Beautiful, normal

At the intersection of Carlton and Cumberland Avenue at 6:30 this evening, I looked into Central Park and saw a well-maintained little skating rink in the centre of the green. A trio of skaters were shooting a puck around under a new set of bright lights. In the background stood Knox United--the greatest of the city's Presbyterian kirk buildings; an imposing example of Gothic revival--was also lit up. Never have I felt such an urge to find a pair of skates for myself.

And while this blog remains firmly pessimistic in its focus (it's so much easier), this scene made me excited about the redevelopment plans for Central Park. Putting a hockey rink in winter will prove to be a great idea, along with a soccer pitch for warm months.

When I came back past the park at 8:30 p.m., there was another small group playing hockey. Let's hope they keep on playing, and that beautiful, civil, quintessentially Canadians scenes like this become more common in Central Park.

Knox Church, corner of Qu'appelle and Edmonton St. WBI

We'll figure it all out later

When half the Provincial budget comes from transfer payments from other provinces anyway, they can afford to introduce measures to cripple the economy.

Here's how cap-and-trade works.

***
Speaking of competence, "City council is poised to approve the purchase of a police helicopter today and then wait until the new year for a report about the costs and benefits."

With a council of children at 510 Main Street, egged on by their arrogant older brother on Broadway, it is no wonder Winnipeg ("it's like a small town") needs L.A.-size crime-fighting tactics.

Urban renewal lives on

Remember when Canada Post was picky about the location of their new central sorting facility? When Higgins and Main wasn't right? Or when the intersection of Broadway and Portage Avenue was ideal because it was on major traffic routes? This concern must be why they have finally settled on a a couple of side streets in the middle of a mixed-use but primarily residential neighborhood. Yes, this was clearly the real estate market at work; no back-room funny business to see here...

Anyway, it looks like the Gordon Bell H.S. "field of dreams" will end up being a true 'win-win' for Winnipeg after all.

Winnipeggers win because every time they drive past Portage and Broadway, they will see the chain link fence (a nice aesthetic touch for a city's pre-eminent street) that encloses a field too small and awkwardly shaped to play regulation sports. And they will be able to think to themselves: this is fair. The poor have grass. Now they have everything.

Winnipeggers will also win because the new site Canada Post is building on helps with the long-term plan of gradually eliminating Centennial/West Alexander as a residential neighborhood, in favor of some kind of sprawling health centre/parkade.

It might be because Centennial/West Alexander is not a neighborhood where NDP heavyweights live and send their sons and daughters to high school (or would if they didn't ship them off to Kelvin or MBCI). Or maybe it's because the City and Province have had it out for Centennial/West Alexander for nearly 50 years, and will use any excuse to chip away at it's residential character.

Centennial/West Alexander, with it's alphabetical street nomenclature (Dagmar, Ellen, Frances, Gertie, Harriet, Isabel, Juno, Kate...), is one of the oldest residential neighborhoods, built up during the Boom of 1881-'82. Urban renewal was eyed for the neighborhood in the 1960s, but that traffic engineering-cum-housing train ran out of steam by the close of that decade, and instead, various spurts of public housing (designed to make Thompson look like Paris) were put up on Alexander, Ross, and Pacific Avenues.

Consider the various Biomed schemes for the blocks north of Health Science Centre, or the Provincial NDP and City government's buying out of Weston Bakery's Elgin/Sherbrook location.

Or consider the City's anomalistic exerisizing of it's Vacant and Derilict Buildings By-law against the owner of the "Alphabet House" at 89 Gertie St. You think the City is that proactively eager to demolish derilict houses in another neighborhood? Take a drive down a street in William Whyte or Spence and see.

And if governments cannot completely eliminate its residential buildings, at least make it a residential neighborhood that it is unsafe and unenjoyable to live in. As a forumer at newwinnipeg.com pointed out today: "It's funny how on the same day that council declined to raise the speed limit on Grant from 50 to 60 on the basis that it could endanger the children in various daycares lining that street, a deal was announced that will ultimately lead to trucks hurtling through another neigbhourhood that also has a significant number of children."

Indeed, across Ellen St. from the future Canada Post site is an apartment complex predominated by new immigrant families, with a large playground at the corner. Across Bannatyne at Ellen, is Victoria-Albert Elementary School, and one block up the street at McDermot and Gertie St. is the Kani Kinichihk Day Care.

