A sulfur processing plant. An oil refinery. A chemical warehouse. Corrals of shipping containers. A depot for petroleum coke, a by-product of oil refining. Oil tank cars lined up along the street in a long row. Manufacturing centres, factories and the carcass of a building still bearing the marks of an old fire. The site of a soon-to-be-constructed airport fuel storage terminal along the northern bank of the Saint-Laurent River. These are the landscapes of Montréal-Est, a city on the eastern end of the Island of Montreal. The lines of division between it and Montreal are as olfactory as they are carved by CN rails: base and acrid, the dense warmth of gasoline and the cold musk of cement, dust and exhaust.

Stretching between the Montreal boroughs of Anjou in the west and Pointe-aux-Trembles in the east, and home to fewer than five thousand residents, this is a city unlike ...