Elsewhere in the former British colonies, Montreal urban designer Vincent Ponte, 86, died March 12th.

The Montreal Gazette reports that Ponte, having earned a fine arts degree at Harvard in 1949, won a Fulbright scholarship to study architecture in Rome, but gave up architecture after the first term. “Some of the guys in my class were better than I was, and I didn’t want to be a second-rate architect, so I went into city planning instead.”

Ponte went to work for I.M. Pei, whose firm became involved in the design for Place Ville Marie in Montreal. Ponte designed the master plan for what he called a “multi-level, interconnected city,” with pedestrian walkways underground. It was only the first of several projects that transformed downtown Montreal. In 1970 Time Magazine dubbed him the Multi-level man, for his visionary separation of pedestrians, commercial vehicles and public transit at different levels.

Born in Boston, an only child in a wealthy Italian family, he is described in the Gazette by Harvard classmate Henry N. Cobb as possessing “exceptionally broad cultural awareness, exceptionally fastidious intellectual standards and exceptionally well-focused professional goals.”

He apparently cut quite a figure in ‘50s Montreal, which is described by the paper tactfully as “not as cosmopolitan” as it is today. “His sleek elegance combined with a certain sinister air, generated by the dark glasses he invariably wears, suggests that he is either a smooth playboy or a rather chilling Mafioso,” wrote the Montreal Star’s Lou Seligson. Need we add that he never married?