The Rise and Sprawl

New site

2011-02-04T22:33:00.007-06:00

After a little over six years at this address, The Rise and Sprawl is now on Tumblr. And all future posts can be viewed at:

http://riseandsprawl.tumblr.com

Thanks,

More on parking minimums

2011-02-02T09:47:00.007-06:00

It has been argued both on this blog and in a piece in The Uniter, that parking minimums--that is the minimum number of off-street parking spaces that a residential development (in a new or rehabilitated building) must have--adds costs to residential developments. These costs are particularly prohibitive in built up urban areas, where available land is in shorter supply than in new greenfield suburban developments.

Parking minimums have been detrimental to density, visual quality, housing affordability, and other things the City's long-term planning documents have ostensibly been trying to "encourage" for the past 25 or so years. And yet an arbitrary set of parking minimum regulations were enshrined in the City's 2006 By-Law.

Even within the City's "urban infill areas," which strangely encapsulate every central neighborhood in Winnipeg except the North End, developers must build 80% of the mandated parking minimums. Within this area, particularly close to transit corridors (ie, a three-minute walk from River and Osborne St., parking minimums make developers pay an "impact fee" where there is likely to be significantly less impact (new residents' cars clogging existing parking facilities) than anticipated. This is true for commercial and institutional developments as it is for residential.

Market Urbanism, a blog frequently referred to here, notes that a study published in the January, 2011 issues of Housing Policy Debate found parking minimum regulations in New York City "have the potential to increase the cost of housing and encourage auto use in multiple ways."

"If developers are providing more parking than they would otherwise, they are incurring extra costs some of which are likely passed on to residents and potential residents - impacting affordability. If parking were a significant moneymaker for developers when unbundled from the price of housing, we might expect to see developers exceeding the minimum requirement more often than was case. [...] If developers are providing more parking than they would otherwise, they are incurring extra costs some of which are likely passed on to residents and potential residents - impacting affordability. If parking were a significant moneymaker for developers when unbundled from the price of housing, we might expect to see developers exceeding the minimum requirement more often than was case."

In 2004, the City of Winnipeg did away with these arbitrary and prohibitive parking minimums for all of Downtown. It should do the same for the rest of the city.

***
Further links:
"Parking Policy Reform More Important Than LEED Certification"
"Externalities, Meet Externalities"
"Onsite Parking: The Scourge of America's Commercial Districts

UPCOMING EVENT: Leo, Kelcey and Galston invade the A-Zone

2011-01-31T21:12:00.007-06:00

Coming up on Sunday, February 13, 2011 CKUW 95.9 FM and The Uniter will present:

Winnipeg: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a panel discussion on transportation, infrastructure, debt, poverty, housing, urban development and sprawl in Winnipeg. This will be at the Mondragon Bookstore and Coffee House, 91 Albert Street, at 7:00 pm

Moderated by ace Uniter reporter Ethan Cabel, the panel is made up of Professor Christopher Leo, Brian F. Kelcey (of State of the City infamy), and myself. Ambitiously, the talk will cover transportation, infrastructure, debt, poverty, housing, urban development and sprawl in Winnipeg--all before 9 pm.

There is no cost, but a $5.00 donation at the door would be appreciated (the event is part of CKUW's annual Fundrive campaign).

***
And speaking of CKUW, here is an interview Scott Price did with me a couple of months ago, where we talked about downtown development: the inhibitive power megaprojects have on private initiative; why governments should get out of the parking lot business; the realities and perceptions of safety; and why downtown needs to be a mixed-use, sidewalk-oriented residential neighborhood more than anything else.

***

McDermot Avenue, west from Main Street, c.1909

A neighborhood in transition: Albert Street, c.1910. By 1914, almost all of the district's houses and other small wood-framed buildings had been replaced by substantial brick and stone buildings. Between NIMBYs and planners, this would not happen today

Wading pool in Norquay Park, Lorne Avenue and Beaconsfield Street, c.1926

Unity Pool Room, 795 Main Street (near Sutherland Avenue), c.1945

Broadway, c.1950.

Vestibule of the Royal Alexandra Hotel, c. 1966

Market Avenue East, c.1969. A key component of the masterplan for Urban Renewal Area no. 2, these buildings were demolished to make way for the Manitoba Theatre Centre (and a large parking lot, but that kind of goes without saying)

Winnipeg Internet Pundits: the biggest thing since radio

2011-01-19T11:18:00.002-06:00

Tune in to UMFM (101.5 FM) this afternoon at 5:00 pm for the second ever Winnipeg Internet Pundits program. Today, host Tessa Vanderhart, myself and a host of other local bloggers will look at matters that include the current (confused) state of heritage preservation in Winnipeg, massage parlors operating in residential neighborhoods, mandatory winter tires, the Winnipeg South riding: a battleground?

In keeping with the times, Internet Pundits is also on Facebook and Twitter

How did you find me?

2010-12-31T16:42:00.003-06:00

More with the year-end navel-gazing, here, with the help of Google Analytics, are some of the keywords with which visitors stumbled upon this blog in 2010:

winnipeg's downtown needs more radical pace (40)
terry balkan chev olds winnipeg (5)
sprawl and rise winnipeg (2)
that's quite unlike our big-sister city of winnipeg, where residents will have (2)
aim and ideals in the formationof royal society by sprall (1)
centreventure is a joke (1)
does the royal alexandra hotel in winnipeg still exist (1)
nikki sixx (1)
reducing taxes on the very wealthy to spur the economy, in good times as well as bad — an idea supported only on the kooky fringes of american political life in 1967 (1)
the bar bar hells hundred acres (1)
the rise and the sprawl (1)
walter krawec winnipeg mayor (1)
why aren't shopping malls open on saturdays in winnipeg (1)
why urban infill? (1)

A very happy new year to all my visitors--intentional or not.

Ordered chaos

2010-12-31T08:54:00.014-06:00

A string of pedestrian accidents, including three fatalities, occurred over Christmastime in Winnipeg, prompting calls for some kind of official action.

At the time my great-grandfather stepped off the train and into the streets of Winnipeg in 1919, automobile use was rapidly increasing. Between 1920 and 1923, the number of registered vehicles in Winnipeg increased from 11,783 to 16,691. Still, the roadways were governed by an ordered chaos. The clip below, between 0:50 and 2:10, shows this at work on Portage Avenue and Main Street. While these streets were originally, and ultimately for the passage of vehicles, the density and mixed uses of the city made them much more than that. No one, not the motorists, the pedestrians, the streetcar operators, the cyclists, or the taxi and delivery drivers, took anything for granted.

A period of conflict emerged in the 1940s, as motor vehicle use increased, and their lobby groups demanded public effort at make life a little less hectic for motorists. A new "pseudo-science" of traffic engineers began appropriating the roadway exclusively for the easy passage of motor vehicles. Citizens were slow to catch on to the change. In 1946, the Tribune noted the growing regularity of traffic fatalities. But this usually fell on the shoulders of pedestrians of a city was considered the jay-walking capital of Canada. Something needed to be done about this.

Something was done. In lieu of actual expressways to plan, traffic engineers rendered Winnipeg's busy streets into expressway-like roadways. The quick and easy passage of vehicles became the near-exclusive use of roadways. While this occurred throughout North America, Winnipeg was particularly aggressive, and today the city's downtown is littered with anti-pedestrian infrastructure (of which the Portage and Main barricades is only the largest example--try walking down Donald St. between Graham and St. Mary sometime). Not willing to suffer such a hostile, inconvenient and degrading environment, most pedestrians disappeared. Storefront businesses, obviously, followed not far behind.

After decades of traffic engineering and suburbanization, motorists, pedestrians and cyclists have become seemingly unable (and unwilling) to co-exist. Traffic lights and painted lanes have allowed motorists to turn their brains off. Pedestrian crossings have allowed pedestrians to do the same--pressing the "cross" button and brainlessly stepping into traffic. Regulations, the thinking goes, have made transportation safe for them; no need to pay attention what else is going on. And so, the ultra-planned and regimented intersections of suburbia became scenes of fatalities over the past couple of weeks. Until drivers are given cause to become more aware of their surroundings, and take quick passage for granted, the best laid plans of traffic engineers (a pedestrian stepping out when and where it was not planned for) will continue to be occasionally interrupted by tragedy.

Reader's Choice: the Top 10 of '10

2010-12-29T12:10:00.012-06:00

In 2010, The Rise and Sprawl has perhaps been a little slower in content than in the blog's previous five years, with much of my writing energy occupied by other projects, notably university papers, and contributions to two books: a chapter of A Manifest Presence: 100 Years of St. Margaret's, and the foreword to Bryan Scott's Winnipeg Love Hate.

Still, time was found to update this blog, and in 2010, The Rise and Sprawl remained among the growing ranks of top local blogs--something that still baffles me, given the generally narrow focus of this blog. I won't complain.

Looking over the popular posts of the past year, it seems that there are two major camps of this blog's readership: one is of the "shut up and post some pics" variety--two of the top three popular posts of 2010 were collections of old photos of Winnipeg with brief commentary. The second seems to be of the "is he saying anything about our department/organization?" variety--posts that name names of organizations, notably Centre Venture, the Historical Buildings Committee and Heritage Winnipeg, seem to be popular.

In any case, the top ten most popular posts of 2010, based on the highest number of visits, appear below. They are, in order:

10. These are my favorite blogs, September 2
A brief list of new, or newly-discovered blogs of note. One addition to the list of great local blogs since September is the product of one of the city's most diligently observant pedestrians, Walter Krawec, whose One Man Committee takes a careful and in-depth look at city life and issues. Checking his blog, and the blogroll on the right hand column, usually precedes my checking major media sources.

9. Point Douglas is going to look great two years from now..., April 15
The slow assault on the city's built heritage continued with the demolition of the Smart-Bag Building on Pacific Avenue East. No one, it seemed, had any real will to save this building, or encourage Sport Manitoba to look at different options.

8. Demolition blues, January 5
Like the northern fringes of the Exchange District, what texture remains on the wind-swept streets south of Portage Avenue continues to face threats. In January, a rumor circulated that the Windsor Hotel and its beloved bar would make way for a parking lot. This plan has been put on hold.

7. What comes next?, May 25
As demolition fencing went up around one of the oldest warehouse buildings in the Exchange District, Sport Manitoba still did not have a penny for constructing a new sports facility in the place of the Smart-Bag Building. This came after the Historical Buildings Committee compromised by allowing the demolition, provided the site not be used for surface parking--something that the city does not allow downtown anyway.

As of late December, the site of the Smart-Bag Building is gravel lot. Sport Manitoba staff and visitors parking on the west edge of the building's footprint. Sport Manitoba allegedly does not have any funds to go toward constructing the recreation facility.

