Good riddance, revolting restaurant

It appears a "for lease" sign will be slowly rotating above the city, as the Royal Crown restaurant at the top of Fort Garry Place will close at the end of the year. It's amazing what kind of excuses can be made for things.

Explaining the closure to the Free Press an anonymous source within the Gill family, who owns the restaurant "cited declining sales and a lack of customer parking among the reasons for the closing.

He said the landlord, Edison Rental Agency, had been selling an increasing number of monthly parking spots, making it difficult for customers to find convenient parking.

'They (customers) won't park two blocks away and walk to the restaurant in -35 C. They will eat somewhere else...'"

You mean the notoriously bad food, dirty and tacky interior, poorly located restrooms, and high prices had nothing to do with it?

If a lack of parking was the Royal Crown's downfall, how is that the Palm Room at the Fort Garry is filled every weekend in the dead of winter? How is it that the vast majority of the city's best dining establishments have virtually no accessory parking? Explain the success of, for example, Yuki Sushi--located in another one of the Gill families' properties, the McLaren Hotel--that has no on-site parking, no million dollar view, and no touristy location. Yuki Sushi is thriving. So is Tre Visi, Hy's, Wasabi, Bailey's, Step N Out, every place on Corydon and Osborne, et cetera.

A lack of parking is a sorry excuse for an upscale/trendy restaurant's failure. The view at the Royal Crown space is fantastic, and anyone who takes a more proactive approach to the service industry would easily be able to draw 'em in from blocks around.

Save Kelly House - new Facebook group

Here's a message I sent to the 1,100 members of the Demolition by Neglect Facebook group:

Dear members of the Demolition By Neglect Facebook group,

Please take a moment to join a newly created group in support of saving the Kelly House, which is currently threatened by demolition: Save Kelly House

This is a textbook case of demolition by neglect, where an owner willfully neglects his property for years, to the point that allowing demolition can be justified. The plan for the property is, unsurprisingly, a surface parking lot.

Built on Adelaide Street in 1882, the Kelly House is that last intact residential house in the Exchange District. It is a product of an era that preceded the wholesale district that would sprout up around the house in early years of the 1900s.



Aside from being the last intact house in the Exchange, the Kelly House is a rare example of Queen Anne residential architecture.

It goes without saying that the Kelly House is simply too historically significant, too architecturally stunning, and too integral a part of the Exchange District's already gap-toothed western edge, to be lost. Winnipeg cannot afford the destruction of anymore buildings for parking lots in its most valuable neighborhood.

For more information on the Kelly House, please see: Heritage Winnipeg's info on the Kelly House

Sincerely,
Robert Galston

Photo courtesy of Manitoba Provincial Archives

Thanks to Kelly Konechny for creating this group and bringing it to my attention

Fixing the Province, one percentage at a time

This week, representatives from the Association of Manitoba Municipalities will gather in Winnipeg to push for a municipal one per cent tax on sales, ostensibly needed in order to upgrade their infrastructure. (And like everything else, it is justified by the state of the global economy.)

Why stop at one per cent? If it is such a panacea, would not two or three per cent--still barely noticeable to the tax-payer--be better still? With ten, we could eliminate the pothole. Twenty, and every gravel section road becomes a four-lane highway.

Perhaps it would be worth the AMM's time this week to ask how it is that municipalities in a less-taxed Alberta have better roads than Manitoba does. Or how between 1882 and 1914, an age before personal income and sales taxes (to say nothing of federal transfers), more rail and river crossings were built in Winnipeg than in the succeeding 95 years.

The answer, of course, is significant economic growth. Only a wealthy economy can create wealthy political jurisdictions. In the absence of growth, using capital works as "a solid economic stimulus" (as Dan Lett of the Free Press argued it can), is like a sick dog feasting upon its own leg to regain its health, and contradicts elementary economic principles. All of that money collected, even if is only a penny per dollar, must be created somewhere in the real economy. Ignoring this in favor of the capital-works-as-stimuli formula might have something to do with why Manitoba increasingly depends on provinces that produce to pay its bills (almost forty per cent of its revenue in 2008).

An arbitrary tax on sales will do nothing to change this, nor will it "fix" the "infrastructure crisis". Think of this the next time you are waiting at a traffic light on a highway that has an unpaved shoulder and is riddled with cracks: it was funded by a government that imposes a full seven per cent tax on sales. But maybe with eight...

Providing a valuable public service is tiring work

"[W]hen it appears that politicians want to turn government into a business, where profit is the determining goal, not the benefits to the public, then we have a huge problem."

So, too, does this sleepy fellow.

The Active Green Community Hub

Who said one-way streets are bad for neighborhoods revitalization? Lloyd Axworthy and the bright lights at the University of Winnipeg don't seem to think so. Today, the university announced that Young Street between Portage and Ellice, primarily residential, would be converted to one-way northbound traffic. Sounds like a great place to live.