The kids in this systemically declining neighborhood would be so lucky as to deserve a grass field.

***
Think the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg, whose offices are located directly across the street from the Canada Post site, will put this in their "poverty report card," protest City Hall, or write letters to the editors on account of affordable rental housing being lost in the neighborhood? Think that any other organ of the poverty racket speak up? Yesh, me neither.

400 delusional kvetches can't be wrong

"Why do we create a regulated cartel to charge high prices and control and reduce supply. Whose interest is that in?" asks Barry Prentice in a Martin Cash piece on another round of taxi fare increases.

Of course it is in the interest of a whingy protectionist racket known as the Winnipeg taxicab "industry," who dress their rent-seeking greed in pretenses of fairness. "It's a tough market out there," they will say. Yes, when taxis are rendered so inefficient by regulation, that their best business comes from fares paid for by EIA or the WRHA, then I can see why it's tough being a cabbie: because willing consumers are tired of standing on street corners or in vestibules, waiting for a cab they called 30 minutes earlier.

Dullness is sexy

As I suspected, my piece in the Free Press last week inspired a response from someone affronted by the notion that maybe another 50 years of publicly-planned parkades downtown might not be the way to go.

This response came from East St. Paul resident Stefano Grande, Director of the Downtown Winnipeg Business Improvement Zone, who tried to sell the public on how new parkades are not only neccessary, but can be sexy and fun!

As I stated in my article, it's all a matter of civic priorities: parkades are never "catalysts" for other uses, and their overabundant presence detracts from conditions that do attract development. And so, if in 2009 new parkades are considered a major priority for downtown Winnipeg, the city should ditch the pretense that it wants to see dynamic, mixed-use and densely-populated neighborhoods there. Instead, it should be more honest with itself in that it simply wants to be district that gives everything to keep suburban commuters with happy with cheap covered parking spaces.

It's their downtown, and it's no wonder them and everyone else avoids it on their own time.

Downtown reborn, again. And again...

More troubling, though completely unsurprising evidence that public megaprojects are not a means to an end, but are the end themselves.

"Downtown Winnipeg BIZ executive director Stefano Grande said that $1.2 billion has been invested in downtown since the MTS Centre opened.

"Red River College, the revamped Millennium Library, Manitoba Hydro Place and The Forks Skate Plaza have all been finished since 2004.

"The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is also going up at The Forks, and the downtown walkway system will soon be a closed loop."

And how much money from this straw-grasping list has been paid through private sources? This is a bit like measuring a city's crime rates based on the number of police officers on the payroll.

Parking is the problem, not answer

This article was published in the Free Press today, on the subject of a growing preoccupation with creating more parking facilities in the East Exchange District, and the delusional theory that new parkades cancel surface existing parking lots.

This seems more pertinent of an issue today, when I learned that Centre Venture Development Corp. is in meetings with Man-Shield Construction about building more parkades in the Exchange District. Maybe this is the one planned for around James Avenue, maybe it's a different one, but one thing is certain, it is obvious that none of these people charged with "revitalizing" the Exchange District live there, or in a neighborhood anywhere remotely close to it.

***
Bill Redekop's story on streetcars that the Greater Winnipeg Transit Commission sold off in 1955 (and likely earlier), the year when the last routes the city: Portage, Main, and Osborne (which were also the first routes to be built) were converted to buses. Since no other city was in the business of buying aging cars for use in transit systems, they were sold for other uses. Steven Stothers, who out of his own interest has done more research on Winnipeg's street railway than anyone else, has photographed numerous cars that once rolled down Winnipeg streets, but now sit out in the country in various stages of disrepair. These photos, along with an extensive collection of archived photos of Winnipeg transit, are available on his Flickr page.

Don't fear the chain store

Here is an article I wrote that appears in this week's edition of The Uniter (which will be on stands tomorrow):

[...] With more done to make Sherbrook an enjoyable place to walk along, and less of an obnoxious funnel to speed south-end commuters through, there would be more pedestrians and businesses, not to mention an increase in the quality of life for the surrounding neighbourhoods.