6. Parking lots, and their defenders, September 26
Perhaps the strangest election issue in 2010 (no small feat in a city where election issues are increasingly just pulled out of thin air randomly) was surface parking lots. Both the mayor and his opponent made promises related to dealing with them. While the candidates and the general public may have discovered in 2010 they have no love for surface parking lots ("they're eyesores"), they increasingly regard them as a strategic resource that simply needs to be better managed. I stood by and laughed at their foolishness, and posted yet again, that semi-famous image--originally drawn by local architect and columnist Brent Bellamy, and used shamelessly by this blog--showing parking to be in no short supply downtown.

Also in this post was a note on the epic saga of the Friends of the Upper Fort Garry, whose for some kind of world class interpretive centre continues to rise. $10-M short on funds for the latest version of the project, the Friends need to come up with the remainder through the generosity of politicians eager to dispense public funds to whichever well-heeled moocher comes begging. Take a number, Friends.

5. 123 Princess Street, October 10
Winnipeg's major development corporation continued to move away from assisting small, risky, privately-funded projects, and toward being hangers-on of big, safe, publicly-funded projects.

4. A tougher sell, April 20
Again with the Smart-Bag Building, which was demolished with no firm plan to replace it. A point I tend to beat on frequently is that [w]hile the Smart-Bag is (or was) a heritage building, this is not a heritage issue. It is an issue of what kind of centre Winnipeg will have: a downsized, decentralized wasteland dominated by parking lots and "new unurban urbanization..." or a modest city that still contains the seeds of its own, slow regeneration, wants to one day see people on the sidewalks again, and doesn't destroy itself quite so willingly.

Building on that precedent, the more recent summary demolition approval of the Shanghai/Coronation Building in Chinatown makes the Smart-Bag story pale in comparison. Expect "developers" to find more new and creative ways to dupe Councillors into demolishing buildings for parking lots in 2011.

3. Warehouse District as it was, July 28
Photos found at the Winnipeg Building Index, showing the Exchange District in the 1970s and early '80s, when it was known as the Winnipeg Historic Warehouse Area; a fading and forgotten warehouse district that a few brave entrepreneurs dreamed would be "the new Gastown or Yorkville." That didn't happen, at least not on their schedule, but by the City valuing building density, mixed uses, calm street spaces and individual initiative in this part of the city, the Exchange District was able to slowly become the most successful and enjoyable neighborhood downtown.

2. Slow burn in a postal code that doesn't matter, October 25
This blog focuses on a particular set of topics, banging out the same old post over and over again, and finding new ways to string a few biting words together about some threatened building or another (see #'s 4, 7, 8, and 9 above). But in the final week of the Civic Election, I commented on the violence and terror in the North End that reached a new level as the entire area was put on lockdown, as a gunman shot three people, killing two . It would be nice if this tragedy served as a wake-up call, but the cops and the City and the Province and public have been hitting the snooze button for years. A few hour spent in the North End over any given weekend should be a sufficient "wake-up call." Instead, a triple shooting is the new normal in a city with a small town mentality and a big city crime problem.

The growing severity and scope of this violence is unacceptable. But it seems that responsibility for doing anything about it is equally unacceptable to anyone elected to uphold peace and civility in this city. Hit the snooze button one more time, Winnipeg: for vast sections of your city, 2011 is going to be a year of increased violence and abandonment.

1. Winnipeg in color, 1962, June 24
While nerdily scanning the pages of the Winnipeg Building Index, I noticed a number of good quality color photos dated 1962. There are shots of Portage and Main, Academy Road, the University of Manitoba, there is also a number of shots of the Main Street strip, and the quickly-disappearing streetscapes of forgotten corners of South Point Douglas: Martha, Henry, Maple. While the views are often quaint, they present a city that nearly 50 years later, largely does not exist in form and function.

Looking north up Main from Logan Avenue, 1962. WBI

That's it for 2010. See you in the new year.

Unpacking container condos

2010-12-15T09:41:00.006-06:00

The least expensive way to develop new condominium housing is to take existing apartment blocks and convert them to condos. Already more or less up to code and conforming with zoning regulations, old apartment buildings are, depending on the condition of the block, basically straight forward renovation-scale projects.

But conversion can only take Winnipeg's lower-end condo market so far, with just a limited supply of apartment blocks available (and that is excluding the implementation of some kind of reactionary, conflict theory-inspired "condo control" regulations).

One emerging building style that would be more expensive than a standard apartment conversion, but less expensive than building entirely new, is container housing.

Container housing is built mainly by using the steel shipping containers that carry goods across the ocean. As one local developer explained, since Canada isn't shipping anything back to China, thousands of used containers sit empty in the country's western ports. This presents an opportunity for Canadian builders. By saving on labor and building material costs, using shipping containers lowers the selling price of the units.

From here...

...to here. Container condos would suit the industrial aesthetic of neighborhoods like South Point Douglas

Throw in some modish furniture, and you're set

Already being used in building developments around the world, Winnipeg's first example of container housing is in the works for South Point Douglas--a neighborhood where it often does not make financial sense to build new, relatively cheap dwelling units. Unlike conventional structures, container buildings can be built cheap without looking cheap.

So far, planners at the City of Winnipeg are cool to the idea of building residences out of shipping containers, particularly used ones. The developer in South Point Douglas has been told that new, never before used containers may be acceptable, but this reduces the affordability.

For City of Winnipeg planners to look at the successes of reusing containers for housing in other cities and allowing their construction here, could open up a new and innovative way to build more of these relatively affordable types of dwelling units.

"It ain't about me!" Frank and Nicky from The Wire might not oppose containers used as condos, but just don't build them on the old grain pier

"Discount everything"

2010-12-14T08:40:00.014-06:00

"Chinatown was mobbed Wednesday night by youngsters wanting to see a Victoria Day fireworks display. More people converged on King st. and Pacific ave. at 10 p.m. than you'll find any noon at Portage and Main.

Extra police handled the swarming humanity. But they weren't very effective. When a boy shouted: "Lookit, sky rockets!" the mob burst it borders and heaved like a wave across the narrow streets.

[...]

Then the rain came. And humanity disappeared like butter into hot toast. You couldn't time it. At one moment, hundreds of people milled on the streets. At the next, the streets were bare, the pavement was glistening beneath the yellow lights, the gutters were gurgling and lonely, spent firecrackers swam with the current into the sewers."

- Ted Schrader [a journalist of the old school] Winnipeg Tribune, May 25, 1944

***
Winnipeg-raised artist Alison Fleming's succinct letter to the editor today defends the Shanghai Restaurant (the subject of one of her paintings) against the standard set of arguments that arise from the Winnipeg yokelsphere and its representatives on Council.

Meanwhile, the city's most keenly observant urban flaneur, Walter Krawec, writes at One Man Committee that maybe it's simply too late for Winnipeg's Chinatown.

"If the local Chinese-Canadian community generally isn't interested in revitalizing the Chinatown district (which is somewhat evident by the lack of private investment in the area), perhaps it's time to give up the ghost, rebrand the area as the "North Exchange District" or some such thing, and stop trying to replace the heritage buildings in the area with seniors homes and parking lots."

Unfortunately, while Winnipeg generally experienced a paradigm shift regarding the Exchange District in the 1970s (from top-down, le Corbusier-inspired "Urban Renewal District No. 3" to the market-driven, Gastown-inspired "Historic Warehouse Area") the same never occurred in Chinatown. There continues to be absolutely no official respect for the existing urban fabric of Chinatown--its small blocks, its uniquely small-scale and relatively ancient architecture--and a will to see new developments emerge from the ground up and work within this fabric. With history proving otherwise, business carries on as if Gustavo da Roza's 1974 vision of demolishing the entire neighborhood for a shopping mall was still sound urban planning.

The same conditions of supply and demand that create neighborhood improvement have not been allowed to emerge in Chinatown, where protectionism and land speculation on the part of local development corporations keeps property off the market and old buildings rotting. This sustained decline, and both the parking lots and garish suburban-style architecture it engenders, further repels people from the district.

The Kuo Ming Tang Building on Pacific Ave. is one last exception to this trend. At once a throwback to the old Chinatown (framed photos of Chiang Kai-shek hang in the building's upstairs office), and the local art scene's quiet, slow northern migration (Guy Maddin apparently shot scenes in the basement of the legendary Golden City store), the building functions like it was a normal old building in a normal old neighborhood. But even this anomaly has felt the pressure around it.

However maligned and gap-toothed its streetscapes, there is still hope for Chinatown to become more than a dull wasteland (it's like suburbia, but with homeless people!), but only after it begins to be seen as a neighborhood whose improvement depends on the same conditions other city neighborhoods do.

A summary demolition

2010-12-08T10:02:00.008-06:00

EPC just approved the demolition of the Coronation/Shanghai Restaurant building, provided some kind of credible plan for a geriatric ward can be put in place. A minor setback for the Chinatown Development Corporation.

This decision was made because the historic and important building was "falling apart," yet there is still no engineer's report to validate this claim. It is based simply on what an architect who is hired by the CDC said, and on the sentiments of a pair of philistine Councillors from the suburban Northeast.

For others, demolishing old buildings is not such an easy process. The Church of the Open Door, a congregation that gathers in a bunker-like building at the corner of Euclid and Hallet St. in North Point Douglas, recently purchased a house next to their property, at 123 Euclid Avenue. Built in 1889, the house is a fine example the modest Second Empire style that was popular with Winnipeg house builders in the 1880s.

Like the Coronation Building, 123 Euclid is on the City of Winnipeg's Historical Building Inventory. So when the Church of the Open Door asked to demolish the house, the City hired an engineering firm to see if the house was structurally viable (which, in the engineer's opinion, it was).

It was a costly and detailed process; the City could have just asked someone from the church if they thought the structure of the house was good, or they could have gotten Coun. Russ Wyatt to do a walk-past. But that did not happen, because it would have been a failure of the Property, Planning and Development Department to practice due diligence. Why is it a different story in Chinatown?

***
Related: One Man Committee - "Goodbye Shanghai; Whither Chinatown?"

Double standards and old buildings

2010-12-07T10:40:00.015-06:00

Nothing like an assisted living complex designed by a McArchitect to make Chinatown an exciting place!

I love how the City's Property and Development Committee doesn't need to wait for an engineers' report to deem the building is "at risk of falling apart;" they just take the word of the architect/cartoonist Ray Wan, who would be hired to draw up a seniors' housing plan in order for the building to be demolished Yup, no conflict of interest there.

