Fort Ville-Marie was a fortress outpost of France in North America. It is the historic nucleus around which the original settlement of Montreal grew.

Given its importance, the site of the fort was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1924.

Samuel de Champlain built a temporary fort in 1611. Champlain established a fur trading post where present-day Pointe-à-Callière stands as part of a project to create a French colonial empire. He and his crew spent a few weeks clearing a site that he named "Place Royale," dug two gardens and planted seed that grew well, confirming that the soil was fertile. In 1613, Samuel de Champlain returned at "Place Royale" and Sault-au-Récollet.

The permanent fort was built in 1642 by the Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal on the Island of Montreal. The first governor was Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve. In the first years, the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal was hosted inside the fort.

The fort was in use between 1642-1674 and was demolished in 1688. Louis-Hector de Callière residence was built on this place in 1695.

Gerald Gladstone (1929-2005) was a Canadian sculptor and painter. Born in Toronto, Canada, as a child Gladstone was as committed to music as he was to painting, teaching himself to play the clarinet and forming a jazz band.

Gladstone was a member of the group of artists exhibited by Toronto gallery owner Av Isaacs in the 1950s. The group included artists such as Michael Snow, Gordon Rayner, Graham Coughtry, and Tony Urquhart. In 1959, he received his first Canada Council of the Arts grant, relocated to London, England. He studied at the Royal College of Art where he met and befriended the British sculptor Henry Moore. As a result of Moore's influence, Gladstone began a long period of experimentation with figurative sculpture.

In 1967, Gladstone received three commissions for Montreal's Expo 67, but several years later he was struggling to find work. There was an exhibition of his mid- to late-career plastic cube sculptures and his Downtown Nudes Series - a collection of oils on canvas - at the opening exhibition of Toronto's St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, and in 1973 he produced the Electric Figure Series, another collection of oils on canvas. Among his late-career commissions were the Three Graces, a fountain and bronze sculpture for the Ontario government buildings, Female Landscape, a fountain and bronze sculpture at Montreal's Place Ville Marie, Optical Galaxy Sculpture, a fountain and sculpture in Belconnen, Australia, and a fountain and precast concrete sculpture for a Martin Luther King memorial in California.