Leonard Cohen gazes over his beloved Montreal

“Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past, a past that happened somewhere else.”
— Leonard Cohen

It’s been almost a decade since Leonard Cohen died. His relationship with Montreal was deep, and the city clearly still has him in his heart.

So much so that there are two different murals in his honour.

The one above, known appropriately as Tower of Songs, is at 1420 Crescent. It’s an amazing sight. I took the picture during a visit in 2022, on the same day that Queen Elizabeth II died.

I didn’t get to see the second, which is at 3981 Saint-Laurent Boulevard, until last fall.

It’s around the corner from Schwartz’s Deli, another Montreal icon. It was a very rainy day, and we scampered along the sidewalks to find the mural, like soaked pilgrims.

Before we explored Montreal that visit, we were in Ottawa. While Martha attended a conference one day, I crossed the river to visit the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau. On display at the time was an exhibition called Retro, cataloguing Canadian music artifacts from the Sixties through to the Eighties.

One of the items was an old-school Olivetti Lettera 32 that Cohen used to write his lyrics (and other work, too).

Cohen wrote the words above for his first novel, The Beautiful Game, which was published in 1963 — although not in Canada. A domestic edition did not appear until the Sixties had ended.