I've always wondered just how dense Montreal was at various points in its history. I recently went through 1941 and 1951 census data to see how the density compared to today.
Here's a map I made of how various neighbourhoods' population changed from 1951 to 2011 (in percent).
(also compared Montreal to other cities
on my blog)
So most of the older neighbourhoods lost a lot of population. In 1951, the inner neighbourhoods like Verdun, the Plateau, Hochelaga-Maisoneuve and the Sud-Ouest still held a good chunk of the metro population. I'm assuming the population loss was mostly a result of decreasing household sizes/decrowding. Even Outremont's population decreased, although I think the Hassidic Jews with large families make up no more than a third of the total populaiton. The population losses were greater in neighbourhoods like the Plateau than in most neighbourhoods in other cities that were built out around 1950, has it gentrified too? I know it's somewhat gentrified now, but at least originally, I don't think it was very poor. From what I can understand, the poorest neighbourhoods were originally closer to downtown and the Lachine canal, and the Plateau was initially middle class.
Although Montreal is quite dense today, with an urban area weighted density similar to that of San Francisco-Oakland and Toronto, and only significantly behind New York, it used to be quite a bit denser prior to suburbanization and decreased crowding/household sizes.
Density distribution by census tract.
The high density areas of Montreal to shift from 40,000-100,000 per square mile (15-40k per km2) to densities less than half that.
Montreal's urban area weighted density in 1951 made it a solid 2nd in North America.
Top five (density in people per square mile)
1. New York-Newark: 74,956 (excludes several suburbs, only includes NYC, Newark, Elizabeth and Hudson County)
2. Montreal: 38,433
3. Philadelphia: 30,602
4. Chicago: 27,099
5. Baltimore: 26,783
Aside from having quite a bit of high density neighbourhoods, Montreal also didn't suburbanize as much by 1951. Many American cities had streetcar and railroad suburbs that were less dense than Montreal's, with mainly single family homes on smallish lots.
Montreal would have been even denser in 1941. Many inner neighbourhoods lost population in the 40s, and of course there was some lower density development in the suburbs. Although Rosemont, Villeray, Parc Extension and a few other neighbourhoods that experienced growth then were built to fairly high densities (but still less dense than the Plateau), you also had less dense NDG, Dorval, Mount Royal, Ahuntsic, Longueuil and Laval experiencing growth.
The Plateau would have had a nighttime population density almost as high as today's Manhattan. I wonder how bad crowding was. And how bustling the city might have been?
I wonder when Montreal would have been at its most dense? The typical pattern in North American cities is you start off relatively low density when you're a small town, then get denser as you get bigger, and then innovations in transportation (first streetcars, then automobiles) lead to reduced densities.
During the 1870-1940 period, you basically had two opposing forces driving density in Montreal. Streetcars allowed the population to spread out more, but Montreal was also growing from a small city (141k) to a big one (over 1mil), which typically leads to higher densities. So I have no idea if it would have been getting denser or not...
Prior to 1941, there was no census tract data to rely on. There was a population breakdown by ward given for the 1931 census, but I have no idea what some of those wards correspond to.
https://archive.org/details/1931981931B381934engfra
What would Montreal have been like in 1870? I think a lot of the city from that time period is not that well preserved. Even the Plateau was only just starting to develop. Much of the city would have been the current downtown area, a lot of which has since been redeveloped into warehouses and office buildings.