Street, where de Gaulle delivered his 1967 speech
- The Second Empire facade, one of the strongest surviving examples of that style in Canada
Orange Line Metro to Champ-de-Mars; the building is at 275 Notre-Dame Street East, between Place Jacques-Cartier and the Champ de Mars.
Montreal City Hall is one of 14 sights worth the detour in Montreal, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Montreal pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Montreal
- Circuit Gilles VilleneuveThe track where Gilles Villeneuve beat the world on home soil in 1978 — and it now carries his name.
- Olympic StadiumThe stadium that cost so much, Montreal renamed it "The Big Owe."
- Bell CentreCanada's largest indoor arena holds 20,962 people — and on a Canadiens night, the noise travels several city blocks.
- Habitat 67A McGill thesis project that actually got built — 354 prefabricated concrete boxes stacked into homes on the Saint Lawrence for a 1967 World's Fair.
- Notre-Dame BasilicaDeep blue vaults scattered with gold stars, and a 7,000-pipe organ that fills every corner of it.
- Montreal Museum of Fine ArtsCanada's oldest art museum, founded in 1860, now sprawls across five pavilions and draws more visitors than any other art museum in the country.