I close my door behind me and step onto the sidewalk on Rue Montcalm. Snow lingers against the curb, the chestnut tree across the street still holds onto its leaves. I can hear the buzz of a conversation in the park, someone repeatedly kicking the bench with their foot. An ambulance siren blares towards the nearby Notre-Dame Hospital. This quiet feels normal to me because the city has trained me to interpret quiet as order—a training with a longer history than I understand.
It’s around 9 PM and I’m going for a night walk with the only intent to listen.
I’m trying to understand how the city decides who gets to make noise and who must remain quiet.
I call my street a quiet street. People who visit always remark on it, for being so central. But when you listen to the quiet, it ceases to be.
As I walk up, I hear dogs barking, TVs through windows and a baby crying. I also hear my own breath sharpen as I go up the street and the sound of my winter coat rubbing against my sleeves. In this not-so-quiet is revealed the uneven nature of the right to nighttime.
When I reach the corner with Sherbrooke, I’m engulfed by wind I didn’t know was there and the soundscape widens as much as the street. Across the street, Parc Lafontaine sits empty, the buzzing of activities of the summer now long gone. On the sides of the park, tall buildings loom, windows partially lit, institutional in aspect. The scale of everything is increased, including the sounds. The traffic never really quiets on Sherbrooke. Some drive on it like a highway in the city. Cars and their rumble come and go in waves as the light turns green, then red. I cannot hear voices or dogs anymore, just the sounds of larger things.
A car turns into Sherbrooke, stereo blasting rap music through open windows. The sound dies down as quickly as it had appeared. It felt invasive to me, entering my space without permission to do so.
Montreal is a city that prides itself on being animated yet quiet. The city regulates sound limits, emphasizes quality of life and neighbourhood peace. That peace is dependent on everyone respecting sound limits and showing their virtue through compliance. Right now, Sherbrooke is doing exactly that. This is the city’s idea of a successful night: traffic is fluid, people are flowing through the grid with purpose. A police car makes its presence known by slowly driving on the right lane.
Researching this essay, I’ve learned that more noise equals higher cardiovascular risks, sleep and mental health issues, and even premature death. I wonder: is what sounds mild to me, wholly within the normal, harming Montréalers, me among them?
60% of Montreal Island residents experience more than 55 dBA at night, where evidence of risks becomes strong. 1 in 5 people on the island also report sleep disturbances from environmental noise. But we’re not all exposed to noise equally. Lower income residents are exposed to more noise than higher income ones. It is not affluent people who live on the side of highways. There is a distribution problem and Rue Sherbrooke is a part of it.
Akin to residential exposure, noise also affects people who move through the city differently. Cyclists are exposed to more than pedestrians and much more than car users. Even now, on Sherbrooke at its quietest, I can feel its potential for loudness. The design of the street states it: this is a large street for large noises, engineered to carry that load. Quiet here and now is not the absence of sound: it’s a lull in a system built for loudness.
We tend to equate noise with undesired sound. But it’s more than that, it’s a sound out of place, an administrative classification. A stereo blasting where it’s not expected, a conversation held on speakerphone on the bus, a mosquito buzzing in an otherwise silent bedroom. The city itself is hungry for noise. Its inhabitants are accustomed to identifying sounds that break order and classify them as a nuisance. I, for one, judge the person on the bus on speakerphone. It is a nuisance to me. But when does that listening turn into control, towards nightlife, unhoused people, or Indigenous gatherings?
I pass the hospital, a strange bubble of nighttime activity. People in scrubs smoke cigarettes alone in the courtyard, the beeping of the machines within the building is only in my imagination. Beyond that, the sidewalk empties. This is not where most Montréalers are on a Saturday night: they are either experiencing loudness on purpose, or quietness on purpose. Except the ones experiencing unwanted noise or unwanted silence.
What happens to the people, venues and nights that don’t fit the city’s version of order? I am walking towards La Tulipe, on Papineau, to find out.
As I approach the turn North, residential blocks overlooking the park loom above me. The traffic on Papineau is heavier, cars constantly start, stop, and honk. Two teenagers laugh loudly, their entire bodies bending forward. The 45 bus stops at the intersection and lets out a few people, bundled up in coats and scarves.
