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Ville-Marie's first street, rue Notre-Dame , was laid out in 1672 and runs east-west from one end of Vieux-Montreal to the other. Other than the financial buildings of rue St-Jacques, there is little of interest to the west of Place d'Armes; it's more rewarding to head east along Notre-Dame from the top of rue St-Sulpice, past the 1811 Maison de la Sauvegarde at no. 160. It stands opposite the imposing Old Courthouse , erected by the British to impress upon the French population the importance of abiding by their laws. It went on to become the site of civil trials under the Napoleonic Code after the courts were divided in 1926, and today serves as municipal offices. Criminal trials took place across the street, at no. 100, in the Edifice Ernest Cormier , which was built in 1925; step inside to admire the impressive colonnade and unique Art Deco lamps. Both courthouses have been usurped by the shiny black glass of the Palais de Justice on the corner of St-Laurent. Beside the Old Courthouse, Place Vauquelin , with its pretty fountain and statue of the naval commander Jean Vauquelin, gives views of the Champ de Mars to the north. Excavations to build a car park here hit rock, which turned out to be the original city walls. After a public vote, the car park scheme was abandoned, the walls were excavated and restored, and the area was transformed into a pleasant grassy space that is used as a park, with occasional son et lumiere performances. East of Place Vauquelin, the ornate Hotel de Ville (City Hall) was built in the 1870s and is a typical example of the area's civic buildings of the time when French-speaking architects looked to the mother country for inspiration. On a visit to Expo '67, General de Gaulle chose its second-floor balcony to make his "Vive le Quebec Libre" speech that left the city's anglophones reeling at the thought that Quebec was on its way to independent status and infused francophones with a political fervour that ended in the October Crisis. The cobbled Place Jacques-Cartier opposite City Hall slopes down towards the river and offers spectacular views of the Vieux-Port, but is overrun with buskers, street artists and hair-braiders throughout the summer months. Restaurants and cafes surrounding the square hustle for business, while the narrow rue St-Amable to the west is choked with struggling artists selling quaint pastels of Montreal scenery alongside garish caricatures of stars like Burt Reynolds and Madonna. A few buildings on the square - Maison Vandelac, Maison del Vecchio and the Maison Cartier - show the architectural features typical of Montreal architecture in the 1800s, with pitched roofs designed to shed heavy snowfall and small dormer windows to defend against the cold. At the top of the square itself, the controversial Monument to Nelson stands above the flower stalls that serve as the only reminders that this was once Montreal's main marketplace. The city's oldest monument - the column is a third the height of its more famous London counterpart, but predates it by a few years - was funded by anglophone Montrealers delighted with Nelson's defeat of the French at Trafalgar in 1805. Quebec separatists adopted it as a rallying point in the 1970s. Ironically, the anglophones never liked the monument much either, because it faced away from the water. East of the square, the long and low fieldstone manor of the Chateau Ramezay (June-Sept daily 10am-6pm; Oct-May Tues-Sun 10am-4.30pm; www.chateauramezay.qc.ca ; $6) looks much as it did in 1756, the only addition being an incongruous tower, which hoisted the building into "chateau" status in the 1800s. One of the oldest buildings in North America, Chateau Ramezay was built by the Compagnie des Indes as offices and storage space and then became a residence for the French governors, before passing into the hands of the British. During the fleeting American invasion Benjamin Franklin stayed here in an attempt to persuade Montrealers to join the United States, but he lost public and church support by not promising the supremacy of the French language in what would have been the fourteenth state. Nowadays, after a variety of other uses, it is an historical museum ; despite some poor translations on the explanatory panels, the collection of oil paintings, domestic artefacts, tools, costumes and furniture from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is thorough and informative. The most impressive room is a reconstruction of the Grande Salle of the Compagnie des Indes, complete with mahogany walls and woodwork imported from Nantes, France. Other rooms are furnished in the bourgeois style of New France, while in the deep stone vaults below, educators teach about the life of the aboriginal peoples before European settlement. At the intersection of Notre-Dame and Berri, the Lieu historique national de Sir-George-Etienne-Cartier (May-Sept daily 10am-6pm; Oct-April Wed-Sun 10am-5pm; $3.25; www.parcscanada.gc.ca/parks/quebec/cartier/ ) comprises two adjoining houses that were inhabited by the Cartier family from 1848 to 1871. The cocky Sir George-Etienne Cartier was one of the fathers of Confederation, persuading the French-Canadians to join the Dominion of Canada by declaring: "We are of different races, not for strife but to work together for the common welfare." Today, leaders of French-Canadian nationalism decry Cartier as a collaborator, and the displays in the east house diplomatically skirt over the issue of whether he was right or wrong and emphasize instead his role in the construction of Canada's railways. This collection is decidedly bizarre however, with Muppet-like figures representing the founding fathers on the main floor, while eight white-painted papier-mache models of Cartier himself sit around a glass-domed, round table upstairs. The rooms in the west house are more interesting, furnished with more than a thousand original artefacts to evoke the period when Sir George lived here. Strangely, part of the display is concentrated around a dinner theme, and recordings of conversations between fictitious house staff automatically start playing once the infrared sensor catches movement in the room.
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