As part of an ongoing series, the Free Press is turning its focus to Winnipeg’s downtown area, exploring why the city’s core is suffering, and what can be done to address it.
This is a core concern.
Once more into the downtown
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
A peaked roof pokes out above storefronts, a vestige of another time, at Kennedy Street and Graham Avenue in Winnipeg.
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In the opening decades of the 20th century, optimism for the bustling Portage strip, and the blocks lined up neatly around it, was overflowing. The City of Winnipeg was growing, booming with new European settlers and new business, signs of the wealth being extracted from the land in a young colonial country, and the promises of more wealth to come.
Newspaper reporters and ad copy writers described each new downtown development with breathless excitement: a 1920s article about a new Eatons addition spoke of the “unbounded faith in the future of this Western country with its practically limitless possibilities,” and of a “greater era of prosperity looming on the horizon.”
Retail ruled along Portage. On the streets that stretched south, a busy neighbourhood rose. It had two public schools packed with students, a growing number of competitively grandiose churches, and blocks filled with new homes. Back then much of downtown south of Portage looked like the West End does today, tree-lined and served by small businesses.
Over the years, local historian Christian Cassidy took stock of the remnants of that downtown. He noted the locations of old houses which still stood, looking ever more anachronistic, between Portage and Broadway, such as the humble 1896 duplex he called the Lonely House, that lingered on a thin sliver of Donald Street until it was razed in 2015.
It will take more than office workers’ return to get downtown back on its feet
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
More foot traffic is needed for a vibrant and safer downtown, says Aimee Peake, owner of Bison Books.
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The plastic is still on the newly purchased couch.
The walls are bare, save for a few empty wooden shelves.
For Chris Watchorn, 288 Colony St. is a blank slate — a prime piece of real estate near the University of Winnipeg, empty but full of promise.
“Hopefully this place becomes more of a community thing as much as it becomes a retail thing,” he says, standing in the soon-to-be men’s apparel shop in early December. Beyond its doors, across the hall, a few other ground floor units sit vacant.
Too many U of W and RRC Polytech students are still fleeing the inner city as soon as classes end
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The latest addition on Elgin Avenue houses 10 new programs, marking the most significant scale-up of the institution’s academic offerings in its history, and is surrounded by a new pedestrian corridor.
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There are no traces of the University of Manitoba’s downtown campus, a collection of science and arts buildings that once stood where manicured grounds now host family picnics — and, during the winter months, piles of snow — on Memorial Boulevard.
Unless one believes an urban legend that suggests the stench of chemicals from the early labs, which were housed in a wooden facility that absorbed the scent before it was bulldozed, still emanate from the grounds on sweltering summer days.
More than 70 years ago, students and academics ditched U of M’s downtown site for a huge plot of land in Fort Garry. The school community fully vacated the campus in the city’s core, owing to growing enrolment, in 1950.
The decision to relocate in the suburbs was “one of the most unfortunate planning decisions in Winnipeg’s history,” as far as Jim Silver is concerned.
Crumbling foundation
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Downtown resident Brian Pincott poses for a photo on his street in Winnipeg on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. He says that improving active transport infrastructure is key to having more people live in the core. For Malak story. Winnipeg Free Press 2022.
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Brian Pincott lives in a home on Spence Street. He loves downtown Winnipeg — he was a city councillor in Calgary for a decade before moving here three and a half years ago and was immediately struck by what he calls some of the best “urban bones” in the country.
“We have an amazing mix of heritage, of facilities, we’ve got an amazing urban environment in the downtown on two rivers,” he says.
But while he’s enjoying the beauty of the city’s core, he also laments what it could be.
“It is an environment that is hostile to me living there,” he says. “It is an environment that is hostile to me walking to a shop.”