Still, destructive traffic engineering does not seem to be the biggest concern amongst local residents. One commenter on my blog recently pointed out that Subway will be the first chain store on the corner of Westminster and Sherbrook, a fact that is “getting everyone down.” While I don’t want to depress moods further, isn’t the Salvation Army thrift store across the street a continent-wide chain? Possibly, but maybe not the type Naomi Klein warned you about.

What gets me down is seeing what many of Winnipeg’s once viable commercial streets have become after years of abandonment. Ellice and Sargent struggle, Provencher snoozes on its potential, and North Main and Selkirk Avenue have practically ceased to exist.

A Subway opening up on Sherbrook is good news. While Mom’s Deli or Pop’s Hardware often add colour to a neighbourhood where chain stores simply add sameness, most neighbourhood strips in Winnipeg’s centre don’t have the luxury of choosing between the two. Any meaningful commercial establishment that wants to open up is something of a small victory against urban malignancy. Continued...]

Soul-destroying globalized capitalism touches down at the corner of Graham and Kennedy St., giving pedestrians another place to walk to. Photo by Wintorbos

For what it's worth

"Few set up shop in mixed-use buildings" proclaims yesterday's Free Press Business headline, noting the continued presence of "for lease" in the commercial spaces on the ground floor of condominium developments along Waterfront Drive, as well as in Osborne Village and in the "French Quarter."

In spite of these slow starts, commercial space on the ground floor of new developments should continue to be de rigueur, certainly in any commercial district, or one that strives to be.

A better (and much more novel) idea is to not tear down old mixed-use buildings where retail space tends to be cheaper. This article makes it sounds like storefront retail was seen as something valuable and sought after, yet almost every significant off-Waterfront project in the Exchange District and north of it to Higgins Avenue--actual or conceptual--has involved tearing down old commercial buildings that would have been had a better chance of attracting retail tenants than the new, expensive shopfronts that affix parking garages. United Way headquarters and WRHA on Main, Sport Manitoba on Pacific, Grain Exchange Building on Lombard, St. Charles Hotel on Albert, and Ryan Block on King... How is it that so little can be built or redeveloped without small commercial buildings first being destroyed?

A walk down Albert Street shows that population density does not necessarily precede some kind of commercial developments. In spite of its success, the Exchange District is still a fledgling, risky commercial market, and so retailers are going to carefully search for spaces based on price and location. Theoretically, however, enough of these independent enterprises operating in cheap old spaces will add to the desirability of the immediate area, and make higher rents in new buildings an easier sell (or lease, to be less metaphorical).

Perhaps a re-read of Chapter 10 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs is in order. And I mean really read the chapter. This whole old building-hugging that has been a dominant theme of this blog ad nauseum, is not just for aesthetic reasons--because some building is a good example of late Romanesque Revival; or for historical sentimentality--because some moustachioed gent built a dry goods empire there back in 1911; these buildings are an economic necessity if downtown districts of "grocery stores, bakeries or coffee shops and restaurants" are truly hoped for. (However, if an unlivable, unattractive, disconnected and sprawling collections of lone non-profit heritage buildings surrounded by parking lots and "for lease" signs is what you want, Winnipeg, keep going: you're half-way there.)

Good news for the black market

Between an archaic transit system that has makes its last runs by 1:45AM, and a semi-nationalized taxi lobby that wants to raise fares (who knew that stifled competition increases prices?), it is no surprise to hear of an increasing number of industrious night owls that park outside downtown bars and charging flat rates (i.e., $5) for passengers to anywhere in the city. Also not surprising is that on most weekend nights, these hacks can do pretty well for themselves.

Maybe this is something else that the taxi racket can cry to the Taxicab Board about.

Soft despotism...

...starts slowly.

Incidentally, President Obama's daughters attend private school.

H/T, Cafe Hayek

Not a good sign

The newly-minted weed lot at 668-74 Main Street has a sign planted in it proclaiming it a "development opportunity" for sale from Centre Venture Development Corp. That this is available to any would-be developer suggests that Sun Wah Supermarket's plan to expand its parking lot at King and Henry Ave. east to Main, is now a non-starter.

One can't help but admire the unbridled optimism of this sign, but something tells me this property is going to sit as a discarded clothing repository for the local population, until it is paved over to store the Chevy HHR's of social workers.

