The early years of the underground city’s development were characterized by muddling negotiations without a central authority, haggled by fleets of lawyers representing the developers, prospective and existing tenants and the project’s architects and planners. The ownership of the underground was complicated, with some rights guarded as the preserve of the Montreal Urban Community Transit Commission, others controlled by private interests and the remainder falling under the purview of the city. In some cases, the negotiations proved so complicated that stretches of tunnel were built with tremendous deviations in order to circumvent uncooperative landowners. The very novelty of the project precluded much expertise by planning professionals, who had no body of regulations, legislation, specialized licensing or historical models to fall back on, so this era of the underground’s extension was often a free-for-all where the most aggressive and creative players could take home the tremendous stakes up for grabs.

After the construction of the initial phase of tunnels at Place Ville Marie, the underground city’s development was funded by the rents of existing tenants, and this phase was certainly conducted with the interests of future tenants in mind. While the underground today is regarded by many Montrealers to be little more than a commercial Inferno, the underground city of the 1960s was even less oriented toward community interaction and accessible spaces than it is today. The entire structure was almost entirely devoid of benches or other sociable spaces, there were no atriums or open courtyards, and every conceivable architectural measure was taken to discourage loitering. Street musicians, political pamphleteers and panhandlers were explicitly forbidden and aggressively policed. Every square foot of possible retail space was rented out, and the passageways and corridors were designed to ensure the maximum exposure of passersby to window displays, including the installation of staggered staircases that required pedestrians to double back past banks of stores when descending multiple flights.

In the period leading up to Expo ’67, the underground city experienced a period of tremendous expansion. Place Bonaventure connected to the underground city in 1966, providing access to over 6 acres of office, retail and trade space. The construction of the Montreal metro in 1966 carved a system of tunnels that could be spliced with existing spaces to extend the underground city’s reach, joining the metro stations to existing office towers, hotels and cultural edifices. The burgeoning subterranean city was given a tremendous boost by the Montreal Urban Community Transit Commission’s practice of granting emphyteutic leases above and around metro stations. An emphyteutic lease grants the lessee full use of property, both buildings and land, including the right to build and let the property so long as the original structure is not compromised. In Quebec, an emphyteutic lease can be granted for as few as ten or as many a hundred years, in this case providing an incredibly lucrative way to create long-term commercial spaces on prime real estate with modest overhead costs. This system has proved so popular with developers that today every downtown metro station is overcrowded with stores, and there is not a single free-standing entrance left to Peel, McGill or Guy-Concordia stations.

In short, the metro system provided considerable impetus for the underground city, in no small part through the construction of stations embedded in shopping spaces so that the transition between the mall and the metro was seamless.