Montreal Took Its Cross Down. The Rule It Supposedly Made Was Never Real.

The cross that actually became a symbol is a product of 1874 and 1924 in equal parts. In 1874, marking its fortieth anniversary and prompted by the Sulpician priest Pierre Dupaigne, the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste proposed a metal cross on the mountain in Maisonneuve's memory. It had no money, and the idea sat for fifty years. It was revived in 1924 inside a broader wave of French-Canadian national assertion, and it was paid for in a way nothing gets paid for now: a province-wide subscription in which more than 100,000 schoolchildren sold five-cent commemorative stamps.

In May 1924 the city ceded a piece of the mountain to the society. Construction started on 16 May. The steel was fabricated and erected by the Dominion Bridge Company — a bridge builder, out of Lachine, whose frames also stand inside Montreal's City Hall, the Mount Royal Hotel and the Forum — working to plans drawn by Dupaigne, a priest, under the supervision of the architects Gascon et Parent. The frame was finished by mid-September. The electrical installation was done by one J.-A. Saint-Amour. On Christmas Eve 1924, 240 fifty-watt bulbs, 120 to a face, lit it for the first time.

A bridge company built it, a priest designed it, and schoolchildren paid for it with five-cent stamps.

What broke

Nothing broke, exactly. What happened instead is that the cross spent a century accumulating a kind of status that no document records.

Start with the ownership. The Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste is said to have given the cross to the city in 1929, but no document attests to the transfer. The city maintained the structure and paid for its light anyway, for seventy-five years, on the strength of an understanding nobody wrote down. The donation was only formalised by a resolution of city council in June 2004. For most of the period in which the cross was supposedly dictating Montreal's skyline, the city could not have produced a title to it.

The same informality attached to its meaning. It turned purple when John Paul II died in 2005, stayed white during the interregnum before Francis in 2013, went red for AIDS awareness and blue for the Fête nationale. A fibre-optic colour system went in for the city's 350th birthday in 1992, with a time capsule buried beside it. Through all of it, the city kept repeating the line it repeated again this autumn: since 1924 the cross has never been completely dark, except for works.

The physical decline is the part with a paper trail. There was a $982,138 overhaul in 2007 and another lighting change in 2009. By 2026 the west face had been switched off outright — the city's own phrase was that this was done to ration the bulbs — and an inspection found the electrical system at the end of its useful life. The executive committee's stated reason for awarding the contract when it did was blunt: without it, there was a real risk the cross would go out on its own.

The turn

The turn in this story is not a building permit. It is a line in a planning document.

Montreal's first plan d'urbanisme, in 1992, set the principle that the skyline should stay below the mountain. The mechanism was an absolute elevation ceiling: no construction above 232.5 metres measured from mean sea level, which is roughly the height of the summit. The cross is not named. The mountain is.

That distinction went missing almost immediately. In the spring of 2021, Denis Coderre published a book-programme arguing that a world-class downtown would have to rise higher than the cross — his words, not the bylaw's. Valérie Plante called the idea a heresy. By September Coderre had reversed himself, and Dinu Bumbaru of Héritage Montréal dismissed the whole exchange as a debate that should never have happened. It took a municipal election to settle a rule that had been written down thirty years earlier.

The clearest illustration came from a developer. Interviewed by Le Devoir for the cross's centenary, Luc Poirier said he had been unable to build a tower on the mountain's flank, and that Coderre, as mayor, had told him an old bylaw forbade building higher than the cross. Robert Beaudry, on the city's executive committee, corrected the record in the same article: heights are set by the plan d'urbanisme and by the PUM, not by the monument.

A former mayor, a major developer and most of the city's press spent a season arguing about a monument. The constraint was always a line on a map.

What the rules allow

Montreal's defining constraint is not a density metric. It is not a floor area ratio, which measures built floor area against lot area, and it is not a storey count. It is an elevation ceiling: a maximum altitude above mean sea level. A tall building on low ground and a short one on high ground can both run into it, and the same tower is legal on one block and illegal three streets uphill.

The ceiling is 232.5 metres above sea level. Under the 1992 and 2004 plans it was paired with a maximum roof height of 200 metres measured from the ground, and the two together produced the skyline Montreal actually has: 1000 de La Gauchetière at 205 metres and fifty-one storeys as the tallest building in the city, Maestria's residential towers at 185 and 199 metres. Only lots on the lowest ground downtown could ever reach those numbers. For most downtown lots the limit is far lower — 120, 80, 65, 55, 35, 25 or 16 metres, depending on the sector.

The instrument has since changed. The 2004 plan d'urbanisme, règlement 04-047, was repealed on 16 June 2025 and replaced by the Plan d'urbanisme et de mobilité 2050, règlement 24-017, adopted that June. The elevation ceiling tied to the mountain survives. The separate 200-metre roof-height cap is reported to have been dropped in the new plan; that has not been confirmed against the text of the regulation itself, and anyone pricing a site should read 24-017 rather than the coverage of it. The city has also described the PUM as holding buildings below an altitude of 204 metres, keyed to the mountain's lowest summit.

