Côte Saint-Luc () is a city on the Island of Montreal in Quebec, Canada. A residential suburb bordered mostly by boroughs of the city of Montreal and by the towns of Hampstead and Montreal West, it is one of the fifteen suburban municipalities that, with Montreal, form the urban agglomeration of Montreal. With 34,504 residents at the 2021 Canadian census, it is the third most populous municipality on the island after Montreal and Dollard-des-Ormeaux.
The name records one of the côtes, or rows of long farm lots, into which the Sulpician seigneurs divided the island under the French regime; the côte Saint-Luc was farmed by French-Canadian families for two centuries and had some 200 inhabitants in 1818. Detached from the village of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Ouest and incorporated as a village in 1903, it lost its north-eastern lots to the new town of Hampstead in 1914 and still counted fewer than 800 people in 1941. After the Second World War it was transformed within fifteen years into a suburb of bungalows, to which apartment towers were added in the 1960s and 1970s; it became a town in 1951 and a city in 1958, and its population passed 20,000 by 1966. Most of the newcomers were Jewish families moving west from central Montreal: by 1971 three-quarters of residents were Jewish, and according to the Jewish community's own census analyses the city has the largest Jewish population of any district or suburb in the Montreal area.
Predominantly English-speaking and officially bilingual under Quebec's Charter of the French Language, the city has repeatedly taken public positions on language laws and sovereignty on behalf of its anglophone and Jewish residents. It was merged into Montreal on January 1, 2002, and re-established as an independent city on January 1, 2006, after 87 per cent of voters in a 2004 referendum chose to leave. About a third of its territory is taken up by Canadian Pacific's St-Luc rail yard, opened in 1950, which, with the rail lines that feed it, leaves the main part of the city with only two road exits under the tracks; the extension of Cavendish Boulevard across the yards, first planned in the 1960s, has never been built. The city is also known for its volunteer emergency medical service, for a public library that opens every day of the year, and for an unusually elderly population, more than a quarter of which is aged 65 or over.
Toponymy On the Island of Montreal the word côte did not originally mean a slope. Under the seigneurial regime it designated a unit of agrarian settlement: a row of narrow, parallel lots running back from a river bank or, in the interior of the island, from a common road, and each côte bore its own name. The road serving the côte Saint-Luc is recorded from the seventeenth century. On Péladeau's 1778 plan it branches off the chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges and runs west around the Westmount hill; that eastern stretch is today's Queen Mary Road, and a short north–south road linking it to the chemin de la Côte-Saint-Antoine became Décarie Boulevard. Tollgates were later set up on the road to stop travellers avoiding the toll on the Côte-des-Neiges road.
The origin of "Saint-Luc" is uncertain. The Commission de toponymie du Québec and The Canadian Encyclopedia suggest that it probably recalls Luc de La Corne, known as La Corne Saint-Luc (1711–1784), an officer, merchant and interpreter who spent much of his life in Montreal. The city of Montreal's street-name repertoire, however, dates the chemin de la Côte-Saint-Luc to the seventeenth century, and the town's 1955 Golden Book (Livre d'or) held that the name already appeared on the seigneurs' land roll (terrier) before the last third of that century. The Golden Book concluded that the historian "is reduced to conjecture" and that the name was most likely a pious dedication, perhaps chosen by a man whose Christian name was Luc; the same book's heraldic section, and the city today, attribute it to Saint Luke the Evangelist, whose symbol, a winged bull, appears on the city's coat of arms. The crest of five ears of wheat recalls the city's agricultural origins, the gyronny of silver and black in the base of the shield symbolizes the railway marshalling yard, and the Latin motto Civibus meis was chosen for its deliberate ambiguity: "for my citizens" or "by my citizens".
The city's residents are known in English as Côte Saint-Lucers; the French demonym is Côte-Saint-Luçois.
History The côte under the Sulpicians (1679–1903)
The first land grants on the Coteau Saint-Pierre, the plateau west of Mount Royal, date from the end of the seventeenth century, but the côtes beyond it were peopled mainly in the eighteenth, once the Iroquois wars had ended. In 1679 the Sulpician superior François Dollier de Casson granted Jean Descary eighty arpents "at the end of and adjoining" the concession he already held on Lac Saint-Pierre; Pierre Hurtubise obtained land on the Coteau Saint-Pierre in 1687, Jacques and Philippe Leduc in 1693 and Pierre LeLac in 1696. Clearing of the côte itself began in the early 1700s, and farming remained its livelihood for two centuries. The earliest surviving count dates from 1818, when the Sulpician François Ciquard, charged with visiting the western districts of the parish of Notre-Dame, listed 209 people on the côte Saint-Luc—65 men, 61 women, 41 boys and 42 girls—in about two dozen households headed by Hurtubises, Gougeons, Lemieux, Prud'hommes, Valades, Lorties and Saint-Germains, more than the 177 he found on the neighbouring Coteau Saint-Pierre.
