Photos from the Tribune

One of the more unfortunate events in recent Winnipeg history was the sudden end of the Winnipeg Tribune in 1980--the city's other daily broadsheet newspaper. Never as much of a partisan paper as the Liberal Free Press (or going way back, the Tory Telegram) was, the Trib generally sat on the populist fence. In its day, it was typically viewed as the middlebrow paper, while the Free Press was more highbrow (at least by Canadian prairie standards). Today, the Winnipeg Sun and the Free Press share the duties of filling the void left by the Trib. Which is unfortunate, because the crass Sun tabloid has increasingly poor local coverage, and the Free Press could use some serious competition in the form of a second local broadsheet, which would help it to shape up and return to being more definitive in its politics, and better in its design and editorship.

In any case, before thier paper folded, Tribune photographers took some wonderful photos. Many of the pictures they took of downtown Winnipeg have appeared recently, on the TRU Winnipeg website, and in Russ Gorluck's book "Going Downtown". The archives from which these photos were taken is found here, where photographs can be searched by year, photographer, or keyword (ie- "crime", "transportation", etc.) It is useful and interesting to look through, particularly when it seems that the bulk of historical photos of Winnipeg available to the public don't post-date 1920 or so.

The Tribune building on the north-east corner of Smith and Graham Avenue, right where Canada Post parks their trucks today. The building was demolished a few years after the paper went out of business

Portage and Fort Street, c.1949. Jay-walking was a big concern of the Tribune's in the late 1940s and '50s, and Winnipeg was at the time called the "jay-walking capital of Canada." No doubt, the relegating of public transit from the centre of the streets, to the sides of them (where cars used to park), which was completed in 1955, was partially done with the hope of ending the subversive tendancy humans have to walk across streets

A view of Main Street from Market Avenue, 1959. The graceful building on the left is where the administration building of the 1962 Civic Centre is located today

Market Square c.1950s, looking east from the corner of Princess and Market Avenue

Greaser youth in the Logan Avenue neighborhood, c.1959

Like a scene out of a movie, 1960. The location is unknown, but judging from the age and condition of the houses, it would have be somewhere in the slums of the day, which were within a kilometre of Main Street between William and Euclid Avenues. Perhaps south Point Douglas, or Sandor Hunyadi's Henry Avenue, or Lord Selkirk Park. Wherever it was, it is almost certainly gone today

“What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people.” -William H. Whyte. Central Park, 1962

Police investigate a crime in the lobby of the National Hotel (today's ManWin) on Main Street, as a young man resembling a Mean Streets-era Robert DeNiro looks on, 1975

Apartment block at the corner of Portage and Carlton. In the late 1970s, a young entreprenuer by the name of Al Golden purchased this building, and even though it was the middle of winter--a terrible time to move--he promptly handed out eviction orders to the forty or so tenants, saying that he could not afford to bring the building up to code. Several years later, this building, along with most of the city block was demolished to make for Air Canada Centre, which, as we all know, stemmed the blight on the north side of Portage Avenue

Traffic engineer-led urban renewal at work: a disabled woman is led away from a demonstration against the closing of the Portage and Main intersection she was attending, 1978. When cities redesigned to be against human activity, it's always the marginal members of society most adversely affected