Before it was a park, it was a reservoir. Before that, a neighbourhood in search of an anchor. When the city transformed the unused land into Square Saint-Louis in the late 1870s, the Plateau's upper-middle-class French-Canadian families moved in quickly, building the ornate Victorian row houses that still frame the square today. Writers, poets, and filmmakers followed, drawn by the same combination of elegance and neighbourhood ease that makes the square feel more Paris than Canada, a comparison the Project for Public Spaces once made official. At the centre, a cast-iron J.L. Mott fountain anchors tree-lined paths popular with everyone from lunch-hour regulars to the more colourful weekend crowd. Émile Nelligan, Quebec's most celebrated Romantic poet, lived nearby; a bust in his honour sits in the square's southeast corner, not far from where he wrote.