Turning left on Papineau, the mood is different. The dark and silent park still sits on my left, but the artery on my right is pulsing with vehicles moving fast towards the Jacques Cartier Bridge.
There are a few commercial spaces now, a few deps, but mostly the blind ground floors of towers for a while, until the height becomes human again and I’m flanked by the familiar silhouette of triplexes. The soundscape is uniform: cars, buses, cyclists braking, the occasional honk. Of the people living all around me, I hear nothing.
The people I see seem absorbed in the act of moving. There is a purpose in their steps, the way they ride their bikes: they are going somewhere with intent. My slow walk, turned to sensation rather than purpose, feels out of place. These people, who move through the city with purpose, tend to be the most exposed to noise and its possible consequences. Certainly much more than those in cars and those at home.
Contrary to most of the arteries on the Plateau, Papineau does not feel festive or warm. There are no cozy terraces here, no party goers. This is nothing like the marketed nightlife of nearby Saint-Denis or Saint-Laurent.
The atmosphere changes as I approach Mont-Royal. More people, happier looking people, the sound of music escaping bars, dishes clinking when a restaurant door opens, warm light emanating from windows. I feel the transition from traffic corridor, from city in the night, to the city of nightlife.
Seconds after crossing Mont-Royal, I reach La Tulipe, the destination of this walk. Its tall facade is imposing, surrounded by apartment buildings. Some residential windows are a few feet from the entrance. Yet, it doesn’t have any of the aura of the last time I was here. Its classic theatre facade is covered by a blue tarp and the marquee that once announced shows and special evenings is gone. A poster in a window indicates “La Tulipe, Salle de Spectacle depuis 1913.” Another reassures that the facade is only getting renovated. This quells my worries.
There is a dissonance between this historical cultural building and the traffic-first geometry of the street. I cannot help but imagine it in 1913, looming proud above a road of carriages and pedestrians.
I used to live very close by. I remember the doors letting out happy, drunk people into the cold air. People smoking, laughing, disappearing into Ubers. Kissing, sometimes. The contrast is stark. Tonight, it is quiet and deserted, the night feels like it has been confiscated.
La Tulipe was there before the condos surrounding it. Yet, condos were built, buildings were rezoned. People with the expectation of quiet in the night moved into these condos, their windows opened on summer nights onto laughter and music.
That’s when the complaints started. A court injunction orders a reduction of noise for neighbouring condos. La Tulipe ceases its operations. The city later admitted having made mistakes in planning and soundproofing for neighbouring units and adjusted the bylaws.
The city settles on a technocratic solution: noise must not be above 3 dBA more than ambient noise at night. The police, the SPVM, has full discretion to determine if that threshold has been crossed and to enforce the 10,000$ fines. For a place like La Tulipe, this means a few complaints can shut them down. And that’s exactly what happened. Montreal joined a worldwide trend of condo-driven noise policing.
The residents near La Tulipe are not living near the constant rumble of a highway or under a landing corridor. They are rejecting intermittent cultural noise. This curated quiet is not evenly distributed across the city. Yet, high levels of noise are not penalized when they are produced by cars and affect those who live on the side of arteries.
La Tulipe is a symptom of a wider issue with policing the night with bylaws and fines. Curfews are applied in parks at night, tickets for vagrancy in public spaces are issued to manage the presence of those that are deemed undesirable.
In Montreal, many of those are the unhoused, among whom Indigenous people are over-represented. Night-time spaces that welcome Indigenous unhoused people across the city are scarce. It is the same partnership between noise control and social order that protects condos that is instrumentalized by the city to govern where indigenous people can exist at night.
This pattern is not confined to Papineau, nor is it to noise. I think about Cabot Square, a few kilometers from here, across downtown Montreal, where presence is regulated, through daylight and nighttime. Cabot square is a long-standing meetup and gathering point for Indigenous people, especially Inuit people.
In 2016, the square was renovated to clear sightlines, increase brightness at night, segment bench seating and generally cater to a new, housed, population. The Children’s hospital that once towered about the square has been replaced by hyper-modern condo towers. These changes, combined with aggressive policing of the space, initiated a dispersion of the people of Cabot Square into colder, darker corners of the city.
