Montreal city above the hill and the city below the hill
At the turn of the twentieth century, life in “the city above the hill” and “below the hill”, in Montreal, differed in many drastic ways. The “city above the hill” is the home of the upper class. ... The upper middle class was situated above and on Dorchester Boulevard while the lower class was inhabited underneath the street, which divided them. The area of the upper city was the exclusive habitat of the rich and prosperous. However, “the city below the hill” is “home of the craftsman, of the manual wage earner, of the mechanic and the clerk and three-quarters of its population belongs to this, the real industrial class. ... While the upper class “above the hill” were busy with their boring, but certainly better, daily lives, the people of poverty “below the hill” dealt with their major problems: housing conditions, employment along with income, education and public health. ... These topics specified what made “the city above the hill” and “the city below the hill” so different at the turn of the twentieth century. The housing conditions of the lower city and the upper city affected the way that the people in Montreal lived. In the upper city, the houses were tall and extravagant; there were “stately churches and well-built schools”3. However, descending the hill these characteristics changed drastically. ... The upper city had not more than fifty people to the acre of degree, but the lower city averaged one hundred persons per acre throughout the entire occupied area. ... In the upper city, were wide, luxurious, well-paved and fairly clean streets. Thus, not so much in the lower city where one home out of every ten is situated either on a short narrow lane in a bottle necked court or directly in the rear of buildings which shut out the street.