Like Beacon Hill in Boston, Montreal’s Square Mile was a golden enclave for the rich and powerful in the halcyon days before income tax, a small geographic area peopled by families who owned and controlled a nation. A few of its great houses still stand – Pierre Trudeau used to live there in an art deco house that was built after the area began to decline. But for the most part, the Square Mile has been lost under a welter of office towers and apartment blocks. Victorian merchant princes, or Edwardian industrialists, those who lived there built their Italinate and Gothic dream houses, hired platoons of servants to run them, and crammed them with works of art and expensive bric-a-brac. In an elegant text, brought alive with 120 magnificent photographs, this book recaptures the lifestyle of of Canada’s founding dynasties and the sheltered luxury of their world.
The Square Mile: Merchant Princes of Montreal
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