When owners want to take an old building that has not been properly maintained and upgraded over the years, and reuse it, they have to go to Property Planning and Development and argue for some kind of building code equivalency. Old buildings in Winnipeg obviously do not meet 100% of the building standard (since these buildings were built long before contemporary standards were created, and the economics of bringing a building up to 100% is often not there).

PP&D will often work with the owner to achieve code equivalency, and to bring the building up to a reasonable standard (say, 60%).

Developer X: "I own Building X, which is very old and has not been properly upgraded over the years. I plan to redevelop the building to earn a profit, but I will be unable to recoup the costs of doing so. So I am trying to take advantage of tax credits, etc. and develop part of the building for now. In the future I will make further improvements and develop the rest. Hopefully the market improves to make these later expenses more feasible."

PP&D: "Redeveloping old buildings downtown fits with the City's long-term planning documents. While in a perfect world, this entire building be completely repaired and upgraded, we recognize the economic realities. A couple of upgrades need to be done before occupancy, and if we can expect you to make further upgrades over time, that would be great. It might take a long time and seem really arbitrary at times, and you may want to start making friends with important people, but we will, ultimately work with you toward a solution that allows you to develop your building."

Most if not all century-old buildings in downtown Winnipeg are not at 100%, yet they are allowed to house uses like loft condos, offices, boutique retail shops, and cafes. Yet when an owner wants to knock a building down, they can argue that their building is not up to standard and it is not financially feasible to bring it up to standard. In that case, PP&D throws equivalency and 60% out the window. Threatened buildings thus face a higher standard than non-threatened ones. If the same standard that applied to the Coronation Block applied everywhere, the entire Exchange District would also be "at risk of falling apart."

Developer Y: "I own Building Y, which is very old and has not been properly upgraded over the years. Because the City told me I cannot demolish the building to earn a profit, I am now scrambling to put together some kind of credible-looking plan to build a geriatric ward on the site."

PP&D: "Demolishing old buildings downtown does not fit with the City's long-term planning documents. This entire building needs to be completely repaired and upgraded, 100%. That's all there is to it. We can't expect you to make all of these improvements at once, so there must be no other option but demolition. You might get some opposition from our Historical Buildings Committee, but we will, ultimately work with you toward a solution that allows you to demolish, especially if you can make friends with suburban councillors often determine the fate of downtown Winnipeg's built environment (a step you've obviously already taken)."

So it seems that the "it may as well come down because it needs alot of work" argument coming from the City is not based in objectivity. This is a matter of will. Of course it needs alot of work--it's an old building.

But demolition of a 19th century building in the Exchange District for a parking lot and no definite plan to build is not without recent precedent. Don't hold your breath waiting for this case to be any different.

Coronation Building, circa 1920. Credit: Buflyer 200

Bad ideas on the menu

2010-12-03T20:53:00.002-06:00

We'll see what becomes of this bright idea.

Menu from the Shanghai Restaurant, dated 1954. The restaurant had opened at its location at 228 King Street more than a decade earlier

In the meantime...

Parking requirements kill urban infill

2010-11-12T08:36:00.014-06:00

Last week I had a piece in The Uniter on Winnipeg's parking minimum requirements set forth in pages 112-119 of the Winnipeg Zoning By-law). Parking requirements mandate a certain minimum number of on-site, off-street parking spaces for new developments of any type of use.

In dense neighborhoods with limited space and high land values, these requirements can at best reduce the affordability of the development and at worst kill the development altogether. This has a negative effect on neighborhood density and diversity, and reinforces neighborhood population decline, car dependence, aesthetically-deficient strip mall development, and all the other things Winnipeg clearly hasn't yet had enough of.

Thankfully, these parking minimums do not apply to downtown, which falls under 2004's more progressive Downtown Zoning By-law. There are no minimum parking requirements here.

The line between urban and suburban: Winnipeg's Downtown falls under a more progressive zoning by-law

Yet they are still firmly in place in Winnipeg's other dense pre-1920s neighborhoods. Most of these do fall under the "urban infill area" (a map is shown on page C-2 of the city-wide by-law), including the West End-Wolseley, most of Fort Rouge, Centennial-West Alexander, and old St. Boniface-Norwood, which mandates that developments need only 80% of the Zoning By-law's minimum parking standard. This is why the Christian Science development at the corner of River and Nassau St. required "only" 55 stalls for its 46 units instead of the 69 the City would require outside the urban infill area. Only slightly less absurd.

The ill-fated affordable housing development at the corner of Main and Pritchard in the North End (which I mentioned in the Uniter piece) would still need to meet 100% of the city-wide standard, since everything north of the CPR--North Point Douglas, Selkirk Avenue, Main Street, St. John's, Luxton--all of it, is not included as the "urban infill" area. And so William Whyte must abide by the same parking standards that Whyte Ridge does. No special provision (however minuscule and arbitrary the 80% provision is) to "promote infill redevelopment" for the North End; the assumption is that there will never be anything but the most garishly suburban infill built here.

***
Market Urbanism reports that Washington DC is looking at re-working that city's parking minimum requirements, so they would "disappear in most cases" in high density neighborhoods with good transit service.

Winnipeg should also look at eliminating parking minimum requirements for developments in its old, dense and urban neighborhoods--including the North End, where good development is needed most of all.

Infill development in Seattle's Pike/Pine neighborhood. Parking requirements make developments like this either more expensive, or not happen at all.Credit

***
Parking minimum Fun Facts, from Table 5-9 of the Winnipeg Zoning By-law:

- Transit stations, advertising signs, and parking lots (both surface and structured) do NOT require any off-street parking spaces. Just in case you were wondering (Category 0)

- Places of worship require on parking space for every five seats in the main assembly area (if your church uses pews, one "seat" equals 20 inches of pew space) (Category 6)

- To construct a single family dwelling on, let's say, a 33' x '99' lot without one parking space is illegal. To construct a single family dwelling on the same lot with six parking spaces (or a two-family dwelling with 12 parking spaces) is perfectly fine (Category 1)

If built today, St. Margaret's Anglican Church on Westminster Ave. would need to build a 40-car parking lot for their 200-ish "seat" sanctuary

Same district, different universe

2010-11-08T08:36:00.014-06:00

Great news--a corner grocery store is set to open in the Exchange District, on McDermot Avenue between Main and Albert. Around the corner on Main, a new fitness centre is opening up next door to the Woodbine Hotel.

No one knew where the neighborhood's first corner grocery store would open, but it is easy to why it was this place in particular. The vicinity of McDermot and Albert has the lowest concentration of parking facilities and the highest concentration of buildings and the things that go along with them: small creative firms, storefront retail, and upstairs, scores of residents in live-work spaces.

The joke's on governments, who have wanted things like grocery stores in the Exchange District, and see it as a key to attracting more residents. But when the first one finally opens up, it is to serve a residential population that lives in the surrounding warehouses illegally--outside the sanction of antiquated building codes.

***
Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I was enjoying reading over this story with cup of coffee until I got to the bottom: "One of the lynchpins of future growth in the Exchange District will be a 450-space parkade, set to begin construction behind the Centennial Concert Hall next spring. Ross McGowan, CEO of CentreVenture Development Corp., which is building the more than $10-million parkade in conjunction with the city, said he considers it an economic development tool."

It seems that the whole point of more than 40 years of public effort into downtown has been that it will be a more interesting place with more busy sidewalks; the kind of place that in the day or evening, one could feel not only safe, but proud walking around in.

Ostensibly, this is still the case. "[Centre Venture head Ross] McGowan said his dream is for the Exchange to one day resemble Toronto's Yorkville, which features a high-density population, a good mix of uses during the day and plenty of restaurants and entertainment options at night."

That's the dream, and here's the reality:

Yorkville became what it was by being largely forgotten by planners and public renewal agencies. Certain physical and economic preconditions that existed there allowed for organic orders to build over time (taking the neighborhood from grimy hipster ghetto to ultra-chic yuppie enclave).

Centre Venture Development Corporation no longer exists to improve the economic viability or the less-tangible vitality of its mandated area. It exists to serve its own preservation by helping other public agencies build their empires--no matter what it looks like physically in terms of bad design, or how it acts in terms of hampering private investment. It's simply easier that way. Jobs are kept, and people can continue drawing salaries sharing with reporters their fanciful dreams about how a little more of this is going to--poof, just like that!--turn into a new Yorkville one day.

Dreams are great. But can't they be done on one's own time?

Photo credit

Solution-focused therapy

2010-10-29T10:22:00.005-05:00

"Let not the needy... be forgotten
Nor the hope of the poor be taken away."
- Anglican Book of Common Prayer

The recent result of the slow carnage in the North End has been met with considerable attention. National Post columnist Father Raymond J. de Souza, in town over the weekend to lecture at St. Margaret's Anglican Church, was shocked by the violence (and interested in this blog's take on it, I must say), and made it the subject of his column in Thursday's Post.

A city cannot afford this much disorder; indeed, this much disorder defeats the purpose of cities.

"The North End of Winnipeg is not an insignificant part of the city. It covers some 100 square blocks. So when local police advised on Saturday night that no one in the North End should leave their homes, and advised everyone else to stay away from the area, it was a temporary, but devastating, acknowledgement of a failure so complete that even living together was not possible."

Main Street looking south from the corner of Pritchard Avenue, from atop a fire-damaged apartment block that has since been demolished. Summer, 2006

***
Taking a broader look, to the North End as a neighborhood that is separated from the rest of the city by a giant rail yard; where residents face layers and layers of official and unofficial racial discrimination, significant barriers to employment and post-secondary education, inadequate and unaffordable housing, inadequate public welfare, and a lack of investment in local infrastructure and public recreation programming.

This is, of course, the North End that existed until the 1960s and '70s.

Since then, billions have been spent to move the North End away from this, and toward being a more socially equitable place: a place where newcomers are not confined to immigrant qhettos by an indifferent government; cast to the winds of industrial capitalism and an array of independent charity-based agencies provided by ethnic benevolent societies and altruistic Methodists. Instead, they are housed in communities by a deeply caring central government, and given a social safety net of post-industrial social democracy.

How has it worked so far?

Put another way, there are today more government-funded initiatives, agencies and resource centres of various kinds on Selkirk than there were in 1985. Is the surrounding neighborhood better off? Is it safer? Has poverty decreased? Far from ideal (like in 1992, when all was well in the world), many would say, but wouldn't there be at least some improvement overall? Wouldn't the streets of the North End become a just a little safer with every Lighthouse the Provincial government opens in the neighborhood? Wouldn't the culture of poverty become just a little less pervasive with every new implementation of the poverty reduction strategy?

What passes for "dealing with the root causes" has barely scratched the surface, and with no more effectiveness than top-down, numbers-based, foreign invader-type policing models have. The real root cause of the crime and death in the North End is that the neighborhood no longer has any roots at all.

