Antique Map of Montreal, with Mount Royal Park, Rand McNally, 1899

About this piece

This antique map of Montreal is the street plan Rand McNally printed across pages 390 and 391 of its 1899 indexed atlas, running from Westmount and Cote Saint Pierre in the west to Hochelaga and Maisonneuve in the east, and from the Notre Dame des Neiges and Mount Royal cemeteries in the north down to the Saint Lawrence waterfront. Mount Royal Park, McGill College and the grounds of the Seminary of Philosophy are washed in green, and the wards, among them Saint Henri, Saint Gabriel, Saint Jean Baptiste, Cote Saint Louis, Cote de la Visitation and Hochelaga, are tinted separately in pink or pale yellow to set the annexed suburban municipalities apart from the older city core.

Individual buildings and institutions are named and, in several cases, shown by a small black footprint on the street grid: the Windsor Hotel, the Art Gallery, Christ Church Cathedral, the Grey Nunnery, the Royal Victoria Hospital and the General Hospital are all marked, along with Logan Park east of the old city and the wharves and rail yards along the river. Saint Helen's Island, shown in green as a public park, and the smaller Ile Ronde sit in the Saint Lawrence opposite the harbor, with a compass rose and a scale of feet at lower right.

The waterfront carries considerable detail; "Proposed Wharves" are labeled along the river below Point Saint Charles, a reminder that the harbor was still under active expansion when this plate was drawn. As a large-scale city plan the sheet has no railroad color key of its own; instead it records the built city street by street, a useful and now historically informative document of Montreal at the very end of the 1890s.

Rand McNally, which grew from William Rand's Chicago printing business of the 1850s after Andrew McNally joined it, was by the 1890s one of the leading map publishers in the United States. This antique map of Montreal is a color lithograph, the outline printed in black with the colors printed over it, and an original 1899 atlas sheet, issued folded through the center. It is suitable for framing. The color is printed rather than applied by hand.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light age toning, deeper toward the sheet edges, minor wear to the lower corners and the original central fold as issued. Please review the images for further condition details.

This is an original antique map, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.