The farmers of the côte were the first in the district to ask for a place of worship. They petitioned the Sulpicians for a chapel in December 1845, and it opened in 1848, five years before the church of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce was blessed in 1853. In 1854 the Seminary offered the churchwardens of Notre-Dame twenty acres at Côte Saint-Luc, free of charge, as the site of Montreal's new Catholic cemetery; the wardens preferred the farm they had bought at Côte-des-Neiges, which became Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery. When the parish of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce was canonically erected in 1867 its territory expressly included "la Côte St-Luc", and the first churchwardens elected in 1874 included members of the Décarie, Lemieux, Prud'homme and Gougeon families that also farmed the côte. By 1900 the old stone chapel was serving as the schoolhouse for the residents of the côte, who by then had their own school commission.
Lovell's gazetteer of 1873 described Cote St. Luc simply as "a concession in the parish of Notre Dame de Grace ... 2 miles from Montreal. Pop. 300", and the 1879 Hopkins atlas of the island shows the whole côte as a ladder of strip farms owned by Décaries, Prud'hommes, Lemieux, Gougeons and a few owners with British names. Municipally the côte belonged to the village of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Ouest, created in 1876, from which Montreal West was detached in 1897. In 1903 P. Lemieux, Stanislas Viau, François-Xavier Décarie, Jérémie Prud'homme, J. H. McDonald and other freeholders petitioned the legislature for a municipality of their own, and a provincial statute sanctioned on April 25, 1903, erected the lands of the côte as the village of Côte Saint-Luc, bounded by the parishes of Saint-Laurent and Lachine, the municipalities of Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens and Montreal West, the Côte Saint-Luc road and the village of Côte-des-Neiges. Luc Prud'homme became the first mayor; his successor Pierre Lemieux, first elected in 1905, held the office for most of the next three decades. The house Lemieux built on Côte Saint-Luc Road in 1927 was bought by the village in 1946 and served as its town hall until 1964.
Village (1903–1945)
Subdividers soon arrived. In 1910 an advertisement for "Kingsdale Park, Montreal's newest western suburb" on Côte St. Luc Road offered four hundred lots at $95 apiece with the promise that water and electric light "will be installed shortly", and Côte St-Luc Realty Limited was chartered in 1912 with a capital of $150,000 to deal in real estate of every kind. The most consequential of these schemes was a syndicate led by the financier Herbert Holt, which bought eight of the côte's original farm lots, in the municipality of Côte Saint-Luc, to subdivide into building lots and, by an act sanctioned on February 19, 1914, had them erected as the separate town of Hampstead, with the village's secretary-treasurer as returning officer for its first election. The separation of Hampstead—followed, according to the city library, by its annexation of a further 52.8 acres around Dufferin Avenue and Queen Mary Road in 1925—left the village's easternmost lots along Queen Mary Road, the present Macdonald Avenue exclave, cut off from the rest of its territory.
Growth was slow for the next three decades. The village counted 303 people in 1911, 377 in 1921, 490 in 1931 and 776 in 1941. Its character, however, was changing. A French-Canadian, Catholic farming community became a mixed one: people of British origin made up 43 per cent of the population in 1931 and 54 per cent in 1941, nearly a fifth of the 1931 residents were British-born, and Roman Catholics were a minority by 1941. There was as yet no Jewish community—the 1931 census recorded no residents of the Jewish faith, and the 1941 census thirteen.
The eastern end of the village along Queen Mary Road, where the first apartment building went up in 1921, was already integrated into Montreal's uniform tramway-fare zone under the 1918 contract between the city and the Montreal Tramways Company. The rest of the village remained rural into the 1940s—a horse show in aid of "Wings for Britain" was held at Red Top Farm on Côte St. Luc Road in 1941—and was crossed by the Canadian Pacific Railway, whose St. Luc Junction was described in 1924 as "a busy sorting yard".
Suburban boom (1945–1976)
In November 1947 the Canadian Pacific Railway began building a new freight terminal on of woods and fields in the northern part of the village, and on July 6, 1950, the federal transport minister, Lionel Chevrier, formally opened the $12-million St. Luc Yard by pulling the uncoupling pin that sent the first freight car rolling down its "hump". With more than of track and room for 4,869 cars, it replaced CP's Sortin, Outremont and Hochelaga yards as the railway's principal Montreal freight terminal and was described as the first fully electrically equipped and signalled hump yard in Canada. The following year the village asked to be reorganized as a town, telling the legislature that the sale of land as building lots, and the development bound to follow recent construction, had outgrown the powers of the Municipal Code; the town charter was sanctioned on December 19, 1951, when Côte Saint-Luc had 1,083 residents. The town's sewer system was built between 1951 and 1953.
Encouraged by the mortgage-loan insurance that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation introduced in 1954, developers bought up the remaining farms and laid out streets of detached houses; the town's first master plan, adopted in 1954, imposed a rectangular grid that followed the boundaries of the old French-regime concessions, while a second plan in 1965 prescribed winding streets and cul-de-sacs for the districts still unbuilt. According to the research of the city library, the Wentworth Development Corporation bought Sydney Brown's farm between Wentworth and Palmer avenues in 1954 and sold its bungalows for $12,500, so that they became known locally as "the 12/5s". The population rose more than twelvefold in a decade, from 1,083 in 1951 to 5,914 in 1956 and 13,266 in 1961; in 1958, under Mayor J.-Adalbert Paris, the town had its charter amended to constitute it as the Cité de Côte Saint-Luc, on the ground that its population now justified city status. Planners of the 1960s expected far more: they projected a maximum population of 98,000, on the assumption of dense apartment districts and an industrial zone.