Hanging out in front of the Merchant's Hotel, Selkirk Avenue and Andrews St. Circa 1945

Slow burn in a postal code that doesn't matter

2010-10-25T09:29:00.011-05:00

"They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious.
'Peace, peace,' they say, when there is no peace." - Jeremiah 6:14 (NIV)

In the evenings over the past summer, I would often hear loud fireworks of some kind going off somewhere around my home in North Point Douglas. Pretty benign stuff, but annoying enough to make my wife and I wish the neighborhood's bohemian influx would speed up, and the sounds of residents letting fireworks off on any given midnight would decrease; replaced by the sounds of the Fresh Options organic produce delivery trucks driving down the street, and the smell of Djarums coming from nearby verandahs and stoops.

Thankfully, though my Victorian-era house in Point Douglas sits in the middle of the historical, near-mythical North End, fireworks was about the extent of the nuisance experienced over the past year.

We have been fortunate to live on such a tidy, quiet, and friendly street in a relatively tidy, quiet and friendly corner of the North End. Watching our kids play on the sidewalk and chatting with our neighbors, my wife and I know it is a different story just a few blocks west.

On Austin Street, and across Main on streets like Flora, Selkirk, Manitoba, Magnus, and Boyd, decent people live there as they do on mine, but their neighborhoods are in a continual state of fear and disorder that has grown increasingly worse over the years. Gang violence has become commonplace, and the weekly roundup of stabbings and shootings are only the more dramatic (or reported) results in a continual state violence and disorder.

Unthinkable a decade or two ago, many parents do not allow their children to play on the front sidewalk. Children that do go outside get beat up and robbed by gangs of pre-teens, right in front of their houses. Even if there were still stores left to walk to, grandmothers who live alone, are afraid to venture on the streets they raised their own children on.

This isn't insider information: government officials across the board have known this for years.

***

Sitting at home on Saturday around midnight, I heard a gun shot somewhere in the distance. Definitely not fireworks this time. A little while later I began learning about reports of someone with a sawed-off shotgun who had shot three people, killed two, and was still at large. Winnipeg Police advised the citizens of the North End to stay in their homes, lock their doors and don't open them for anyone but the police. The entire city was told to avoid driving through the North End.

Tuning into the police radio scanner, I didn't come across anything about the gunman, just the usual stuff for the evening shift: descriptions of robbery suspects, and estimates on how long it would be until a cell at the Martha Street drunk tank was available. At one point, a call came through advising units about a robbery that occurred on Selkirk Avenue by a man brandishing scissors. But, the dispatch noted with a tone that implied "nevermind," the victim gave up his possessions without incident.

Saturday night in the North End, and armed robberies don't matter unless the victim is stabbed.

***

I will leave discussions of crime and policing to better blogs like Policing, Politics and Public Policy, and The Crime Scene, but it is worth pointing out just how geographically large the core of the North End--where crime and violence is strongest--is in relation to the rest capital region.

The North End, between the CPR, Arlington, Mountain, and the Red River, in relation to the rest of the Winnipeg region. But, like the new suburbs rising on the city's edges, the North End continues to expand outward: north past Mountain, west to McPhillips, and across the river to Elmwood.

While suffering through violence in 2010, much of the North End has had virtually no political representation. The M.P. Judy Wasylycia Leis stepped down to run for mayor, and the M.L.A. George Hickes and City Councillor Harry Lazarenko have both spent the better part of the year lying in hospital beds--working only slightly less harder for their constituents than they did in the years before. Without representation, property owners in the North End pay higher and higher tax bills as assessment values mushroom--all going towards the coffers of a City that does not care about them, the fear, the barbarism, the third world conditions, the bodies.

No matter how politically insignificant the North End is, no city can ever thrive overall with such a large portion of it living under the gun. When travel through an area more than 100 square blocks is not advised by police, and where no one charged with the task of caring seems to, local investment and residents will move out of north side of the city. New investment and new residents will avoid Winnipeg altogether.

***

"As rough as that neighborhood could be, we had us a community. Nobody, no victim, who didn't matter. Makes me sick... how far we done fell." - Bunk Moreland, The Wire

Always the rougher part of town, the North End had street gangs dating back at least to the Depression, when kids formed gangs like the Dew-Drops and the Hi-Spots and terrorized shopkeepers and residents when they weren't brawling rival crews. The difference between now and then (and until very recently), is that the North End was still a functional neighborhood where citizens, with the law on their side, were the ones in charge. Today, on many blocks, it is clear the bad guys have won, and the police and the law and peace of a civil society gave up and went home. The social workers and community organizers who think they're revitalizing Selkirk Avenue are only passing through turf that turns into a jungle after they go home for the day.

There is no safety and order to be found on many blocks in the North End, and though this effects the entire city, no one cares. Left alone, Saturday night's rampage will become the new normal.

The sidewalk is too damn high

2010-10-19T21:02:00.007-05:00

Work on replacing the sidewalks on Albert Street over the past month left a strange elevation of the curb right in front of the entrance to the Royal Albert Arms, at number 48. Why at this spot in particular does the curb rise more than a foot above the street? It is to inhibit jay-walking to and from the Albert, and crowds that hang around outside its doors between sets from spilling onto the street.

Street Life Prevention Through Environmental Design

This same type of streetscaping was employed in recent years on Main Street around Higgins Avenue, no doubt to curb (get it?) the jay-walking on that former strip of hotel bars. It has also been built on the east side of Osborne Street near the busy Toad and the Hole Pub--another place where jay-walkers like to get together and enjoy a drink or two.

Any taller, and City by-laws would require a railing

One consequence of this attempt at making it quicker and easier for cars to move, is that it is more dangerous for pedestrians. Imagine walking down the busy Osborne sidewalk and accidentally stepping off the giant curb. Or a pack of drunk hipster girls racing out of the Albert in granny boots to catch a taxi--another night of slumming it downtown nearly at its end--only to collapse on the massive drop from sidewalk to street. A sinister part of me finds this last image a little amusing, but the rest of me wonders what exactly Public Works was thinking.

*This post's title is borrowed from my new favorite political party

That was the plan, anyway

2010-10-15T16:50:00.010-05:00

Looking through the Manitobia project, I came across several interesting items that show some of the rationalization behind the planning and urban renewal that reshaped the metro Winnipeg region after the Second World War.

In a letter to the Tribune in March of 1941, a Mr. A.V. Turner said that a city doesn't need to suffer a Blitz to be bombed to be rebuilt. Also interesting is the "anything and everything for employment" which has continued to drive much of government economic policy since the Depression.

The Tribune could see what was coming, and in May, 1944, an editorial proclaimed that "the present crowding of people into the city proper cannot be expected to continue indefinitely after the war. The residential and dormitory suburbs will undoubtedly make themselves felt once the restrictions on gasoline and rubber are eased. Families will spread out to the neighboring municipalities once "walking distance" is no longer an important consideration."

Another editorial later that year encouraged more planning as soon as possible:

"Now is the time to devise an overall plan for the city as a whole. When building starts it can be guided to conform to this master plan." In England, town planning had "made great strides with provisions for green belts, shopping centres, and decentralization." Planning, it went on, could keep Winnipeg "from expanding in haphazard fashion with business residential and industrial districts hopelessly intermixed."

Hopelessly intermixed: Simcoe Street near Sargent Avenue, c.1948

Not everyone was entirely on the bandwagon. R.H. Avent, a former City Surveyor, told the Town Planning Commission in 1944 that "[the pre-Unicity] Winnipeg itself, with an area of 25 square miles, contains a population of 223,000 where there would be ample accommodation, without crowding, for over 400,000."

Avent also noted that "the scattering of population... has increased the cost of municipal administration, distribution of utilities and of transportation. It is my opinion, therefore, that the policy of the future should be centralization, without crowding, and rehabilitation of the central areas now served with utilities."

Today, only 220,000 persons live in the former City of Winnipeg boundaries, slightly less than the 223,000 that lived there sixty-six years ago.

123 Princess Street

2010-10-10T12:36:00.008-05:00

On Friday I wrote of the hazard of giving more power to public development agencies. Not only ineffective and inefficient, they can be counter-productive. I used Centre Venture as a case in point: "Finding it easier than lending to small, risky private initiatives, Centre Venture instead busies itself taking credit for big-ticket projects that would have gone through with our without them. Centre Venture has even have made attempts to muscle out property owners who are actually renewing neighborhoods."

This was not the first time I've been critical of that organization for that reason. Nearly two years ago, I remember being contacted by two different people who both told me the same thing: I was more right than I knew. They were right.

Centre Venture responded to their organizations' own financial mismanagement by coming down hard on the loans made to small developments in risky parts of downtown. The real agents of change downtown, with their own money on the line, borrowers were abruptly cut down so that Centre Venture could stay solvent enough in 2008 and '09, to change directions and become an organization that plays middleman in the development of ugly publicly-driven megaprojects.

Now, one of these small players, Pat Hitchcock, who owns of a warehouse at 123 Princess Street is taking his ordeal with Centre Venture and the City of Winnipeg public with a website, Save 123 Princess Street.

Someone also took the story more visibly public, postering across Centre Venture's storefront office on Main Street (currently undergoing renovations).

Photos found at the Skyscraperpage.com forum

More details to follow, I am sure.

A good day for bad ideas

2010-10-07T18:11:00.006-05:00

What with my being part of the new media generation, I used Twitter to follow the Downtown BIZ mayoral debates on downtown issues last night, while studying for school. The tweeting brought the debate to the comfort of my kitchen table courtesy of Free Press reporter Bartley Kives, and PR professional Deborah Zanke.

Yesterday's debate demonstrated the very low level of thinking regarding downtown issues in Winnipeg. Not just the mayoral candidates and their inane responses, but the questions themselves, which aren't really a set of questions as much as they are one statement: Give us more of the status quo, please.

Land uses (question 3) and retail (question 8) should be micro-managed by public bodies; greater reliance should be placed on yesterday's mega-projects (question 7); still greater reliance should be on the public management of parking lots (question 9); suburban commercial centres are still to blame for downtown's woes (question 10); and of course, organizations like the BIZ should be given more money to be even greater self-serving cash cows (questions 1-10).

Stupid questions deserve stupid answers, and for the most part, the event organizers got exactly what they deserved.

It wasn't all bad: Katz gave lip service to private interest's role in cities (who knew?). Judy Wasylycia-Leis reiterated a pledge she made last month to remove the barricades at Portage and Main, and said transit buses should run later than 1:30 a.m.

