METRO TOURIST

My friend and I had been planning to spend the day from one end of the orange line to the next. We started early enough and finished late enough to have all three meals in different places, and we took photos of the metros themselves, the art they contained, and the environs. We only made it six stops before we fast tracked our way to China town for supper, before returning home. It was an adventure and we transitioned from comprehensive to focussed, from idealist to pragmatist, vacillating a little in between, and listening to ourselves and each other, for an excellent day!

The idea was to go from Cote-Vertu to Montmorency, but we have to return to continue on. We almost veered completely from the orange line, considering the connection to the blue line, least known to most but not for us, since both of us lived in Cote des Neiges for a few years, and began to wax nostalgic for the excellent food around Snowdon and Cote-des-Neiges. We are both pretty tasks oriented, and I genuinely think we would both have deviated from the task if the argument had been strong enough, but in the end, there were too many unexplored places that we still had time to see.

The metro is an integral part of Montreal’s history. The idea of a metro started as a network plan by Montreal City Council in November of 1961, and it was inaugurated October 14, 1966, with some concessions and future plans that had to accommodate the World Exposition (Expo ‘67) being awarded to the city in August of 1963. The original metro included three lines (Green, Orange, and Yellow) and twenty stations in 1966, and expanding to twenty-six by the opening of the Expo themed Man and His World on April 27, 1967.

ENTERTAINMENT - horseracing, fireworks, restaurant eating, parade

CULTURE -Mary and Child, Greek theatre, Japanese Shinto gates, Egyptian, Hebrew, Yin and Yang, Roman, ?beanie, Shakespeare ?Yorrick, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Man, Michaelangelo’s Statue, Pilgrims, Charlie Chapman, Comedy, Archecture vs modern art, ?, ?

SCIENCE- war, slavery, hieroglyphs, climbing mountains, Arabic, Chinese, Roman Era (SPQR -tattoo’s on Jason’s arm in gods of Olympus series, atoms, molecules, cell architecture vs the striving to the moon

The history of the metro is linked very early on the art you see in nearly every station. This is in large part to a caricaturist and first artistic director of Expo ‘67 named Robert Lapalme (encouraged to paint by contemporary Jean-Paul Lemieux. Each station was designed to distinct, and the art was often done by the architect. In fact, the metro budget didn’t cover art, so it was privately sought out and funded. Robert Lapalme’s vision was for the artworks to recount the city’s history. One such piece was a triptych created for the Welcome Centre of Expo ‘67, and requested to be installed in its current site at the Berri UQAM station (on the way to Longueuil, on the yellow line) as a personal request by Mayor Jean Drapeau. The three paintings, in primary colours represent Science, Culture, and Entertainment. They remind me of Don Quichote in a backdrop of roman ruins, if Picasso’s Guernica was Disney-fied  and mixed with the modern abstract.

The first line planned was where we started, the Orange Line, but it is actually referred to as Line 2. It is the longest line in the system, at 30 km long. It is the second longest line in Canada only to the Yonge-University line in Toronto. It currently has 31 stations, which  contains 13 of the original 20 that were running in The original plan was proposed to run as a closed loop in 2019. It is Line 1, or the Green Line.