Quartier Petit Champlain

This guide to Quartier Petit Champlain traces how a street a 1960 city report called a slum, its buildings held together with sheets of tin after the shipbuilding trade that once fed it collapsed, became a stubborn bet by businessman Gerry Paris and architect Jacques de Blois, who started buying up derelict buildings here in 1976. It follows the potters, jewelers and glassblowers already drawn in by cheap rent, and the storefronts they filled while the neighborhood was still written off. Listen for the workshops tucked into these same walls as you walk the cobblestones.