Credit

But things got laughable when Sam Katz was asked about heritage, and responded that the Ryan Block fiasco is an example of a successful solution. And while it is a pleasant surprise to see the shell of the 115-year old warehouse rise again at the corner of King St. and Bannatyne, the backstory is one of shame not just for the City under Katz' watch, but every mayor going back to Bill Norrie (ask your parents). Close to 20 years of demolition by neglect, and at the end of it all, the City doles out lavish heritage tax credits to the owner so that he can build a parkade that apparently is poorly designed and charges above market rates.

Wasylycia-Leis, for her part, offered up another earlier promise to create a pedestrian mall in the Exchange District. But bad strategies peaked a few hours before the debate, when she announced that she would give the Winnipeg Parking Authority more power to act as a property developer, using parkade revenue to build city-owned mixed-use developments, theoretically on the site of surface parking lots.

This is essentially a promise to feed the monster that has grown during the Sam Katz years--of more "arms-length" agencies than Vishnu can keep track of, and giving them more and more power.

Credit

Increasingly over the past few years, City development agencies like Centre Venture have done less accommodating of the market and more tampering with it, while making themselves a redundant organization by focusing on public/non-profit development. Finding it easier than lending to small, risky private initiatives, Centre Venture instead busies itself taking credit for big-ticket projects that would have gone through with our without them. Centre Venture has even have made attempts to muscle out property owners who are actually renewing neighborhoods. What would make anyone believe the allegedly thuggish and unaccountable Winnipeg Parking Authority, under a new mayor long on "strategies" and micro-management, would be any better--nevermind that they would make a dent in Winnipeg's barren streetscapes.

And the book I took notes from while glancing at the Twitter feed last night: The Fatal Conceit by F.A. Hayek (a must-read for anyone who wants to better understand how cities, societies, and markets work). It was a little bit like studying the works of Rachmaninoff while listening to Nickelback.

"From one problem to another"

2010-10-01T10:08:00.003-05:00

Winnipeg isn't the only city to suffer the junk science of Active Transportation facilities. This video shows New York commuters who gave up on the slower, more dangerous bike lanes built for them by the city, and are back riding in motorized traffic.

H/T - The Infrastructurist

The loser cruiser

2010-09-29T16:33:00.002-05:00

This comment came to me from the venerable University of Winnipeg history professor, Garin Burbank, in response to an earlier post:

"I am the only middle or upper class person, dressed in coat and tie, riding the express buses in from west Winnipeg. Have been for 20 years. Until you get the comfortable classes out of their cars (5 dollars per litre gas?), we will have ugly surface lots."

While transit service became more costly but less frequent in those 20 years, the City continued every effort to make the downtown workforce drive and park their automobile as easily and as cheaply as possible, which is why Professor Burbank finds himself alone aboard the loser cruiser, and one of the reasons why downtown's landscape is so barren.

Glory days, they'll pass you by...

2010-09-28T20:31:00.017-05:00

Winnipeg's Main Street being a shamefully void and unwelcoming desolation row was once seen as a source of civic shame and concern. This was so much so, that several generations of big public ideas were pushed down on the neighborhood. First came the plan to restore its as downtown's secondary business strip by building a civic centre nearby. Then came the vision to create Neeginan an Aboriginal cultural and business centre.

Now it seems the vision for Main Street is a one-stop-shop (lifestyle centre?) for the socially dysfunctional, addicted, and mentally ill. The Civic Centre and Neeginan failed for obvious reasons, but if nothing else, they had the ability to excite a good chunk of the public that footed the bill for them.

Who's going to be excited about the new Welfare District?

Main Street Project executive director Brian Bechtel told the media he likes how the WRHA's Access Centre "is that it is not displacing local residents." (You know, like a for-profit venture would.)

Funny thing is, the WRHA's hulking parking garage (that the City gave a $500,000 tax credit toward in order that the professional "service-providers" could park their Hyundai Tuscans in safety and ease), was built where Jack's Place stood. Jack's was a four-storey building constructed as a hotel in 1912, and was completely retrofitted and stood in excellent condition when it was torn down in 2008. It served for 30 years as housing for the local population, most recently as the Neeginan Emergency Shelter. Also lost on Bechtel was how the first few nights after the Bell Hotel closed in 2008, residents of that establishment slept outside its locked doors in the rain. All for a good cause... one day.

Family Services minister Gord Mackintosh, who apparently is driven to work down Main Street blindfolded every day, says the WRHA signals a return to the street's glory days. "I think we'll see more private sector support services (is that Social Worker for cafes?) for all those who work here."

The glory days

Not the glory days

Long before new commercial development on the strip happens (how many private enterprises have opened after the WRHA was built, versus before?), I think Gord Mackintosh will see more of what his neighbors back in the tree-lined enclave of Luxton east of North Main are seeing: more of the downtown homeless population migrating further and further north on Main and into Luxton during the day and evenings. And at night, the old Legions and fraternal halls up on Main north of Mountain Avenue are increasingly becoming the favored spots of what a decade ago would have been the rough Main Street bar crowd: back before all this public non-displacement happened. Unforeseen circumstances.

Continued decline and suffering on Main Street is just fine for public officials and for the Captains of the Poverty Industry. Just as long as they get their cut.

The antidote to sprawl?

2010-09-27T10:46:00.002-05:00

Whatever shenanigans went on in the clubhouses of Scottsdale, AZ to bring about the development of the Fort Rouge Yards, are for another time (or another blog entirely). But what Calgary's Lexington Investment Corp. and local B&M Land are planning is Winnipeg's first large-scale new-urbanism development, and a welcome stray from the hollowing-out pattern development in Winnipeg has followed for decades.

Far from the transit-oriented development it is being billed as (if buses attracted development, Graham Avenue would be lined with condos, not parking lots), it is still a good, surprisingly urban infill project that many old neighborhoods like Lord Roberts (the Fort Rouge neighborhood west of South Osborne St. and south of the CNR) have the room for, and will need to build in order to maintain a density that can support local commercial activity, public services, and community institutions.

Surprisingly normal street-oriented urban development. Who knew? Credit

Between 1971 and 2006, the population of the Lord Roberts neighborhood declined by 24%, from 6,555 persons in 1971, to 4,955 in 2006. Lord Robert's declining population is still paying for the same number of roadways, sidewalks, parks, transit and public schools it had in 1971, but with less . When completed circa 2015, the Fort Rouge development will have increased the neighborhood population by 1,800 persons--just higher than the population in 1971. While residents (and former neighbors, from when I rented in a little Cape Cod house on Rathgar Avenue a decade ago; a lonely boy walking to the bus stop with Morrissey tapes in my walkman...) may fear their neighborhood is being overcrowded, it is simply regaining some of the density it had 40 years ago.

Winnipeg's established neighborhoods need about 100 more developments like this.

***
Postwar sprawl in North America is largely a creature of government, but in Waverley West, one does not to connect any dots to see this, since government itself is a direct player in the game. Waverley West: the NDP's dream suburb where $398,000 will get you into a 1,500 square-foot bungalow (some comparison between Waverley West's average prices vs. other new suburbs would be interesting).

Parking lots, and their defenders

2010-09-26T13:30:00.006-05:00

It has been pointed out by this blog and elsewhere, that "you only need to spend a few seconds with Google Maps," Bartley Kives writes today, "to see how downtown Winnipeg resembles a patchwork of unimproved gravel and concrete."

And just to save readers those few seconds, I present for the umpteenth time, a guide to off-street parking spaces in Winnipeg's central business district. This is circa 2007, but with a few exceptions represents the parking situation today today. Red is surface lots, yellow is parking garages, blue is underground parkades.

***
More from the it would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic file, the geezer brahmins and dress-up buffoons that have come to be the face of the heritage preservation movement in this city, are now half way toward reaching the $20 million they now need to build an interpretive centre at Upper Fort Garry.

But the good news is, they are over two-thirds of the way toward raising the $14.5-million they needed for the centre in 2009, and have raised three times the $3.5-m they said they needed in 2008. The birthplace of Winnipeg's inertia-fueled white elephants? Hardly, but one shameful, far-from-completed chapter to be sure.

Hooked on a feeling...

2010-09-23T17:03:00.011-05:00

The dream of the 1970s refuses to die, and Anders Swanson and Albert Street "business owners" (co-op members) are again pushing to have Albert Street closed.

I recently wrote on this idea, since this is not the first time this year the idea has resurfaced. What is funny about this week's story, is how it notes the rain clouds of reality getting in the way of a bright idea. Closing down a block of Albert Street to celebrate Car-Free Day on Wednesday, "[t]he pouring rain put a damper on the scheduled activities, such as street hockey and car-free trivia, but organizers were undaunted.

'If only it wasn't raining, it would be packed," said Anders Swanson, who works at Natural Cycle on Albert Street. "Everybody's inside having cake, but that doesn't count.'"

If only it wasn't raining. No doubt. But the unfortunate fact remains, that some days it does rain in Winnipeg. Other days it snows. Then there's those days where it neither rains nor snows but is just so downright miserable that you wish it would do one or the other (think November).

If the cycling faithful can't get out and enjoy a car-free street in a September rain shower on Car-Free Day, what makes them think everyone else will?

Anyway, I'm looking for examples of cities in North America with streets with roughly the same preconditions as Albert Street that have made a go of pedestrian malls. Many cities that got in on the pedestrian mall fad in the 1970s have since removed theirs by re-allowing car traffic. This includes large cities such as Chicago, Baltimore and St. Louis; small cities like Freeport NY, Rockford IL and Wilkes-Barre PA; and even the two capitals of progressive planning, Portland and Vancouver.

The pedestrian mall dream in St. Louis...

...and the reality. [Credit]

The successful pedestrian malls that come to mind (Sparks Street in Ottawa, Stephen Avenue in Calgary, and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis), survive as tidy little places that do well during the workweek (straddled as they are by the downtown workforce and department stores), but are largely vacated downtown spaces at night.

This success is something that Albert Street could not hope for, nor should it aspire to; we can do better than that. What is so remarkable about Albert Street today is that it is one of the few downtown spaces where car traffic is on equal footing with pedestrians or bicycles; it is one place where they co-exist. As far as downtown attractions go, a place like that is the Barnum and Bailey's Circus of downtown Winnipeg.

Like the cycling routes that will hurt business and livability on Assiniboine Ave., Sherbrook, or Machray, people like Anders Swanson imagine closing down Albert Street would stick it to Winnipeg's Car Culture. Closing down the street would be an affront to the big SUV driver racing in from Island Lakes, they think; payback for Portage Avenue cruise night and all the times I've been cut off by a lone motorist. What idiotic planning fads like this (cut from the same cloth as traffic engineering that enabled car culture in the first place) are really sticking it to is urban culture; to density, mixed uses, and the ability to live without a car. The scores of tiny firms that operate above the ground floors on Albert depend on drive-up traffic, and on-street parking and loading.

