RESO - the Underground City

Roughly 32 Kilometres Of Connected Pedestrian Tunnels Beneath Downtown Montreal, Linking Ten Metro Stations, Two Universities, Rail Terminals, Shopping Complexes And Thousands Of Offices; Among The Largest Underground Networks In The World · Montreal, Quebec

Montreal gets four months of winter and built a city underneath itself to avoid it. RESO - the name plays on reseau, network - is ROUGHLY THIRTY-TWO KILOMETRES OF CONNECTED PEDESTRIAN TUNNEL beneath downtown, linking TEN METRO STATIONS, two universities, the rail terminals, the convention centre, several thousand offices and a very large amount of retail. It started in 1962 with Place Ville Marie, whose excavation left a hole the architects connected to Central Station, and it has grown by accretion ever since - which is why it is NOT A SINGLE DESIGNED SPACE but a stitched-together sequence of mall concourses, office lobbies and tunnels with wildly different ceilings, floors and eras. IN JANUARY YOU CAN LIVE IN IT: arrive by train, sleep in a hotel, work, eat, shop and take the metro without going outside once. That is the point, and it is genuinely strange.

Downtown Montreal, beneath Sainte-Catherine and Rene-Levesque, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

THERE IS NO SINGLE OPENING TIME BECAUSE THERE IS NO SINGLE BUILDING - RESO is a network of privately owned concourses stitched to public metro stations, and EACH SECTION KEEPS ITS OWN HOURS. In practice the network is broadly open from early morning until the shops close in the evening, and SECTIONS SHUT AT NIGHT AND ON SUNDAYS when their host buildings do - which means a route that worked on Saturday afternoon may be closed on Sunday evening. THE METRO CONCOURSES THEMSELVES RUN ON METRO HOURS. IT IS FREE TO WALK and requires no ticket, though passing through a metro turnstile does. NAVIGATION IS THE REAL PROBLEM: signage is inconsistent between owners and the network is not laid out logically. Download a map, or accept that you will get lost, which most people do.

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