True to his dust-jacket proclamation, the nomadic Mr. Cohen returned to Montreal sporadically throughout his adult life, and so, until his death in November at the age of 82, if your timing was fortuitous, you might have seen him on the steps of the gray stone triplex he purchased just off The Main in the early 1970s. With his often-present laptop perched on his knees, it’s where he exchanged pleasantries with neighbors he’d known for decades or called out to acquaintances lingering in the pocket-size Parc du Portugal across Rue Vallières.

During a recent attempt to retrace Mr. Cohen’s relationship with my adopted home city — spurred on by the fact that, until his death, I had not known that we were such close Plateau neighbors, living only a 15-minute walk apart — I discovered that the best evidence that he reveled in Montreal’s comfortable clasp was found on his feet.

“One day he was in back of me at the bakery,” Ida Ponte, a manager at the J. Schreter apparel store on The Main, told me as she recalled her visits to another St.-Laurent staple, Les Anges Gourmets. Like many Little Portugal mainstays, Les Anges offers a cross-cultural array of goods, as renowned for its French patisserie as for its Portuguese egg custard tarts, pasteis de natas. “I didn’t know he was there and he just leans over and whispers to me, ‘You’re the only one who knows I’m wearing slippers.’”

Mr. Cohen’s preferred footwear for padding around Little Portugal — always the same Foamtreads slippers, purchased at J. Schreter — illustrated his rapport with the middle-class neighborhood that served as his Montreal home base after a childhood spent in the tonier Westmount enclave. Sotto voce and sly-humored, polite and without airs, Mr. Cohen exuded a big-hearted bonhomie for the people and for the places he loyally patronized.