In great neighborhoods, streets serve many purposes. Even on rainy days.

***
Related: Progressive Winnipeg, Playing Favorites

Semi-related: Policy Frog: Cycle of Confusion [who knew the City of Winnipeg was so flush with cash?]

These are my favorite blogs

2010-09-02T21:53:00.009-05:00

With no blog feed, and a list of links a little out-dated and across the board, here are some urban-related links of note:

***
Bryan Scott's Winnipeg Love Hate is a photography blog that you may have heard of...
Scott was recently featured, in the Free Press. These photos give equal time to a complicated city's beauty and ugliness, its triumphs and failures--all of which are usually found in the same image.

A book of Scott's work, which I was honored to write the forward to, is scheduled to be available in November.

***
Brian F. Kelcey's State of the City looks at public policy in North American cities. He also takes intelligent aim at former employer Mayor Sam Katz and just about everybody else. The Twitter feed is worth following, too.

***
The View From Seven, which is both text-heavy and interesting, with occasional keen observations on the state of downtown Winnipeg.

***
U of M Architecture student Sophia Sengsurlya's attractive new Heart of the Continent looks at design and city planning ideas. Looking forward to more from this blog.

***
Making a return after four months of no new posts, Market Urbanism offers libertarian commentary that favors sparse zoning codes, private transit systems, and even private cul-de-sacs. Sounds radical, but not at all unlike any North American city of your grandparent's generation.

***
Roberta Brandes-Gratz had a great piece in the New York Times, on how it was the risky individual action that restored city neighborhoods (like New York's Upper West Side) over the past 40 years.

This happened to be published online five years to the day my wife and I took possession of an old house in North Point Douglas. I don't except a Manhattan-esque gentrification anytime soon, it has been a healthy real estate market and demographics--people move in, keep up and renovate properties and make the area a little more civil and cool--that has, and will continue to help change this neighborhood around. But this is an aspect to the Point Douglas story that doesn't fit in the Official Narrative.

***
Standing in front of the Unity Pool Room, 795 Main St. between the C.P. tracks and Jarvis Avenue, circa 1948. Credit

In praise of normal city spaces

2010-08-17T09:48:00.006-05:00

Converting downtown streets to "pedestrian malls," a trend that came and went in the 1970s (sometime between the trends of demolishing everything for public housing, and demolishing everything for a convention centre), should stay in that dustbin of history where it belongs. Essentially from the same anti-urban school of thought that dominated city planning through the postwar years, pedestrian malls were an attempt saving the city from itself: purification by diluting the messy mixture and concentration that great cities produce. Just as business and residences do not belong in the same building, cars and pedestrians do not belong in the same public spaces.

An idea for closing Albert Street to car traffic follows that same thinking. People can walk on this street, cars can drive rapidly everywhere else. The Driveway merging off Main Street to connect with the Canwest Parkade on Albert--a key component of the Asper/Jorgenson pedestrian mall idea--is another bad move that would kill future development and street life on this sorry spot at Portage and Main.)

Are neck scarves due for a comeback? I saw one in Ottawa recently, so why not?

Were the City to act on this idea, it would not be the first time it has tried to tamper with Albert Street. In the early 1990s, the block of Albert between Notre Dame and McDermot was converted to one-way traffic. This, according to longtime Exchange District investor Tom Dixon, was a bad move. "Albert Street quickly became deserted because getting there was too complicated. 'You could have shot a cannon down the street,' Dixon says."

In the end, Dixon and other Albert St. interests petitioned the return to two-way traffic on this block, which worked.

"'Eyy, where's all the chicks, man? They went back to Osborne Village after all the business closed up, chico"

While commerce in this part of the West Exchange has improved greatly in recent years, it is still fragile compared to more established and popular (car-plagued) pedestrian strips in Fort Rouge. The boutique retail shops on Albert St., and there are a number of them, are not exactly raking it in (particularly when replacing smashed shop windows is a semi-regular business cost).

It is doubtful that existing and potential retailers would share the same confidence in this flash-in-the-pan daydream. Where would their delivery trucks unload? Where would their customers park (or try to park), and would they walk even further? Would the problem of after-hours vandalism increase? Does this work in winter months, nevermind when the Fringe Festival is not on? These are questions all worth discussion, but ones retailers might not stick around find out the answers to.

Albert is one of downtown Winnipeg's few examples of how speedy car traffic need not be the dominant use of public space, and how through on-street parking, pedestrians and cars can use the same street when car traffic is not obnoxious (Graham Avenue, which also enjoys a fairly healthy concentration of retail, is another). If anything, cheaper, simpler ideas, like ending rush-hour parking restrictions on King and Princess Streets, or re-introducing angle parking on Arthur (one idea floating around some City departments recently), are less destructive traffic experiments to try in the West Exchange.

The warehouse district as it was

2010-07-28T08:31:00.006-05:00

A few weeks ago I began a post on here that ended up being expanded and sent to the Free Press. The piece compares Portage Avenue to its nearby neighbor the Exchange District, and looks at the two key aspects to the Exchange District's success:

- public money was gradual, and the neighborhood did not suffocate from big ideas. Organic (read: real) revitalization was able to take hold.

- the City of Winnipeg, for the most part, respected and defended the physical scale and context of the neighborhood. Density, small blocks, and old buildings were seen in the Exchange District as crucial to renewal, not obstacles to overcome.

It happened that a Mr. Evan Thornton, a Winnipeg ex-pat who contributes to Spacing Ottawa, was in town for the Fringe Festival this week, and recalled in a post on Spacing growing up in Winnipeg in the '60s and '70s, a time when "no one I knew ever went to the Exchange District; in fact back then the area didn't even go by any name at all and unless you were employed by one of the mid-century businesses that still valued the low rent and central location the district – fur storage, typewriter repair, offset printers, that sort of thing – you had no reason to show your face along the grimy streets just north of the famous corner of Portage and Main."

From the color photos of the time, grimy streets seems apt, and the use of the pressure washer and scrub brush on the brick and stone facades of buildings over recent years is one clear sign of the confidence owners have in the area.

These photos, all from the University of Manitoba's Winnipeg Building Index, show the district in the 1970s and '80s--the not so good, not so old days--before streetscaping, pressure-washers, progressive property owners, boutique retailers, the creative sector, Red River College, and a fair residential population (in both legal and illegal living spaces), came to make the Exchange District the place it is today.

A decapitated and exhaust-coveredUnion Trust Tower (it lavish and heavy cornice was pulled off sometime in the '60s, has since been replaced somewhat), corner of Lombard and Main

An equally grimy Bank of Commerce next door. While its grandeur is certainly unmatched by all but the Legislative Building, the Bank of Commerce was only narrowly saved from the wrecker's ball in 1978--back when the city's fledgling heritage preservation movement still had principles

The Confederation Life Building, also saved from demolition (traffic engineers wanted to straighten Main Street in front of it), getting its facade cleaned

What would become Red River College's Princess St. campus, when the the future of this row of buildings hung in the balance

Number 115 Bannatyne Avenue, one of the earliest local examples of warehouse-to-office conversion. It is occupied by a number of creative firms today

The Ashdown Warehouse seen from Rorie St. The loft condos had yet to be developed upstairs, and the bricked-off loading docks had yet to restored as a hair stylist college

Arthur Street, with the Gault (Artspace) Building on the right

McDermot Avenue from Albert, the centre of the district's retail success

Criterion Hotel on McDermot, badly damaged by fire and awaiting demolition. The building has since been restored and is in commercial use

Princess Avenue near Bannatyne, before landscaping came to the street, and before loft condos and a hair salon came to the Western Elevator building

Market Square and Townsite, a 'vertical shopping mall.' Townsite closed by the mid-1980s, and the Johnson Terminal at The Forks became downtown's leading multi-level kitsch emporium. But the Traveller's Building found a more suitable use as loft condos, with a cafe and bar (that has the city's best cocktail menu) on the main level

The Common

2010-07-21T10:31:00.006-05:00

West side of Martha St. near Logan Avenue, c.1918. Credit

A new blog was created as an outlet for me to blab endlessly about the history of Point Douglas. It is hoped that it will be updated regularly with photos, maps, and newsclippings about the countless people and places that make up this Winnipeg neighborhood's vast and complex history.

Link: The Common: History from Winnipeg's first neighborhood"

Breaking news from 1969

2010-06-27T09:08:00.002-05:00

April 1, 1969 - "If a major convention hall is built in Winnipeg, it seems elementary good sense that it be located within easy access of hotel accommodation. It also seems good sense to try to ensure that strong supporting services and facilities are developed in close relation to the convention centre, such as shopping, entertainment, etc."

June 26, 2010 - "The proposed development is part of a broader CentreVenture effort to have an area encompassing the MTS Centre, the Winnipeg Convention Centre, the Burton Cummings Theatre and the Metropolitan Theatre declared a "SHED," or sports, hospitality and entertainment district..."

And some say that I live in the past when it comes to downtown.

How has Portage Avenue fared since 1969?

The Manitoba Advantage

2010-06-25T09:51:00.005-05:00

"The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."

"Advanced Education Minister Diane McGifford has rejected 10 of 12 requests from the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg for tuition cap exemptions."

Meanwhile, the President's office at the the University of Winnipeg has sent letters to every one of that school's departments, saying that they must cut their budget by 3.5% this year, to help deal with the paltry 2% increase in funding from the Province of Manitoba this upcoming year. Two per cent is a decrease from previous years, and does not cover inflation.

The Province apparently cannot afford to pay for universities, yet they are not allowing anyone who can afford them pay.

Winnipeg in Color, 1962

2010-06-24T09:37:00.018-05:00

All photos courtesy of the Winnipeg Building Index at the University of Manitoba's Architecture and Fine Arts Library.

