Place Ville-Marie, #1 – Viewed from de Maisonneuve West at City Councillors Street, Montréal, Québec

1 Place Ville-Marie is a 188 m (617 ft) with 47-storey, cruciform office tower built in the International style in 1962. Place Ville-Marie was one of the first designs of Henry N. Cobb and I. M. Pei, who was later to become a famous master of Modernist architecture. Mayor Jean Drapeau chose the name himself. Ville-Marie was the name of the French settlement founded at what is now Montreal in 1642.

Place Ville-Marie is arguably the most distinctive building in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Along with an underground shopping mall, it forms the nexus of Montreal’s Underground City, the world’s largest, with indoor access to over 1,600 shops, restaurants, offices and businesses, as well several metro stations in Montreal, a suburban transportation terminal, and tunnels extending all over downtown. A rotating beacon on the rooftop (turning counter-clockwise) lights up at night, illuminating the surrounding sky with up to four white horizontal beams that can be seen as far as 50 km away.

The brown brick building in the foreground is the Bay department store. It was built as the flagship store of Morgan’s (formally Henry Morgan & Company) – a Montreal-based Canadian department store chain. At its peak, the company had stores in Quebec and Ontario. The first Morgan’s store was opened in Montreal in 1845 by Scottish immigrant Henry Morgan. Morgan’s was purchased in 1960 by Hudson’s Bay Company.