Too cozy to fail?

English degrees become even more useless today, as McNally Robinson Booksellers announced the company is in bankruptcy protection, and have laid off close to 200 employees at their stores at Polo Park and in Don Mills, ON.

Like when McNally Robinson vacated their Portage Place premises a couple of years ago, this certainly comes as sad news (the Polo Park store's awkardly confusing layout notwithstanding). And while it was surprising when I read it this morning (my last memory of the place was the frantic aisles and a long queues of Christmastime), it is much less so after a moment of consideration. The rehabilitation of the former Sport Check location in the basement of Polo Park was obviously not an inexpensive move, involving constructing an entirely new facade and extensive remodelling of the interior. The end result was a branch store with roughly the same floor space as the flagship store located a 10-15 drive away.

This seemed a little too much bookstore for the location. Polo Park is a great for selling iPods, skinny jeans, and cashmere sweaters, but for a store whose market is the established literate classes of the city (and surrounding hinterlands), it's hard to imagine an operation of that scale being profitable there.

Equally unsurprising, is that the compnay's woes are being caused by the internet. CBC Radio spent the afternoon blaming this on more people downloading e-books, or ordering them online. The few individuals I know that have downloading a book online, have done so to assist with hastily writing a school paper. Certainly never to read.

Winnipeg's literary scene has never been better than it has in recent years, thanks in no small part to millions of titles available (for good prices) through the internet. In 2009, people that continued to read books had the printed world at their fingertips, and more access to more books than they would have 20 years earlier. McNally Robinson proves at Grant Park (and apparently Saskatoon) can be profitable and thrive as a compliment to the new amazon.com reality.

The company's troubles come from taking very costly risks at a very bad time to do so. Namely, months before a recession. The unfortunate part for Winnipeg customers, is that the company now has one location instead of two.


***Is Sandy Shindleman suggesting auto workers read books?

Merry Christmas

Little updating of this blog is anticipated over the holidays, or until after new year's day, and so I will leave its readers with warm wishes and a winter scene from the city of Winnipeg, best viewed large.

The busy sidewalks of Main Street, looking north from near McDermot Avenue, circa 1913. Not the Woodbine Hotel's sign. Source of photo is unknown

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.