Located at the crossroads of inland and ocean-going shipping, just at the mouth of the Lachine Canal, the huge grain elevators, with their rail-mounted mobile elevators and their conveyors, form a gigantic machine for receiving and transferring grain from the West, by ship or railcar. This machine is still in operation, for while the huge elevator No. 5 is now unused, several neighbouring elevators are still working.

AN EXAMPLE OF MODERNITY AT THE GATEWAY TO THE CONTINENT

The square steel form of the oldest part of elevator No. 5, built between 1903 and 1906 for the Grand Trunk Railway Company, was designed by the John S. Metcalf company of Chicago (Metcalf himself was a native of Sherbrooke, Quebec), a world leader in this type of structure at the time. The port also awarded the company the contract for elevator No. 2—a gigantic structure of reinforced concrete, the latest technological wonder in 1910. The remains of this elevator were conserved after it was demolished in 1978 and can still be seen.

In 1923, when Montreal had become the world's largest grain-handling port, the famous architect Le Corbusier, like other great modernists, marvelled at North American elevators in his book Vers une architecture, and mentioned Montreal's elevator No. 2 as an example. As for elevator No 5, additions and expansions followed in 1913-1914, 1922-1923 and 1958-1959, and all the essential internal and external components are still in place today. While there are many other elevators elsewhere, this one is a particularly impressive and complete example of this type of functional architecture, at the very site of the gateway to the continent, in Montreal.

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