Watch the NFB documentary "Montreal by Night"
Featured Works
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Montreal Closing the Door on Garage Leagues by Nicholas Santoianni
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Queering the Night: Montreal's After-Hour Pulse by Anastasia Cubasova
Montreal Closing the Door on Garage Leagues by Nicholas Santoianni
For decades, garage leagues have been a vital part of Montreal’s hockey culture, providing adults, mostly men with a space to play, socialize, and unwind after work. More than just recreational games, these leagues foster camaraderie and maintain a deep-rooted tradition of community hockey. However, they are now under threat. Arenas are closing earlier, prioritizing other uses, and making it increasingly difficult for these leagues to secure ice time (City of Montreal 2024). At the same time, youth hockey participation has declined by 35 percent in recent years, with the rising cost of the sport contributing to its decreasing accessibility (Whyno 2024). While hockey remains the most popular sport among adults in Canada, it ranks only third among minors, reflecting a generational shift in engagement (Narrative Research 2023). With fewer young players feeding into the game, adult hockey remains a crucial lifeline for keeping the culture alive. If arenas continue shifting away from supporting garage leagues, a core aspect of Montreal’s identity risks fading away. This map highlights where these leagues still persist, the challenges they face, and the urgent need to protect this essential part of local hockey culture.
Night Food: Lighting the Path by Karine Payette
This map catalogs restaurants and cafés open past midnight classified by date in 25-year intervals, shedding light on the oldest institutions still in operation. This approach revealed a correlation between the restaurants' location and proximity to public transit: night food spots increasingly clustered around the transit axes created by in the introduction of the underground metro in 1966, concentrating and replacing tramway routes as the predominant method of public transit.
The map also emphasizes the luminous impact of these night food establishments and how they attract customers through their street lighting. Two types of lighting were identified, catering to different clientele. On one hand, a warm lighting style—represented in yellow—marks places offering a warm ambiance that encourages customers to stay longer. On the other hand, a brighter lighting style—represented in white—highlights places that encouraged higher customer turnover.
In this way, these dining spaces contribute to the nighttime vitality around metro stations, adding comfort and safety to the surrounding neighborhoods.
Nocturnal Grocery Shopping by Ishaan Anand
Anand's urban map depicts the access to grocery stores throughout the 24-hour cycle with different biomes: desert, savanna, forest and rainforest. The desert has the lowest access to grocery stores, the forest has the highest access to grocery stores and the rainforest has access to grocery stores at night (the list is given at the bottom right). While it may seem that there are not a lot of people working in the night, there are businesses operational throughout the night all over the island of Montreal. These places are depicted as animals: bats are police and fire stations, owls are airports, mice are slaughterhouses, possums are factories, and the fireflies are all the late-night grocery stores operational past midnight. The map is shown in a board game-style graphic design.
This urban map identifies working establishments (excluding restaurants and bars) during the night. It is seen that most of these places are far away from groceries during the night. In addition, there are only seven late-night grocery stores on the island! - and located very far away from most late-night working locations. Therefore, this is a clear representation of the need to extend grocery hours past midnight to water deserts into rainforest regions.
Queering the Night: Montreal's After-Hour Pulse by Anastasia Cubasova
Montreal's queer community hosts a unique constellation of night care spaces, revealed through this mapping project. These 28 identified venues are not typical nightlife locales but environments where support, visibility, and community bonding occur. Ranging in activity, these spaces are predominantly temporary and operate under the radar, relying on word-of-mouth for promotion. While often impermanent, they cater to various segments of the 2SLGBTQIA+ population, including youth and the elderly, ensuring inclusivity in their offerings throughout the year. The selection of these organizations and collectives was meticulously based on criteria such as visibility, fundraising, providing support and information, cultivating the community, targeting action for community members, and a specific orientation towards sapphic, trans, and BIPOC individuals.
Despite their often invisible nature, these spaces are vibrantly present and play a crucial role in the strength and resilience of the community. The ephemerality of these venues does not diminish their significance; rather, it highlights a dynamic network that, although not always seen, is continuously active and influential.
In the accompanying drawing, an axonometric volum etry of the map of southern Montreal is presented, depicting a virtual room where various members of the queer community navigate through the night. They engage in diverse activities, fostering and cultivating their bonds. This visual representation not only illustrates the physical locations but also celebrates the lively and communal spirit that thrives within these after-hours gatherings.
The Body is a Temple by Dharshini Mahesh-Babu
In Hindu philosophy, the body is seen as a temple—an entity that must be nourished through discipline, devotion, and self-care. Using the game Operation as a base map, this map draws parallels between the body and the city. Just as the game highlights different parts of the human body that require precision and care, this map identifies Hindu temples not only as places of worship but as crucial community hubs that provide holistic care, addressing physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. Each temple functions as an organ, contributing to the health of the city through services that sustain not only individuals but also the broader community even beyond religious practice. They offer wellness programs, cultural activities, and nourishment through prasadam, the sanctified free food distributed in temples, highlighting alternative forms of care rooted in diaspora, spirituality, and shared responsibility.