Now the delta, and it is the point of the whole piece. The ground at the cross is 233 metres above sea level. The cross is 31.4 metres tall. Its tip therefore stands roughly thirty metres above the altitude at which the city stops issuing permits. A tower built exactly to the legal maximum would clear the mountain's shoulder and still sit well below the arms of the object everyone names.

The slogan is more generous than the bylaw. The rule people invoke would let you build higher than the rule that exists.

Timeline

• December 1642 — The river rises against Fort Ville-Marie and Maisonneuve makes his vow. The settlement is a few dozen people on a flood plain.
• 6 January 1643 — The wooden cross is planted at the summit. For the next decade it stands alone above a colony fighting for its existence.
• 1653 — Maisonneuve finds the cross destroyed and charges Marguerite Bourgeoys with replacing it. After that the mountain passes through two centuries as farmland, seigneurial land and merchants' estates, with no monument of record.
• 1874 — The Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste proposes a metal cross. Fifty years of no money follow.
• 1876 — Olmsted's parc du Mont-Royal is inaugurated. The mountain becomes public ground, which is what eventually makes a permanent monument on it possible.
• May–September 1924 — The city cedes a parcel at the summit, the cornerstone is blessed, and Dominion Bridge raises the steel in four months.
• 24 December 1924 — First illumination. For the next sixty-eight years the cross is simply there, lit white, through a depression, a war and the Quiet Revolution.
• 1929 — The society gifts the cross to the city, in an act no surviving document attests. The city pays the hydro bill regardless, for the next seventy-five years.
• 1992 — Two things land in the same year: a fibre-optic colour system for Montreal's 350th, and the first plan d'urbanisme, with its 232.5-metre ceiling. The symbol and the rule arrive together, which may be why they have been confused ever since.
• 2004–2005 — Council formalises the donation in June 2004; Quebec declares the Site patrimonial du Mont-Royal on 9 March 2005. The cross becomes publicly owned and provincially protected within eleven months.
• 2007 — A $982,138 overhaul, with polychromatic bulbs. Two decades later that system is at end of life.
• 2021 — The height fight. It resolves without a single change to the regulation.
• June 2025 — PUM 2050 is adopted and the 2004 plan repealed. The mountain ceiling carries over into a document otherwise built around 200,000 new homes.
• 3 June 2026 — The executive committee authorises close to $3.8 million, with one compliant bidder. The lights stay on for another four months.
• Late September 2026 — The cross goes dark. Most people assume that is the whole of the work.
• 15 October 2026 — It comes off the summit entirely and is laid on the ground beside its own foundations, for the first time in a century.

What it is now

The ground holds a 102-year-old steel structure on a publicly owned summit inside a provincially protected heritage site, currently lying on its side. The rules allow a skyline that stops roughly thirty metres below where its arms normally sit. The distance between those two facts is the entirety of Montreal's height policy, and almost none of it is religious.

Consider who the arrangement serves. The elevation ceiling is a view-protection rule, and it works: the mountain stays legible from the street, which is a genuine public good in a city named after it. It also manufactures scarcity. Because the ceiling is absolute and measured from sea level, the handful of low-lying downtown lots that can actually reach 232.5 metres are worth a great deal more than their neighbours, and nothing any council does will make more of them. Meanwhile the limits that decide where Montrealers can actually live — the 16, 25 and 35 metres that cover most of the island — have never once been debated in a mayoral race.

There is one more layer the commemorations tend to skip. A light on this mountain predates the vow by a long way: the Mohawk communities of Kahnawake, Kanesatake and Akwesasne chose the name Tiohtià:ke Otsira'kéhne for a Mount Royal summit in 2017, marking its use as a fire beacon long before 1642. That is the Outremont peak, not the one the cross stands on. Different hill, same idea, four centuries earlier.

So the $3.8 million is not the scandal, and it is not really the story. The story is that a city in a housing shortage has spent thirty years conducting its height debate in the language of a monument that the regulation does not mention, while the monument itself stands higher than anything the regulation would permit. The promise being kept this autumn is 383 years old. The steel is 102. The city has only been able to prove it owns the thing since 2004.

What's still unknown

The contract figure is reported three different ways: roughly $3.1 million in one account, $3,769,140 in another, a little over $3.7 million in a third, against an authorised envelope near $3.8 million. The city's own decision summary for the 3 June 2026 executive committee meeting would settle it in a sentence.

The 1929 donation remains undocumented, and the SSJB's own fonds at BAnQ is the place to look for whatever was actually signed. The parcel the city ceded in May 1924 has no lot number in the open record either; a search in the Registre foncier du Québec, which charges per search, would produce it. And the claim that the 1924 cross once contained an observatory in its arms appears in a single tourism source and is left out of this piece for that reason — the Dominion Bridge shop drawings, if they survive, would confirm or kill it. Finally, whether règlement 24-017 really drops the 200-metre roof cap is a question that should be answered by reading the regulation, not the newspapers.