Which, in spite of the sign, would probably suit Centre Venture just fine. After all, the cash-strapped organization is flying an architect to Vancouver on a week-long fact-finding mission to skid row flophouses that have been converted into "transitional" housing, so the same can be done with the Bell Hotel. Earlier in the year, Centre Venture (in what was the most depressing article for anyone holding out for a remotely performing city with a livable centre) joined the chorus of downtown property managers in the "race" for the "ideal tenant"--the government bureaucracy.

Bell Hotel, c.1980

Centre Venture does still quietly go about the business of helping small businesses get off the ground in downtown Winnipeg. Places like Berns & Black hair salon, who conducted extensive renovations of 468 Main did so with help from Centre Venture. They should be commended for projects like this, not only because this is the sort of thing the organization was created for in 1999, but because it helps bring about things badly needed (property improvements, coffee shops, grocery stores, small offices) that conventional financial institutions find too risky.

This is not just a matter of uses that better lend themselves to a more safe, interesting and livable downtown (which at one time was believed to be the whole point of this public effort at downtown revitalization), but of what is more practical use of public funds: an upstart entrepreneur renovating a deteriorated storefront on Main Street and opening cafe is a risky venture that is hard to borrow money for; a public social housing or a provincial government department's office is not. So while Centre Venture can be useful in bringing small private ideas to life, it is just another layer of redundancy in public projects like the Bell Hotel.

Some good news

Here is a piece I wrote that was published in today's Free Press (which happens to be the paper's last Sunday edition), on Red River College's plan to convert the vacant Union Bank tower on Main Street into residences, as well as their culinary arts program (which will include several restaurants):

It's easy to get excited about the plans Red River College has for the Union Bank tower on Main Street. Built in 1904, it is a true example the early skyscrapers, not only by virtue of its height, but by its adaptation of classical orders to a tall building. Reaching 11 storeys from ground through the wonder of steel, it looks down on Main from a sharp bend in what had been, just a generation before, a muddy trail connecting two forts along the Red River.

When the tower became vacant in 1992, I was 10 years old, and I have grown into young adulthood seeing it as a heartbreakingly prominent reminder of Winnipeg's lost glory. And so, if nothing else, to one day see the lights on in the building at night will have a huge impact on the city's bruised psyche, sending a message that, for now at least, we no longer let prominent architectural treasures sit empty for years.

As a result of this good news, there is, however, a tendency that must be avoided, and that is to see educational facilities as the new panacea to downtown's all-too-obvious ills.

Early in 1946, consolidating the University of Manitoba with many of the city's other small colleges was a major consideration. More than 60 years later, one can easily imagine what downtown would be like under this different course of events: some 40,000 full-time students on any given day; the brick mansions of Kennedy and Edmonton restored as fraternity houses, department offices, or coffee shops; Broadway sidewalks filled with young and purposeful pedestrians well into the evening. The University of Manitoba would have practically rubbed shoulders with the University of Winnipeg, and downtown Winnipeg would be seen as the centre of a university town, and not simply a sprawling, patchy collection of government office buildings.

Sounds nice, but one need only walk along the south side of Ellice by the University of Winnipeg's campus, to see that just because thousands of students use a place, does not mean it will have a good effect on the surroundings. [Continued...]

***
While the Union Bank tower was an early landmark in highrise development in this country, it was not Winnipeg's (and Western Canada's) first skyscraper, as it is often called. The Merchant's Bank building, which was constructed between 1900 and 1902 at the southeast corner of Main and Lombard Avenue, was the first commercial building with a steel frame construction in Winnipeg. Though it was only seven stories tall, it's design accentuated its verticality. Remarkably, the Merchant's Bank is scarcely a footnote, since it was demolished in 1966 (to make way for the Richardson Building), a decade before any serious efforts were made at documenting the city's architecture.

Photo from the Flickr collection of Wintorbos, St. Vital's famous (and prodigal) son

Another reason to move

The problem with downtown renewal, is that so many buildings get in your way...

Word 'round the development campfire is that the City has given Sport Manitoba permission to demolish the 125-year-old Smart Bag Building at 145 Pacific Avenue (written about in early January). Not formal permission, of course, since that could only come after Council removes 145 Pacific off the mainly ceremonial Municipal Conservation List--months after it added to the list. Presumably, this is still for the purpose of constructing a parking garage.

(I wonder if this is going to be another "tough one" for the Heritage Winnipeg board to decide a position on, the way it was when this issue came to the public attention in January.)