Rue du Petit Champlain

"Trompe-l'oeil: Transparency by the St. Lawrence I've been to Québec City several times, and it's never boring. Street art is all over Vieux-Québec (The "Old" city)—sculpture, plantings, frescoes... This is the Fresque du Petit Champlain, just a couple of blocks from the St. Lawrence River, a fresco depicting various periods in the history of this neighborhood, the oldest commercial street in North America. Once, on a train from Québec to Montréal, I struck up a conversation with a woman whose family used to live in this neighborhood. Although it's still residential, with restaurants and boutiques, it's always full of tourists. Back then, she said, "it was full of Irish immigrant families," like hers. "Although they didn't speak French, they and the Québecois got along just fine—they all hated the English!"