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The plateau of today is no longer the plateau I grew up on.

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I lived in Mile End in the 1980s, and the neighborhood is technically part of the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, but anyone who knows the area knows that Mile End is its own micro-neighborhood. Back then, it was a working-class area and very ethnically diverse – Italians, Portuguese, Hasidic Jews and French Canadians – and it started to attract students and artists.

But it wasn’t really the Plateau then, and it isn’t now. At the beginning of this century it became the center of indie music and the coolest scene, and today it’s mostly a mecca for tourists and wealthy professionals who like to live in a trendy neighborhood.

Forty years ago I walked east of Mile End to the Plateau, and back then it wasn’t so different from the neighborhood described in the plays and novels of Michel Tremblay. Working class, French-speaking, the salt of the earth. In the 1980s, if you were on Mont-Royal Avenue east of St-Denis Street, the chance of hearing something in MacLennan’s language was about as good as the chance of encountering a Parti Québécois pastor praising the Rocky Mountains and the beauty of Canada.

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Recently I was strolling down Mont-Royal Avenue East, which is closed to traffic in the summer, and I heard plenty of conversations in English. Of course, you also hear a lot more French from people born across the Atlantic, and sometimes it feels like if you immigrate to Quebec from France, you have no choice but to move to the Plateau. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than on Laurier Avenue East, just east of Laurier Park, a lovely little strip full of quirky, oh-so-French bakeries, restaurants and cheese shops.

Michele Luchs, who was born and raised in Baltimore, moved to Quebec in 1988 and has lived on the Plateau ever since – first in Laval, south of Rachel, then in Milton-Parc, and for the last 22 years in de Lanaudière, north of Mont-Royal. (Like Mile End, Milton-Parc is another part that is technically part of the Plateau, but is not what most of us think of as the Plateau.)

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In 2002, when Luchs moved there, the scene at Mont-Royal E. was completely different.

“There weren’t many Anglophones here,” Luchs said. “When I heard an English voice here, it was kind of a surprise. There was a woman living on our block who would start yelling in French every time she heard an Anglophone voice. If my daughter stood on the porch and said, ‘Don’t forget to get butter,’ the woman would yell, ‘You have no business being here!’ There were definitely some people who weren’t too happy about Anglos moving in. But they were few and far between.”

In the three-family house she now lives in and the one next door, people from England, Australia, Newfoundland, France and even a few from Quebec live there. And she loves the fact that her neighbourhood is so much more diverse now.

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Just around the corner from their apartment is Chez Victoire, a funky restaurant on Mont-Royal that has been serving innovative French cuisine for 15 years. In that time, co-owners Alexandre Gosselin (the chef) and Karl Leblanc have watched the street and the area radically change.

Leblanc, who now lives in NDG, lived in this part of the plateau 20 years ago.

“Back then, restaurants and bars opened and it was super trendy,” Leblanc said.

But now, he notes, there are other trendy neighborhoods like St. Henri and Griffintown.

“Back then, everyone went to the Plateau because of the hip bohemian scene,” said Leblanc.

Gosselin said the plateau isn’t as cool as it used to be.

“It’s not the prime location it was when we started 15 years ago,” Gosselin said. “Now there are all the big stores here, there are fewer mom-and-pop shops. Rents are going up and smaller stores can’t open here. It used to be really Québécois, a kind of little jewel of Montreal. Now we’re like all the other neighbourhoods. Now nothing is different on Mont-Royal. Mont-Royal is losing its charm.”

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The beauty of the Plateau scene is that so many bars and venues have managed to survive all these years, says club owner Gary Tremblay – such as L’Escogriffe, Quai des brumes, Bily Kun and Diese Onze, the jazz bar on St. Denis Street that he owns and runs.

“These places are adapting, but the good thing is that they’re doing it without selling out,” said Tremblay, who is also co-owner of the ultra-cool Mont-Royal Ave. venue O Patro Vys. “They’re staying true to their school, but they’re adapting. They’re still staying authentic. I think that’s pretty impressive. This Onze has been open for almost 18 years now, Bily Kun is in its 26th year now, O Patro Vys is in its 21st year, L’Esco and Quai des brumes have been around forever. I was with the manager of Quai des brumes yesterday. They sometimes do two or three shows a day and it’s busy as hell.”

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One of the biggest changes, Tremblay says, is the exponential growth of Airbnb in the area. The 2018 ordinance restricting these home rentals to sections of St.-Denis St. and St.-Laurent Blvd. has actually helped the clubs, Tremblay notes. He says that’s great for club business because now a lot of tourists are staying in the Plateau looking for live music.

“The whole revival of St. Denis Street is because of all the Airbnbs, because there were never any hotels on the Plateau,” Tremblay said. “The fact that they’ve put so many Airbnbs in the street now… there’s so much tourism, so many people coming to the city out of curiosity. When you go to Montreal for a three- or four-day trip, it’s usually because you’re curious. You’re usually an open-minded person. I think that’s been the saving grace for St. Denis Street. We have the highest occupancy rate in the street in 10 years. We’re at 87 percent occupancy, which is pretty surprising because the street was basically buried by everyone.”

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It’s true that the Plateau is probably not as cool as it once was. You just have to stand on the corner of Mont-Royal and St-Denis and cry: there are fast food joints on all four corners, and three of them are chains (A&W, McDonald’s and Thai Express). But the Plateau still has cool characters like Paul Gabber, a unique guy you can hardly imagine anywhere else. He grew up in the area and has been running the incredibly eclectic second-hand record store Paul’s Boutique on Mont-Royal Ave. at the corner of de Bullion for 23 years.

“It’s still a very nice neighborhood,” Gabber said. “I go east on Mont-Royal and it’s boring. But here it’s fun.”

“Here” is the stretch of Mont-Royal between St-Laurent and St-Denis, and Gabber is right. This is the model for the street – cool places, bars, ice cream parlors, pool halls, almost all run by locals.

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