Noblesse

It's 7:30 PM and I'm sitting up in my hotel room bed, in for the night. My sons and I will go swimming at 9:30 or so, but my feet are finished walking, and there's no chance that I'll leave this hotel tonight.

We walked to St. Joseph's Oratory today, 4 or so uphill miles from our hotel; and then returned to McGill University, and decided to walk to the top of Mont Royal, too. I recorded 26,000 steps today. That's not the real story, though (but 26,000! Impressive!). The real story is how amazingly beautiful the Oratory and Mont Royal Park are, and how much work and prayer went into the creation of both of these miraculous places.

*****
Most people know Frederick Law Olmsted as the designer of New York's Central Park, but apparently, he was also involved in the design of Mont Royal Park. According to Wikipedia, an economic crash in the mid 19th century prompted Montreal's city planners to abandon many of Olmsted's very ambitious plans for the park. This is astonishing to me, because it's still amazingly beautiful and welcoming, the type of public space that the great 19th century robber barons built with their vast fortunes. Using winding paths and wooden stairs built into the side of the mountain, visitors can either climb or hike to the top, where Chateau Mont Royal will welcome them with ice cream and cold drinks and overpriced souvenirs. (Buy an expensive t-shirt! It's not cheap to maintain a thing like Mont Royal!) Then, they can stand on the overlook, with all of magnificent Montreal spreading below, and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment that comes with having climbed a mountain--even a relatively small one.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to take a panoramic picture.
Trust me, it's much more impressive in person. 

St. Joseph's is even more magnificent. You walk and walk and walk down Chemin de la Cote des Neiges, growing more and more certain that you have the wrong directions and that your GPS doesn't know what the hell it's talking about. And then, just as you approach Chemin Queen Mary, you see the very top of the dome emerging from the tree canopy.

OMG! There it is!

St. Joseph's was also built during the midst of an economic crisis. According to the $2 Visitor's Guide, construction was halted in 1931. Brother Andre was supposed to have ordered the construction company to place a statue of St. Joseph in the open structure. "If he wants a roof over his head, he'll make sure that the money is there." A few years later, construction was complete.

This is what it looks like today, as you approach on foot.

Mont Royal Park was built with the help of municipal funds and private donations from Canada's robber baron counterparts (descendants of Hudson Bay traders, I guess). And St. Joseph's was completed with the help of private funding from donors large and small (but probably mostly large). 

I don't like to indulge in class-warfare rhetoric. If you compare my life to the lives of most people who have ever lived for all of human history, then I'm the one percent, and I could do a lot better at noblesse oblige. On the other hand, it's hard to compare today's super rich (no Donald Trump, not including you, because no one expects anything from you) to the super rich of the 19th and early 20th centuries and not feel a little bit shortchanged. The Carnegies and the Mellons and the Vanderbilts endowed parks and hospitals and museums that were built to last forever. I guess it's still too early to say what the Buffets and the Gates and the Zuckerbergs will leave behind. If it's anything half as magnificent as Mont Royal Park and St. Joseph's Oratory, then I guess I can forgive them for Facebook and Windows Vista. 

9:00 now. I'm too tired to move, but swimming doesn't count as moving. More Montreal tomorrow, maybe. A bientot.