Place Ville Marie

This guide to Place Ville Marie traces its nineteen sixty-two cruciform tower and the planner Vincent Ponte's unusual solution to Montreal winters: a heated underground concourse that became the seed of the thirty-kilometer Underground City. It follows the building's more recent two-hundred-million-dollar reinvention, tearing open the old food court to replace it with Le Cathcart, a glass-skylit beer garden built for over a thousand people. Sixty-six shops opened here without a single coat needed, back in nineteen sixty-two.