South of Sainte-Catherine on the Main, there's a building that doesn't quite match its neighbours. Its four storeys of grey cut stone, arched windows that grow smaller as they climb, carved trim, and a row of columns give it a regal bearing among the marquees and pulsing lights of downtown nightlife. It's only once you look at the ground floor that you get a clue about its purpose: six big openings, built as shop windows, tell you this grand stone structure needed tenants to help pay for it. It's had tenants since 1893, long enough to make it the oldest continuously operating theatre in Canada.
They were the Association Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a patriotic organization founded in 1834 to defend French-Canadian interests. This was the same outfit that invented the holiday of that same name on June 24th Quebec still takes off every summer. By the 1880s, the society had been around fifty years and still had no building of its own. That's when a journalist named Laurent-Olivier David proposed one, in 1884: offices, a library, classrooms, a theatre, and those storefronts, because the annual Saint-Jean celebrations had a habit of losing money.
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