Ogilvy (Montreal)

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For the Ogilvy's department store in Ottawa, Ontario, please see Ogilvy's.

Ogilvy's in Montreal

Saint Catherine Street entrance to Ogilvy's

La Maison Ogilvy, commonly known as Ogilvy's (or Ogilvy in French), is a prominent department store in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where its store on Saint Catherine Street is a retail landmark.

Ogilvy's is the only one of Montreal's four west-end department stores still operating under its original name, and is known as the "Grande dame of St. Catherine Street". The store was founded in 1866 by James A. Ogilvy, a pioneer in Montreal retailing, and has been located for almost a hundred years in an Romanesque Revival stone building built in 1908 in the great style of the day.

In 1927, the store and the "Ogilvy's" name was acquired by Arthur J. Nesbitt, an investment banker who was a partner in Nesbitt Thomson & Co. stock brokerage and the energy conglomerate, Power Corporation of Canada. The new owner's twenty year-old son, J. Aird Nesbitt, took over management of the Ogilvy store. He created a style and personality for Ogilvy's that distinguished it from Montreal's other department stores.

In 1928, Ogilvy's opened the Tudor Room, a concert hall on the store's fifth floor. The first Montreal Symphony Orchestra broadcast across Canada originated from this hall in 1931. Of Scottish ancestry, Nesbitt also initiated another Ogilvy's tradition in 1950 when he hired two bagpipers to parade through the entire store between noon and 1 o'clock every day. More than fifty years later, a piper continues to march through the store daily.

After Nesbitt's retirement, Ogilvy's changed hands once more in 1985. The new owners renovated and revitalized the store interior, and a "new" Ogilvy's emerged in 1987. Ogilvy's was the first department store in Canada to adopt the "store within a store" concept, whereby the store features a collection of independent boutiques under one roof. Each boutique has its own unique character, while sharing common customer policies and standards. Ogilvy's also contains a restaurant, hair salon, florist and interior design consultants. Finally, Ogilvy's is renowned for its yearly, vintage Christmas window display, the only one of its type in downtown Montreal.