Why “North” Doesn’t Mean North in Montreal

This story originally appeared in a special edition The Main x URBANIA Micromag. Read the full collection here.

If you’re walking "north" up Wellington in Verdun, your compass will read west the whole way. It’s the same story in Pointe-aux-Trembles at the other end of the island (not that many people are out for a casual stroll in Pointe-aux-Trembles). In Ville-Émard, where the distortion peaks, northward streets like Jolicoeur point west-southwest, which lands the local north closer to true south than true north. And on the Plateau, you can stand on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, look straight up the street toward what every address plate insists is north, and watch the sun go down at the end of it.

Confusing? Yes. When one Redditor described fielding directions from tourists, the answer came back as a question: "Which north do you want?". There's geographic north, magnetic north, and Montreal north, and none of them agree with one another.

So how did an entire city end up navigating by a compass rose that's been wrong for 350 years?

Blame the river

Every Montreal direction flows from a single premise: the St. Lawrence River runs west to east. Zoom out far enough and it's true, as the river starts at Lake Ontario and empties into the Atlantic. For the better part of four centuries it was the highway between the Great Lakes and Europe; upriver meant west, downriver east.

The problem is what the river does when it reaches Montreal: The island sits at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers, and as the St. Lawrence wraps around it, it swings through nearly a quarter-turn, running close to due north past parts of the island before bending back toward the northeast. Cities have always oriented themselves to their waterways, and this is the feature that scrambles everything for Montreal. Manhattan's rivers run consistently along its flanks while Montreal's rotates as it passes.

When the city's first street plan was drawn up in 1672, a handful of streets in what's now the Old Port were laid out parallel and perpendicular to the shoreline. The river was treated as due south because that's how everyone experienced it: you arrived from the east, you continued to the west, and the water was the bottom edge of the known world.

This fiction hardens in the archives with an 1801 map by road surveyor Louis Charland, which rotated the entire island so the river runs flat along the bottom of the page, with a small compass rose conceding that true north is actually off to the side. Montreal has been drawn sideways for more than two centuries. The maps in metro stations still do it today with Laval at the top and West Island on the left.

Farms and compasses

The grid didn't stay confined to the Old Port. Under the French regime, farmland was divided into long, narrow strips running back from the water, because river access was everything. When those agricultural lots eventually became streets, each one inherited the same orientation: perpendicular to the shore, ergo "north-south," no matter what a compass had to say about it.

This is also why the chaos isn't uniform. Montreal, as McGill urban planning professor David Wachsmuth put it on CBC's Good Question, Montreal podcast, is "a city of grids in the plural": a patchwork of settlements that each squared themselves to their own stretch of waterfront before being stitched together. Pull up a map of the Sud-Ouest where neighbouring grids took their bearings from different bodies of water, and you can see the collision for yourself.