Park Slope: One Way Is The Wrong Way

Contradicting the move to speed up car traffic on Young Street, it was also announced that the University's "green corridor" will include a transit "hub" at the U of W--a new bus stop on a lane between Langside and Young--that "is consistent with our goal of creating an active transportation hub on campus which will make it as easy as possible for students to choose sustainable, environmentally-friendly commuting options such as bus and bicycles." (Although "actively transporting" oneself to the U of W by inter-city bus is not an option.

It is a text-book example of transit planned by people who haven't ridden a bus since Juba was mayor. Just look at the bus routes that will descend upon this hub:
-Route 50, to Windsor Park (weekday rush hour service only)
-Route 53 to Norwood (weekday rush hour service only)
-Route 54 St. Mary's Express (weekday P.M. rush hour service only)
-Route 55 to St. Vital Centre
-Route 56 to St. Boniface (weekday rush hour service only)
-Route 57 to Soutdale (weekday P.M. rush hour service only)
-Route 59 to Island Lakes (weekday P.M. rush hour service only)
-Route 68 to Grosvenor (no service on Sunday)

It's enough to make you sell your car and buy a transit pass, isn't it?

For the other 93.6% of U of W students who use transit, please continue to catch a Portage bus in front of Wesley Hall, or use the real University of Winnipeg transit hub: The Bay.

***

I wrote an article on Centre Venture's land acquisition quest into Point Douglas, that was published in the Free Press yesterday.

It is possible that an expansion is less a matter of South Point Douglas needing CentreVenture, but of CentreVenture needing South Point Douglas.

Recently, CentreVenture has had its very existence questioned as, on some fronts, downtown is showing signs of the economic improvement that CentreVenture was mandated to kick-start a decade ago. To include South Point Douglas in its boundaries would be a boon to any redevelopment agency struggling to prove its relevancy. It is a tremendously challenging district (a useful point to bring up when approaching funders), yet has enough recent success stories of organically driven revitalization (and the media attention that goes along with them) to latch onto...

Centre Venture should stay home - WFP, November 16, 2008

Bad things happen to bad surfaces

What does $200,000 get you? A decent Craftsman style house on Jessie or Warsaw, a five minute walk off the Corydon strip can still be had for that price. Or one could procure their very own archway to prop over their street.



Less than 24 hours after being unveiled, one Fort Rouge resident notes, this arch has been hit by graffiti. How is that the great sculpted works in the city's public spaces have stood for years--even while being ignored by civic officialdom--without ever being defaced by graffiti? Mayberry Fine Art has had a statue of a horse sitting on the McDermot Avenue sidewalk near Main for several years without so much as a Sharpie taken to it.

I don't give vandals much credit, but it seems that even the most depraved young hood can recognize (if only subconsciously) the difference between quality and deficiency, real and fake, beauty and ugliness.

Anyway, the easy access for taggers to the structure by the steel beams will be solved, as stucco is going to be applied to them. I suppose this is to keep with the bogus "Little Italy" theme of the neighborhood. Good thing the arch says "Corydon Avenue" on it... I'd probably think I'm no longer in Winnipeg, but walking down la strada in bella vecchia Napoli.

Come on down!

Nick Hill was not the first North Main merchant to offer clearance sales. Here is a notice published in The Nor'wester, May 13, 1865:



Found at my new favorite website.

"WE SHALL HAVE FAILED, and the blood of our dearest will have flowed in vain, if the victory which they died to win does not lead to a lasting peace founded on justice and established in goodwill. To that, then, let us turn our thoughts on this day of just triumph and proud sorrow; and then take up our work again, resolved as a people to do nothing unworthy of those who died for us and to make the world such a world as they would have desired, for their children and for ours."

- His Majesty King George VI, May 8, 1945

Oops!

Thanks to Adrian at Flickr.com for getting a shot of the crowning achievement of Centre Venture's "Heart of Gold" plan for downtown's main thoroughfares--parkades built with all the charms the Nazi army put into machine gun nests on the Normandy coast.



Not even the City's design review board could love this one. One local architect reported on a forum:
"i... heard today that the downtown design review board rejected the design for the [WRHA] parkade on main steeet, but it proceeded anyways... now the city (planning department) is up in arms about it and want something done... wait until it is finished to do something about it... its 2 blocks from city hall for goodness sake... you didnt see it every day?... i am sure they will have to use the plastic covered chain link fence between the floors now instead of just regular."

Because it is an ugly failure--an open parkade on a main downtown thoroughfare--Centre Venture will claim to have nothing to do with it--they merely came up with the idea to develop a parkade of that size and on that site, and were the ones that approved the builder's bid. Blame WRHA, blame Stantec Design, blame the builder, blame Planning or some other City department...

Way to go, everyone. The truth is, you all played a part. And if incompetence were a commodity, Winnipeg would be Chicago of the North.

***

This whole thing brings up the relevancy of the Downtown Design Review Board: if they have no teeth to prevent parkades on Main Street, what is the point of having this Board? Any consulting firm or architecture critic could make "recommendations" to building designers, at less cost to the City.