Montréal Underground City

This guide to Montreal's Underground City opens during the ice storm of January 1998, when ice coated the power wires downtown until steel transmission towers folded and millions of Canadians lost power, while people below barely noticed. It traces the network back to 1962, when urban planner Vincent Ponte convinced the builders of Place Ville Marie to bury their loading docks, and to the unplanned, building-by-building growth that followed as the Metro arrived after 1966. Look for any of its more than one hundred street-level entrances, each one a door into that same buried network.