The Rise and Fall of Montreal's Red Light District

Stand at the corner of Saint-Laurent and Sainte-Catherine now and you'll find glass condos, festival infrastructure, and the Quartier des Spectacles' signature red dots glowing on the pavement. It's clean, curated, maybe even a little soulless to some. What it all replaced was the complete opposite.

For roughly four decades spanning from the early 1920s through the late 1950s, this corner was at the heart of ten-block stretch of downtown Montreal that was one of the most electrically alive places in North America. They called it the Red Light District, named after the lanterns that hung outside brothels to signal their trade, and it ran on a combustible mix of jazz, burlesque, gambling, organized crime, and a municipal tolerance for vice that was, depending on who you asked, either the city's greatest shame or its defining legacy for years to come.

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