In 2018, the Open Door shelter, once on the corner of Cabot Square, moved to Parc Avenue on the Plateau, leaving behind a vacuum of service in the area. Not everyone made the move. Since, a new shelter has opened across the street from Cabot square, Resilience Montreal. It offers warmth, shelter, food and clothes to anyone who needs it.
COVID-19 sharpened the crisis for unhoused Indigenous people. The new location of the Open Door shelter was closed down in the middle of winter, while a curfew was applied in the street from 8PM to 5AM, extending to unhoused people. People were left with nowhere safe to go during the night.
On a cold night in January 2021, Innu man Raphaël “Napa” André took shelter in a portable toilet feet away from the closed down shelter and died of hypothermia in the night.
The coroner concluded the death had been avoidable. “If a door had been opened to him and if he had had a heated and safe place to stay for the night, it is clear to me … that he would not have died, even if he was heavily intoxicated due to alcohol,” she said.
In response to André’s death, the Raphaël André Mémorial Tent was installed in Cabot Square. A heated structure welcoming all at all hours in a bubble of warmth, fatigue and food, contrasting against the cold paved surface of the Square. Its approach was one of care over control, Indigenous-led and accepting of all bodies and sounds. There, noise was an accepted part of survival, not a risk.
The city is trained to hear some people’s sounds as disorder and others as ambiance. I am a part of this system: I judge the teenager on speakerphone and the car driving past on loud speakers. None of this is new for the Indigenous people of this city: their nights have been policed, silenced and displaced for generations.
As I turn on the quiet and calm of Gilford and start my walk back home, I wonder: is there still even a night left at all?
The noise of Papineau dies down immediately. The street is narrow, bordered by duplexes. The snow is whiter, some patches remain undisturbed. The wind stops stinging my face. My breathing slows and so does the rhythm of my thoughts. Here, it’s hard to think about the politics of the night.
I pass a couple silently walking, their eyes on the sidewalk. Laughs escape from a briefly opened door. Someone is scraping ice off their front steps. This is the soundscape of the city I inhabit, where noise is not measured or policed. None of this is a question of virtue. It’s the result of zoning practices and affluence: quiet on Gilford is allowed to exist, rather than earned.
Montreal has long constrained nightlife, from razing the Faubourg Saint-Laurent to closing concert venues because of complaints. This pattern is not unique to Montreal: it is worldwide. Cities are sweeping dirt off their nights, sterilizing them, insisting on a binary where noise is associated with disorder and quiet with safety and virtue. It has nothing to do with decibels and all to do with who is considered legitimate at night.
As I turn south on Garnier, I look up at the sky, exposing my neck to the cold. Neither dark nor star-studded, it has a yellowish tinge, reflecting the lights of the city below. The city’s drive to police and control the soundscape in pursuit of “order” has a parallel, non-human, cost. The same brightness that makes the streets safe for humans is extinguishing the night for migratory birds. The light dome above the city disorients them, exhausts them. Insects are also affected, as well as bats losing their dark corridors. Noise too, disturbs behaviours: communication, breeding and survival are all affected. For those non-human animals, the experience of the night is altered or diminished: cities create a perpetual dusk where natural light never fully exists.
I had wondered who is allowed to exist at night and why. The pandemic seems to have shifted the night towards an ideal of quietness representing virtue and safety. This is rooted in a colonial history of displacing and managing Indigenous people at night, through passes, curfews and bans on ceremonies. Noise regulations have become another mechanism of moral sorting. The night is becoming governed, more than it is experienced.
As I reach Parc Lafontaine again, I decide to cross it in the quiet of night. I can still hear the city pulsating close by, but mostly, I hear my staccato breathing and the sound of the trees shifting in the wind. I can feel the slippery decomposing leaves under my feet. I love this feeling. I love the elongated silhouettes of naked trees in the night. The quiet is comforting to me. But it is only comfortable because I am allowed here. My presence is not seen as undesirable. In this city, calm can be both beauty and exclusion. The city’s version of night is shrinking, leaving only behind a curated quiet.
Reaching my door and the safety of my home, I realize the answer to my original question has shifted: the night doesn’t belong to those who use it, but to those who govern it. Turning my key in the lock, I am left to wonder: does this night in Montreal still belong to everyone?
