Four in five Canadians today live in urban or suburban communities, so to find out what this means for the average homeowner, BMO SmartSteps for Homeowners has partnered with Spacing Magazine as they head on a cross-country road trip to celebrate what city-living is like in Canada today. They’ll be sending us updates along the way (We’ve already heard from Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Toronto), and now they’re heading East to Montreal.

They are like Montreal’s DNA. The wrought iron staircases wind down from the balconies, twist gracefully over the narrow ribbon of garden, sometimes tangling with trees or morning glories before alighting on the edge of the sidewalk. They come in every colour and shape; no two seem alike and yet they are all unmistakably characteristic of Montreal.

Like many things in this city, the iconic curving staircases are the product of resourcefulness, wound about regulation. Around 1890, in an attempt to secure a smidgen of urban green space, the City of Montreal legislated a mandatory setback for residential buildings. This reduced the amount of living space within each lot and, as a result, the staircases were pushed out of the house, into the band of land which was to remain, theoretically, open. Outdoor staircases soon became standard in the working class neighbourhoods, such as The Plateau Mont-Royal, Rosemont, and Villeray that sprung up at the turn of the century.

The staircases also evolved with respect to environmental constraints. Never mind if wintertime transforms your front steps into a danger zone - what’s the point in heating an indoor staircase when shoveling was cheaper than coal?

Nor would the house-builders of yore waste timber and ore on straight lines and sensible landings. Better to cut corners: the shortest staircase between a second-story balcony and the ground, without overstepping the property line, is some variation on a spiral.

What seems merely picturesque today was a judicious choice at a time when large families crowded into tiny flats, labour was cheap and, come winter, warmth was more precious than gold.

Later, in the 1940’s, a new bylaw prevented the construction of outdoor staircases: safety considerations were technically the reason, but some elites found the stairs spilling outside of working-class homes to be aesthetically unappealing. Although this rule was repealed in the 1980’s, the current building code would make many of the traditional winding staircases, with their narrow and uneven steps, illegal.

Nevertheless, Montreal’s heritage protection policy requires homeowners to restore staircases and balconies according to their original characteristics in order to preserve these snippets of Montreal’s traditional built form.

But, like DNA, architectural heritage does not survive by being frozen in time. The skilled craftsmanship that was once invested in even the most modest homes has by and large been lost, but given a chance, many Montrealers still nurture the ingenious spirit that found the smartest route between two points to be a squiggle.

By Alanah Heffez, of Spacing Montreal