Plaza Saint-Hubert

This guide to Plaza Saint-Hubert in Montreal traces why a shopping street needed a roof: in the early 1970s, merchants were losing customers to rain and snow, and after considering an enclosed mall, city engineers settled on something stranger, a slanted glass canopy running above both sidewalks while the street stayed open beneath it. Construction ran through 1984, producing 1.2 kilometers of canopy, the only structure of its kind in Canada. Montrealers were unimpressed at first, with critics calling the steel framework crude and blunt next to the strip's ornate old storefronts.