The downtown skyline from the Red River near The Forks

Portage and Main looking east, where the Richardson Building and Fairmont Hotel would be built by the end of the decade. On the left is the seven-storey Merchant's Bank building that was Winnipeg's first tall steel-frame building when it was constructed in 1900

Looking east on Portage Avenue toward Main

Great Western Building and the Allan Killam McKay Building on the west side of Main south of Portage. These treasures were relegated to the dustbin of history in 1973, to make way for an embarassing act of corporate welfare, the Trizec Development

Looking south on Main from near William Avenue

Looking north up Main from James Avenue. Most of the buildings in this view are now gone

Northwest corner of Logan and Main. The Royal Alexandra Hotel at Higgins is seen in the background. It would be demolished through the winter of 1971-2

A couple of old relics on Rupert Avenue east of Main, looking toward the Amy Street Hydro plant

Looking east on Henry Avenue from near Martha Street. On the right is Rosh Pina Synagogue, built in 1892

Gifford Hall, Martha Street and Logan Avenue. This house was the home of E.F. Hutchings, who by 1910 would be one of Winnipeg's 19 millionaires. The house was pulled down later in the 1960s to make way for the extension of the Disraeli 'freeway'

Dominion Immigration Building, Maple Street along the south side of the CP mainline. This would be demolished sometime in the late 1980s

Maple Street at Macdonald Avenue. The Maple All People's Mission building later became home to Pilgrim Baptist Church, a congregation made up of many of the blacks that lived in the Point Douglas area at mid-century. Pilgrim Baptist still exists at this site, though in a newer building. The large buildings in the background are the Dominion Immigration and Manitoba Cold Storage

Looking north on Main from around Redwood Avenue. The Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral, built in the early 1950s, is still there today

Looking west on Academy Road from Waterloo Street

U of M Campus, Fort Garry, before adults dressed like toddlers

[Y]Our Winnipeg

2010-06-22T15:49:00.001-05:00

Remind me again: why does Winnipeg have planners, planning documents, by-laws, and heritage groups?

What comes next?

2010-05-25T13:08:00.009-05:00

Demolition fencing went up around an Exchange District warehouse known as the Smart-Bag Building near Pacific Avenue and Lily Street. This is in preparation for Sport Manitoba's athletic fieldhouse, or gymnasium.

Of course, only a cynical, acid-tongued ogre would dare oppose Badly-needed [secular] Recreation Facilities in the Inner City, but as of February, Sport Manitoba's own website notes that the fieldhouse is far from a sure thing. The construction timeline is "TBD," and funding has "yet to be secured." This, says a source involved in the project, continues to be the case now, and that where once a building stood (and remained occupied) for 126 years, only banners and a surface parking lot will stand quite soon. (Banners and parking: two things downtown Winnipeg just does not have enough of.)

Commenting on this blog on April 20, City Councillor and Historical Buildings Committee Chair Jenny Gerbasi noted emphatically that the site of the Smart-Bag Building will not be used as surface parking, as the HBC worked an enforceable clause into the agreement to remove to building from the Conservation list, so that surface parking would not be allowed to used on the site of the building.

Parking or not, there is going to be another formless void in the Exchange District, to be replaced by little more than a nice idea with no timeline or funding. That and two dollars will let you park downtown for an hour.

***
Appropriately enough, the City of Winnipeg thought that next door to a doomed heritage building was a good place to host a review the final draft of their Heritage Resource Management Plan. This is next Saturday, May 29, from 12:00 to 4:00 pm at Sport Manitoba, 145 Pacific Avenue. Thanks to Gord for pointing this out.

Cause to symptom: it's your fault!

2010-05-19T07:46:00.006-05:00

While I applaud any effort to get Mr. Herman Holla to clean up the junk from his property at the corner of Higgins and Annabella (which, incidentally, was the home of the Ackland family), I wonder: since when has the City of Winnipeg, at any point in its tragic 137-year history, cared about visual order and livability in Point Douglas?

After all, a junk pile fits quite well in Plan Winnipeg's vision for Mr. Holla's neighborhood of South Point Douglas as a commuter corridor flanked by heavy industry. What is wrong with his little patch of blight--what has raised the righteous action of the City of Winnipeg bureaucracy--is that Mr. Holla didn't ask for the correct permits, variances, or pays the right taxes to keep it.

Large scrap yards and industrial storage lots that encroach residences persist elsewhere in Point Douglas. All of Mr. Holla's neighborhood is zoned exclusively for heavy industry. The City is essentially re-building the same Disraeli disaster that quartered the neighborhood in 1959, and is set to turn Higgins Avenue and the Louise Bridge into even more of an obnoxious truck route that races mere feet past Mr. Holla's front door.

For the City of Winnipeg to say to one property owner that he is degrading South Point Douglas is a little like Joseph Stalin calling Hugo Chavez a totalitarian monster.

Proven quite capable of bringing the heavy hand of by-law enforcement down on lone, slightly eccentric property owners in the name of neighborhood livability, the City should perhaps next attempt to their own stifling impediments to quality of life in South Point Douglas.

Wherefore art thou, gentrification?

2010-05-06T09:16:00.008-05:00

The story goes that the artists that have been found in the Exchange District west of Main for the last 30 or so years are being pushed out by the more recent surge in new developments and rising rents. (Ironically, this surge was caused by the artist's presence in the first place; since they added to the area's very marketable cool factor.) As a result, artists have been forced to migrate north to Chinatown and Point Douglas in search of studio spaces that offer that same dusty beat character that attracted them to the West Exchange in the good old days of Mondo Trasho and draft night at Wellington's, available at the same low price points.

No doubt, there has been an increase in artists north of City Hall: for years, artists have shared the hallways of the Kou Ming Tang Building with Chinese nationalist societies and Judo clubs. There's the Edge Gallery and studio apartments on Main and Logan. Wanda Koop works out of a building on Henry Avenue, and Jordan van Sewall and others live as self-proclaimed arts colonizers on Curtis Street. Across Higgins, people like Eleanor Bond have worked in the Watkin's Building, and north of the tracks, North Point Douglas has quickly become a commuter suburb for the art scene.

But is this migration caused by gentrification in the Exchange District? Probably not. The commercial upswing in the West Exchange over the past five or six years still hasn't extended higher than the ground floor, and upstairs from the dress shops and hair salons popping up on Albert, McDermot, and Main, there is still a strong concentration of artists living and working, perhaps in greater numbers than ever before.

The feared displacement the West Exchange art scene experiences in the near future won't be caused by push factors (gentrification), but by pull factors (better opportunities elsewhere).

Two longtime anchors of the West Exchange's art scene are poised to take flight. The 38-year-old Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art, which will be moving from the corner of King and McDermot Ave. to their new Post-It note bunker at Portage and Memorial sometime this year. Meanwhile, Cinematheque is rumored to either close their Arthur St. movie house, or relocate to somewhere in St. Boniface. This owing to a Winnipeg Film Group board that is increasingly unhappy with Cinematheque continuing to be a money-losing operation.

Whatever shifts in the geography of the Winnipeg art scene are occurring, the West Exchange seems poised to remain its centre, in spite of a loss of two big institutions, and droves and droves of the neighborhood's new phantom gentry. How this reality fits in the Marxist narrative is yet to be determined.

Developed by press release

2010-04-28T09:59:00.004-05:00

This piece on Centre Venture's new plan might be news, or it might be more pre-election nonsense. With a serious campaign looming, Katz' City Hall is tying up all their loose ends before October, including Centre Venture's failed "heart of gold" mandate for Main and Portage. Scramble up a phantom urban renewal scheme for the shamefully blighted NW corner of Portage and Donald, throw in some tired old contradictory mush about how downtown is "too spread out" (more on that in the future), and is close to "the tipping point," and you've got yourself another story on the Business page.

Centre Venture's sudden string of good luck with finding developers (the Avenue Building, the Bell Hotel, and the Youth For Christ mega-centre) may have alot to do with City Hall's sudden willingness to allow them to make deals at a loss. City Hall is clerly happy to spend, spend, spend on things that could make Katz look bad come October--the current incarnation of Centre Venture chief among them.

A tougher sell

2010-04-20T11:32:00.011-05:00

Sport Manitoba's planned destruction of the Smart-Bag Co. Building has left a city wondering just why they have a historical buildings committee and building conservation by-laws anymore.

The 126-year-old warehouse will not be making way for a fieldhouse (essentially, a gymnasium) any time soon, but a surface parking lot where a fieldhouse might go in the future. Currently, Sport Manitoba does not have any money to build any kind of fieldhouse. They do, however, apparently have the funds to tear down this building and use its site as a temporary surface parking lot. (But as photographer Bryan Scott reminds us, there is nothing more permanent than a temporary parking lot in downtown Winnipeg.)

As far as optics are concerned, a surface parking lot in a mostly-vacant corner of the city isn't quite the "public amenity" that a fieldhouse would be. But just as demolishing a perfectly fine building that was totally occupied a year ago isn't as easy to justify as one that is "unsafe," it isn't easy to demolish buildings for parking lots as it would be for a new gym that Exchange residents could use. Sports Manitoba might be a non-profit, but they sure know how to sell.

The map below shows the extent of Winnipeg's built up area in 1884, the year that the first part of the Smart-Bag Building was constructed on Alexander Avenue. In 1884, the city only expanded as far west as Isabel and Kennedy Streets, as far north as Point Douglas, and "South End" meant Broadway.

The map is only to put into perspective the age of this building in relation to the rest of the city. But history is not reason enough to keep old buildings from falling, and surface parking lots from proliferating throughout the city centre. While the Smart-Bag is (or was) a heritage building, this is not a heritage issue. It is an issue of what kind of centre Winnipeg will have: a downsized, decentralized wasteland dominated by parking lots and "new unurban urbanization (thanks again, Jane Jacobs)," or a modest city that still contains the seeds of its own, slow regeneration, wants to one day see people on the sidewalks again, and doesn't destroy itself quite so willingly.

Courtesy of Manitoba Historical Maps. Click to enlarge

Point Douglas is going to look great in two years

2010-04-15T17:23:00.007-05:00

...from my rearview mirror. I can't wait to move out and leave the renewal to the professionals.

Sport Manitoba is getting their wish, and will make the neighborhood north of the Manitoba Museum a little more boring, dangerous, and windswept. The City of Winnipeg has issued a demolition permit for them for the old portion of the Smart Bag Building on Alexander Avenue. All without a public hearing (not even one announced 30 hours before it begins), too. Instead, permission to demolish was granted in principle a year ago, when the original demolition request was withdrawn until Sport Manitoba could find the money to go ahead with the demolition.

On command, fire officials have also declared the structure unsafe, which is a lie.

Dating back to 1884, it is one of the oldest warehouses in the Exchange District. Not that it matters to any of the philistines involved in this farce.

We hate these things

Good idea seeking champion

2010-04-15T10:31:00.006-05:00

Since November of 2006, a recommendation has been bouncing around between different committees at City Hall, that the Winnipeg Parking Authority, the Exchange District Business Improvement Zone, and the ward Councillor (Mike Pagtakhan) "work together... to explore" converting the short block of Arthur St. from Bannatyne to McDermot to angled parking instead of the current paralell parking allowed on this street.

Arthur Street stands as a symbol of the proliferation of idiotic traffic engineering: the street is only two blocks long, in the centre of the Exchange District, has low traffic counts (without even the daily evacuation that the TD Centre inflicts on Albert St.) Given its unimportance as a traffic route and the width of its roadway, the entire length of Arthur St. could (and should) be converted to two-way traffic and have angled parking on both sides of the street without hurting anyone's commute times.

