The construction of warehouse-showrooms in the 1850s to 1880s, as Montreal was becoming an industrial city, was probably the most spectacular urban transformation to occur in the historic heart of the city. These large multipurpose, multi-storey commercial buildings comprised warehouses, showrooms, workshops and offices. There are over 200 of such units still standing in Old Montreal, often grouped together.

Their massive presence indicates the role played by Montreal at the time as the main Canadian distribution centre. Imports flowed through these warehouse-showrooms, as did a very large proportion of locally produced industrial goods, as well. Some items were manufactured there, too, including shoes, jewellery and certain chemicals. Many of them lined Notre-Dame Street, crossing through the historic city centre, making it a popular shopping street for Montrealers who came to admire the industrial goods in the windows of these new retail outlets.

Montreal's warehouse-showrooms, the epitome of functionality, offered a combination of great interior flexibility, thanks to their structures of wooden beams and cast-iron columns, and large openings thanks to the fine window frameworks, with traditional local greystone cut into slender monolithic blocks. This construction method (like the cast-iron buildings of New York and St. Louis, although their façades were entirely of cast iron), prefigured the 20th-century Rationalist movement, which saw form as a reflection of function. Architectural beauty was a product of this simplicity. Architectural historians refer to this as proto- rationalism. In Montreal as in New York, this structural approach would continue for several decades. Nonetheless, building facades would become more and more exuberant, inspired by Renaissance architecture and quite in keeping with Victorian tastes. Old Montreal has some superb examples of this style.

Even for the most austere warehouse-showrooms, architects were able to style their facades and roof lines to adapt the buildings to the surrounding Victorian streetscapes.

Most of the warehouse-showrooms forming the "River-side" in the old port of Montreal have another public face, on Saint-Paul Street. This "city-side" façade was designed to attract customers, retailers and wholesalers from across Canada to see new products, and was always much more elaborate than the port side, designed for receiving and shipping.

These groups of warehouse-showrooms, fairly packed together and well preserved, are exceptional examples of the transformations in business in North America, and in Montreal in particular, from the 1850s to the 1880s.

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