If you pop into any Montreal souvenir shop, alongside the post cards featuring photos of Notre Dame Basilica, Saint-Joseph's Oratory or Habitat, you are sure to find ones with a row of stately triplexes pictured on the front.
More than any other form of residential architecture, the triplex -- a three-dwellings-in-one edifice often characterized by its ornate façade and long outdoor (sometimes spiral) staircase -- is the archetypal Montreal house.
More than a century of the city's history can be told through that of the triplex, a construction form that flourished during Montreal's industrial heyday between 1870 and 1930, and which has recently been making a comeback.
Montrealers sometimes take for granted these distinctive buildings, thousands of which line the streets of almost every neighbourhood in the city core. Yet, architects and urban-studies experts hail the houses as a triumph of practical yet innovative and attractive design. And they single out the triplex as a major reason Montreal's inner-city neighbourhoods remain so vibrant compared with many of their counterparts in North America.
"The triplex has been the saviour of this city," says David Hanna, one of the few specialists on the form and a professor of urban geography at the Université du Québec à Montréal. "Our neighbourhoods are probably among the healthiest in Canada because of this medium-density housing.
"It's been a great tool of ethnic mixing. Triplexes are great for converting into condominiums or co-ops. And they have allowed Montreal to avoid having a lot of high-rises."
However, Mr. Hanna notes, a huge part of city's rich architectural heritage is threatened by the lack of formal protection of the triplex. Unlike New York City, which has designated large numbers of its late 19th-century tenements as historic sites, Montreal triplexes have earned no such recognition.
"The greatest protection comes from the owners themselves," adds Université de Montréal architecture and urban studies professor Jean-Claude Marsan. "There is an appropriation of these houses by their owners. They take care of them because they love them so much."
Gabriel Deschambault, 56, is one such owner. His family still lives in the triplex in the Plateau Mont-Royal arrondissement that his grandfather built in 1910.
While Mr. Deschambault and his wife live in the house's third-floor flat, the couple's sons, Rémi, 31, and Philippe, 29, occupy the first- and second-floor apartments, respectively.
"It has never dawned on us to move to the suburbs," muses Mr. Deschambault, a retired city employee, and an architect himself. "We love it here not only because this is the house I grew up in, but because of the neighbourhood around us. We are close to everything."
While working for the City of Montreal in 1990, Mr. Deschambault helped start up Opération patrimoine architectural de Montréal, a program that encourages triplex owners to maintain their residences in good condition and respect a set of architectural norms when renovating them.
"The objective is to help people realize what they have and to take care of it so that these houses are still standing in 50 years -- or longer."
With it's limestone façade, metal cornices and cast-iron parapets, Mr. Deschambault's home, on Rue Christophe-Colombe, is representative of an upper-middle-class triplex of the early 20th century.
But the majority of Montreal triplexes were first built as working-class tenements. Their construction was seen an innovative way to cope with Montreal's rapid industrialization in the late 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of rural Quebeckers descended on the city for work, creating an explosive demand for new housing.
Inspired by the working-class row houses of Britain, most of the triplexes in the Saint-Henri and Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhoods have brick exteriors. This reflects both the influence of British architects and the lower cost of brick compared with stone, a material favoured by French architects.
Triplexes were usually built in groups of no more than three or four. Hence, the variety of designs and building materials broke with the monotony typical of row-housing, and continue to contribute to the visual richness of many Montreal neighbourhoods.
Over the decades, Mr. Hanna notes, the triplex has brought Montrealers from diverse ethnic backgrounds and income groups together in the same neighbourhoods. For instance, in the early 1900s, the owners were typically French-Canadian families who lived in the ground floor flat while renting out the upper-floor apartments to Italian or Lebanese immigrants. As upwardly mobile francophones moved to single-family dwellings in the suburbs in later years, the new owners -- the Lebanese or Italians immigrants -- rented their flats to newer immigrants from other countries.
Meanwhile, the origin of the characteristic outdoor staircase -- unique to Montreal -- has become the stuff of local folklore.
Some experts attribute it to the simple fact that it was cheaper to build the staircases leading to first- and second-floor units on the outside, rather than enclosing them within buildings. (Typically, the staircase leading to the third-floor is inside.) Some suggest that the Roman Catholic Church strongly encouraged outdoor staircases for reasons of public morality. Church leaders believed different families should not have to share anything so intimate as a common entrance. Still others think that the rural Quebeckers who first occupied the triplexes, habituated as they were to their own verandas in the country, preferred separate entrances and balconies.
Whether the staircase was spiral or straight was more a function of the size of the lot than anything else. Early triplexes, with little frontage, have spiral staircases. Later ones, built when designers were encouraged to set houses back from the street in order to create grander-looking avenues, could accommodate long, straight staircases.
Either way, Montrealers rue their staircases on moving day. "If you've got to carry a piano up one of them, it's pretty painful," Mr. Hanna says. "So, there really are problems with them."
Indeed, by 1945, the outdoor staircases were seen as unsightly and Montreal city council passed a by-law prohibiting them. The change ushered in an era of apartment-block and high-rise construction that did not abate until the by-law was finally repealed in the late 1970s.
Since then, Montrealers have re-embraced the triplex. While townhouses are currently popular with developers in many North American cities, developers in Montreal are more likely to propose a modern triplex. Mr. Hanna noticed one such development recently even in Boisbriand, a working-class suburb about 40 kilometres northeast of downtown Montreal.
"We're building triplexes all over the place," he says. "The form has endured."
Konrad Yakabuski