St. Patrick’s Basilica

I’m only going to give you one guess as to which group of immigrants the Saint Patrick’s Basilica was built for. It was the Irish, of course, legions of whom started arriving to Canada in the early nineteenth century. Set atop a hill in downtown Montreal, the imposing Gothic Revival church was completed in 1847.

The 1800s weren’t exactly good times in Ireland, with problems like overpopulation, the tyrannical British and famine forcing a huge percentage of the island’s population to leave ho...