Future Metro Projection Proposed in 1967

By Aaron Gordon

The Metro routes are the subterranean arteries of this city. It is the Metro, more than any centralized city council, that will make this “One Island, One City”. Whether you laugh derisively a this idea probably depends more on where in the city you live than on your opinions concerning amalgamation – and rightfully so. Right now the Metro serves the downtown core of Montreal, allowing one to get downtown and back out. You can, of course, go east to west – from Angrignon to Honoré-Beaugrand or Snowdon to Saint-Michel – or you can go north-south and south-north on the orange line. But getting between Snowdon and Angrignon is a matter of always heading toward and then away from downtown. Buses can go almost anywhere, but the Metro always travels in a direction relational to downtown.

The metro opened in October 1966. The Metro was supposed to be the future of Montreal. The last trolleys were taken off the streets just months before the Metro’s debut, and trams were already seven years in the past. The trams and trolleys were not just replaced by something new, they were replaced by the idea of the future that infected the city at that time. Large areas of Montreal were being torn down, and the downtown core was going to be revitalized with high-rise apartments. Expo 67 oozed with desire for the future, for a new humanity and for the technology that would make it happen.

The Metro is imbued with dreams of a future made possible through technology. It was not just the dream of moving people about. It was the dream of a modern city like New York, London or Paris. It was a chance to redesign the city, changing its surface by connecting it underground. As long ago as 1944, the Montreal Tramway Company, one of several organizations involved in the nascent Metro and predecessor of the STM, drew a core north-south line under St. Laurent intersecting with a shortened Ste. Catherine line(St. Denis to McGill), with possible extensions that would stretch in several directions. Over the years there were other projections as to what the Metro could be, with the possibility of an above ground line, and where it could go. None of these plans were more ambitious than the 1967 projection. In what could only be the euphoria of Expo ’67 and the first stages of the Metro under way, the Ministère de l’Équipement et du Logement and the Ministère de Transports proposed a haphazard web of different lines which would be completed in the 1980s, a deadline later revised to 2000 for the new millennium.