Ship Shape

For 50 years, the Port of Montreal catered to out-of-town cruise passengers. Its splashy new waterfront tower is amonument to local life.

IN THE 1920s, Montreal was one of the world's most active export centres for wheat. The Old Port was peppered with enormous grain silos and, at its south end, Alexandra Pier shipped out all that precious cargo. By 1967, however, the pier served two purely practical purposes: as a parking area and as a processing terminal for cruise passengers, a brief stopover before they sought entertainment elsewhere in the city.

In 2013, with the site showing signs of advanced agesome parts of it were literally crumbling-the port authority launched a design competition to modernize the waterfront. Provencher_Roy, a Montreal architecture firm, won for its plan to convert the concrete-heavy, closed-to-the-public space into a love letter to Montreal.