Shilling for Portage Place

This is an article that was submitted to the Rise and Sprawl this weekend. On the subject, I should add that I just returned from Minneapolis, where Brooks Brothers is set to open on the Nicolett Mall downtown--just between Macy's department store and Banana Republic.


In a recent article (Finding its place, September 16), Winnipeg Free Press yes-man Bart Kives celebrates 20 years of Portage Place by penning a 1300-word apology for the monolithic mall. Kives's lead anecdote tells of Holt Renfrew's departure from Portage Place (and, effectively, the City of Winnipeg) but the happy ending is that the budget boutique Urban Planet will now be occupying the space.

"With the switch," writes Kives, "an emblem of the mall's very pragmatic future supplanted one of the vestiges of its original pretense." Speaking of pretenses, could that sentence be any more bombastic? Never mind, Kives next goes on to claim that "Portage Place has stopped trying to be a bastion of suburbia in the midst of the inner city.

Instead, the downtown Winnipeg mall is OK being a downtown Winnipeg mall...."

Holt Renfrew... suburbia? Pardon me, Bart, if we fail to see the connection. We needn't even consult a ninety year-old Henderson Directory to point out that Holts has had a retail presence in downtown Winnipeg since before our grandparents were born. Unless what Bart's really saying is that downtown equals ghetto and suburbia equals prosperity, which seems to be the prevailing mindset in Winnipeg. So far, however, we have yet to hear any news that Holt Renfrew–a.k.a. Canada's premiere upscale department store with locations in Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec City, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver–is planning to open at Route 90 and Lindenwood Drive.

Indeed, the importance of location cannot be overemphasized, which is why Kives turned to Winnipeg's resident expert on the downtown core, Downtown Business Improvement Zone Executive Director Stefano Grande, for a quote on precisely that subject.

"...[P]eople shop where they live," said Grande, explaining why you can no longer buy, say, Bally Shoes, Hugo Boss suits, or Club Monaco jeans downtown. Only suburbia is inhabited by people with that sort of discretionary income. "It's Marketing 101, a fundamental that's now understood."

Now that that's understood, it might be a good time to remind readers of where Grande lives, out in the sticks at 19 Donna Place in East St. Paul, and ponder where he and his wife and his neighbours shop for the things they can't buy at the Birds Hill Store or the Sobeys at Hoddinott and Birds Hill Roads.

Kives, writing with his usual pretense of being an omniscient insider, goes on to drop an exasperatingly limpid non sequitur. "What's also changed in Winnipeg," he writes, "is a growing sophistication about the role megaprojects play -- or fail to play -- in the revitalization of downtown." Kives quotes PP operations manager Don Lombaert as saying, "I don't think there is a single, magic bullet that will save downtown. You need a number of smaller projects," then goes on to say, without irony, "That's precisely what's happening in downtown right now, as a wide array of new developments -- from the $260-million Canadian Museum for Human Rights to a $700,000 facelift for Old Market Square -- begin to come online." Exactly how a park renovation comes "online" I'm not certain, but I'm equally baffled as to how a quarter-billion dollar museum can qualify as a "smaller project."

No matter. Grande assures us, "I think we've learned a lot over the past 20 years, in terms of urban planning," but we would've been better served had planners read Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities 46 years ago, so the downtown might have been spared not just Portage Place, but the Centennial Centre and Winnipeg Square. While the latter created the infamous Portage & Main barriers–a source of civic shame and a nuisance to every tourist who stays at the Lombard Hotel–the former two created superblocks within our downtown grid.

In the case of Portage Place, the walling-up of Kennedy and Edmonton Streets created a foreboding zone–the bleakness of which is only accentuated by the throngs of thugged-out looking characters mobbing outside the scarce entrances on Portage. Of course each store has a sidewalk entrance, but they are nearly all locked up, and in most cases you can't even catch a glimpse at the wares offered inside. Still, the tone of Kives's article suggests that this is better than the aging storefront buildings, and the through streets of Kennedy and Edmonton, that preceded the mall.

"But even with the benefit of 20 years of hindsight," he writes, "the decision to raze three blocks of downtown Winnipeg to make way for Portage Place still looks like the correct decision to the people who made that choice." Like the obedient shill that he is, Kives takes his next quote from Jim August, "who helped assemble the land for Portage Place under the Core Area Initiative and is now CEO of The Forks-North Portage Partnership," who describes the the expropriations, demolitions, and blocking off of Kennedy and Edmonton "...a pretty innovative and reasonably aggressive initiative at the time."



Since Kives never fished around for a contrary opinion on Portage Place–and he certainly knew he could've found it here–TRU Winnipeg feels compelled to suggest our own "pretty innovative and reasonably aggressive initiative," that would aid in the rescue of Portage Avenue as a retail destination, and indeed might help it become the Michigan Avenue of the north. (Mr. Grande, are all those thousands of downtown shoppers in Chicago living nearby?) The brutal truth is that Portage Place itself now needs to be razed–it and the housing project-style hi-rises that lie behind it. The superblock needs to be broken up, Edmonton and Kennedy streets must again flow north to Ellice, and the entire area needs to be rebuilt to new urbanist principles. The razing might be a megaproject, but the rebuilding would be many small ones: mixed-use (sidewalk storefront, apartment dwellings above) buildings, perhaps even some rowhouses. Like Cabrini-Green, the problem with Portage Place, and the increasingly downmarket apartment towers known as Place Promenade, lies within the undesirability of the structures themselves, which lead them to attract undesirable persons.

Grande, however, deserves credit for making what may well turn out to be an accurate prediction. "When [the] (Manitoba) Hydro [building] comes in, you'll see the food court go bonkers," he told Kives. And I think he's right. Imagine even a small percentage of nerdy suburban office drones arriving each afternoon into a place filled with characters so ominous it resembles a prison mess hall. Inside his mind, perhaps, Kives has already written a few of the tragic headlines.