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See Montreal . . . in slippers
By CLEO PASKAL MONTREAL -- This city's Central Train Station has a proper, Art Deco, grand hall. The ceiling soars, there is marble everywhere and there are splendid cream-on-blue frescos of Canadians playing hockey, logging wood and generally being happy, if stylized, little beavers. So when I arrive by train, I think of this airy space as Montreal's vestibule, a place somewhere between inside and outside. A buffer. Then I head over to the doors on the south side of the big hall and peek outside. If the weather is nice, I burst out into the sunshine. If it is a typical day between November and April, I shudder and head underground. Really. I walk to the north side of the station hall and into the labyrinth of hallways that make up the roughly 20 miles of Montreal's "Underground City." That name, however, is as misleading as it is unappealing. There are no dark, dangerous corridors. No miner's helmets are needed. You encounter no Mole People. Instead, Montreal has developed an architecture that soothes all but the most committed claustrophobe. The temperature averages a relatively balmy 68 degrees. Where there is no natural light, a range of technologies try to recreate the tones of sunlight. Fountains are everywhere to maintain humidity. It is more like a city-within-a-city: 60 distinct, multistoried complexes linked by brightly lit, well-ventilated corridors. Each complex has its own character and purpose. There is the gracious, 1,000-room, Queen Elizabeth Hotel. The endless shopping of downtown. The Molson Center, home of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team. The Museum of Contemporary Art. Chinatown. Also linked are health clinics, universities, apartment buildings, restaurants, banks and more than 39 movie theaters. Finding your way around can be tricky, with no mountains, rivers or even slopes of the street to guide you. But Montreal planners recently came up with something. Strategically located at main crossroads are computer terminals that will give you a print-out of directions on how to get to your destination. I used one recently to reach the skylit skating rink in the Bell building: From Central Station I went along a tunnel lined with tempting restaurants, up an escalator to the tree-filled lobby of the Bell building and through a sleek corporate hallway. Suddenly, the air was filled with the sshhhkktt of skates slipping and the soft thump of tourists falling on their butts. It made me proud to be Canadian. The engineering marvel that is the underground city was actually started by the railroad, though inadvertently. When the Canadian National Railway tunneled through Mount Royal (from which the city takes its name) in 1918 and brought the first transcontinental train to Montreal, the company has also created a gash of railroad tracks across the urban landscape. The divide was a city planner's nightmare. Finally, in the 1950s, the CNR brought in architect I.M. Pei to construct a new building that would bridge the gap and link the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and CNR headquarters. Pei designed the 47-seven story Place Ville-Marie. He took advantage of Montreal's solid limestone foundation to place half of Place Ville-Marie's floor space below ground. And by 1962, workers had tunneled from the new building to the hotel, the train station and CNR headquarters. The underground city was born. Winter-haters everywhere celebrated. The next big boom for the underground was the opening of the Metro (subway) system, just in time for Expo '67 world's fair. One percent of the construction costs went to art, and the entire network was conceived as the world's largest art gallery. It was a fine plan -- had it been built in Italy during the Renaissance. Instead, Montreal now has an unrivaled collection of concrete abstract art and avant-garde stained glass. Artistic merits aside, the Metro system created a whole new underground web. Now it extends over about 20 miles of pathways, 60 stations and about 1,540 square miles. If you live in one of the apartments tied to the network, you can leave your apartment, go to work, buy your groceries, see the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, take a night course and go out to dinner, all in your T-shirt. In January. I had one friend who liked to emphasize her complete insulation from the ravages of winter by showing up at her classes in her bedroom slippers. Sure it all sounds a bit wussy. Canadians, after all, are supposed to be a hardy lot. In Central Station's Art Deco murals, for instance, there are no underground people sipping cappuccinos and reading the paper while snowstorms rage a few feet above their heads. But then again, what's more Canadian than the beaver? And I don't see many of them traipsing down Ste. Catherine Street in February. Nope, they are all snug and cozy in their dens. So, if the thought of avoiding winter seems somehow anti-Canadian to you, just think of Montreal's underground city as an enormous beaver lodge. I, on the other hand, don't need any excuses. Warm is good. - Wussy or not, freelance writer Cleo Paskal lives aboveground in Quebec Province.
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