Currently, this recommendation sits on the shelf of the Standing Committee for Downtown Development, and was last brought up May 4, 2009. It would not be hard to turn this recommendation from inspecific fluff to quick and easy action, if someone only started the process. For the parking authority, angled parking would mean more parked cars to collect money from, for the BIZ it would offer more places for visitors to park (that are free evenings and weekends), and for Councillor Pagtakhan (who faces the re-election fight of his life later this year) and everyone else, it would be good publicity.

What's the hold up?

Angled parking and two-way traffic on Albert Street, c.1925

City learns to say no

2010-04-13T09:42:00.005-05:00

And now for some good news.

After the City broke their agreement with Rubin Spletzer's plan to build an apartment at the corner of Fort and Assiniboine Ave., the developer looked to build on an acre of City-owned land down the road, on the south side of Assiniboine Avenue and just east of the Midtown/Donald Bridge.

This new development is a 24-storey tower with 12 townhouse units at the tower's base, but the first two floors (ground level and second storey), would be a parkade, with only one pedestrian entrance from the sidewalk.

The density wasn't a problem, but the design. In March, the Downtown Development Committee sent the Spletzer's company, Assiniboine Landing, back to the drawing board to get a design that will "provide a more appropriate interface with the public realm."

As it was, PP&D said in their report to the DDC that the design was "highly vehicle-oriented and pedestrian unfriendly. There is serious concern that this development, which abuts public space on all sides, is to be wrapped by a 20-foot high parkade wall. This will create a stark, unfriendly sidewalk that feels less safe. The public park spaces on the east and west sides would also be affected by the parkade wall and lack of casual surveillance to discourage crime. No amount of landscape or façade detailing can mitigate this problem. Even the townhouse units, that were included to extend active uses and eyes on the street, have no direct connection to the sidewalk and are located 20 feet above grade (on the third storey)."

Someone in PP&D gets it (well, I think a few people do), and more importantly, are starting to be able to act on that. They are still working within a philosophically and functionally broken system, where the arbitrary junk science of traffic engineering and the 'aristocracy of pull' still rule decisions (I wonder if SPC-DD or PP&D could tell the WRHA, Manitoba Hydro, or some other public entity to go back to the drawing board), but this is a start.

The neighborhood between Broadway and Assiniboine is proof (and fair warning to Exchange District boosters) that a strong, socio-economically mixed residential population doesn't make a neighborhood any less anonymous, boring, or dangerous. Broadway-Assiniboine needs new development that creates street life, not repells it, and the Downtown Development Committee and PP&D were right to turn down this design.

Link. Click on Standing Policy Committee on Downtown Development, then Minutes, and then on the March 1 meeting.

Mocking democracy

2010-04-12T16:17:00.004-05:00

Want to speak in opposition to a block of houses in a quiet West Alexander neighborhood being lost for the benefit of a swelling Winnipeg Regional Health Authority? Get down the Council Chambers on Main Street tomorrow at 5 p.m.

The Agenda for this meeting was only posted on the City Clerk's website this morning, some 30 hours before the meeting begins. Did the Clerk's Ofice and members of this council (Councillors O'Shaugnessy, Pagtakhan, and Lazarenko) only get notice of this meeting this morning? Probably not, since Clerks and Councillors have lives and prior obligations, too (heck, even Lazarenko might), and some kind of meaningful notice is appreciated. How is a resident with a family, job and other involvements supposed to drop everything at a day's notice speak against this blockbusting scheme?

This illustrates clearly the shameful sham that is City Hall's relationship to the public it alleges to serve.

The hub without spokes

2010-04-11T15:21:00.014-05:00

This past week, the University of Winnipeg stepped closer to this goal of "creating an active transportation hub on campus", with the City of Winnipeg saying it will spend $1.2 million to renovate the former bus depot space at Portage and Balmoral (the Rice Building, 491 Portage). Plus, Transit will "chip in $50,000 a year [paid 50/50 between the City and Province] to share the cost of security, lighting, cleaning and maintenance inside the terminal [with the U of W]," who lease the building from 4306946 Manitoba Ltd, a company that the U of W's Community Renewal Corp. has a 25% stake in.

In August, 2009, the U of W claimed that "[r]enovation and operating costs for the ANX will be covered by rental leases and savings from lease reductions as part of the University's efforts to consolidate its facilities and programs on the main campus." Not only will the building "pay for itself," the University believed, but their "operating budget will benefit from these renovations both through increased revenues from retail services and a return on rents owing to the fact The University of Winnipeg Community Renewal Corporation (UWCRC) owns 25% of the 491 Portage Avenue complex."

And if it doesn't pay, if the debt/service coverage ratio falls below 1.0/1.0 (in other words, if the property owner starts to lose money on this agreement), the university is required to either start paying market-rate rent on the property or find another tenant. (Link, p.26)

Or, possibly, find someone dumb enough to pay the cost of renovating a big chunk of the building, and chip in with the property's operating costs.

And what does the City and Transit get from this? Eight transit routes will converge on the Balmoral terminal, plus whatever 'bus rapid transit' routes are developed in the futre. What are these eight routes? According to Winnipeg Transit, they are:
- Route 3 Downtown Spirit. Daytime hours, Monday to Saturday
- Route 42 Plessis Express. Weekday P.M. rush hour only
- Route 46 Transcona Express. Weekday P.M. rush hour only
- Route 47 Transcona Local. Runs full daily schedule (approx. 5:30am-1:30am) Monday - Sunday
- Route 48 McMeans Express. Weekday P.M. rush hour only
- Route 49 Dugald Express. Weekday A.M. rush hour only

The remaining two, which I believe are the 40 and 41 express routes, are not running on Winnipeg Transit's Spring 2010 Schedule.

Even if a few 'rapid transit' routes terminated here sometime in the next century, they are still removed by at least a block from the major transit routes that U of W students use: 11, 14, 16, 18, 24, etc. What is the point of getting dropped off in front of an indoor station if you're just headed back outside to cross Portage and Memorial and go around The Bay to catch a transfer?

A hub is only as good as its spokes, and one major city route, a downtown shuttle, and a handful of barely-there express routes to Transcona don't make for much of one. For transit users, this poorly-located terminal is only one minor (but costly) improvement, and looks more like patronage to 'the godfather' than it does good transit planning.

Photo of Fort St. at Portage Ave. c.1950 courtesy of Buflyer2000

Slow train coming

2010-04-08T17:39:00.007-05:00

WFP: Ribbon cut on some 300 units of the Lord Selkirk Park Development recieving a $17-M upgrade.

Here's the type of upgrade to Lord Selkirk Park that would actually be a good use of money:

A tragic social experiment in 1962 is a tragic social experiment in 2010 (low-flush toilets and trendy rugs notwithstanding). More can be read about why Lord Selkirk Park is fundamentally rigged to fail here.

The best thing for Lord Selkirk Park is level it entirely, re-open the streets that were closed (Stella, Charles, etc.) and subdivide the property into 25' x 100' town lots. Allow for flexible, mixed-use zoning, and help local housing groups and co-ops to purchase and build on enough of those lots to house the project's current population. The suburban design of the development displaced thousands from the fine-grained neighborhood in the '60s, and with a return to density and mixed-use, the neighborhood could house many more people than it currently does, while giving its residents chances for better property management, property ownership, a sense of place, increased safety, and social diversity. These are things a new coat of paint can never do.

Corner of King St. and Dufferin Ave., c.1961. Courtesy of the Winnipeg Tribune index

Blockbusting (for the common good)

2010-04-07T14:57:00.007-05:00

In December of last year, I wrote that urban renewal was on the march in Centennial/West Alexander, that unassuming neighborhood between Logan and Notre Dame Avenue, and that the neighborhood was under threat of a slow-paced (what other speed is there here?) urban renewal process, where residents and businesses are phased out to make way for new megaprojects of various government interests.

Well, the thing about being a cynic in Winnipeg, is that you generally get it right. This from an official source today:

"The WRHA has bought up all eight houses on the north side of Bannatyne east of Tecumseh and plans to tear them down to build a Community Mental Health Crisis Response Centre and (sometime in the future) a second energy plant.

...[G]iven that there is a big surface parking lot on William at Tecumseh (immediately north of the proposed development site) why are they tearing down eight houses to make room for this development? ...[That] surface lot is owned by Manitoba Hydro...

The sign on the lot says that HSC administrates the parking... This application is tentatively scheduled to appear before City Council's Lord Selkirk-West Kildonan Community Committee on Tuesday, April 13th."

Centennial/West Alexander has been home to what have historically been some of Winnipeg's roughest, poorest quarters. But this block of Bannatyne, just west of Health Sciences Centre, is on a leafy, well-kept neighborhood of bungalows that date between 1920 and 1960, sitting under a canopy of large boulevard trees. If they can feel justified in razing this block, there's no reason why they wouldn't yours.

Inaction in action

2010-04-06T08:39:00.012-05:00

Manitoba is, according to Prof. Allen Mills' piece in the Free Press today, under "soft despotism," and governed by bureaucracy.

I should know: I live in North Point Douglas. Here, as in the North End (where between Selkirk and Redwood, conditions are becoming so deplorable that they would make villages in the third-world blush with embarrassment), there is no representation at either the Municipal and Provincial level. This is because the Councillor and MLA for the area, Harry Lazarenko and George Hickes, are both speakers of their respective government assemblies. And also because they both happen to be disconnected dinosaurs.

Of course, Manitoba's despotism isn't so soft everywhere, as anyone would quickly learn if they chose to engage in trade of bottles of scotch, automobile insurance, or hydroelectricity, or dared to set their own price on cheese and milk. Or, if their sanctioned, more "socially responsible" activities got in the way of the plans of the Province and their subsidiary City of Winnipeg, such as owning property.

This is happening to Mike Gobiel , who last week told the Free Press he heard from PCL Construction that he was losing the building that he moved his hobby shop business into recently, to make way for a curve to the northeast in Waterfront Drive at Higgins. (This is to make way for the new span which will rise alongside the existing Disraeli, but also to prepare for the enhanced Higgins Avenue and Louise Bridge project later in the decade. Pleasant waterfront roadway to commuter artery in less than 20 years. Way to go, Winnipeg.)

Anyway, the City eventually did get around to contacting Mr. Gobiel about the expropriation of his property--by email. And this only some three months after twice saying he could could go ahead and renovate the place, go ahead and occupy it, because the building would not be affected.

As Mr. Gobiel wrote in a letter sent April 1: "We bought this building in Dec 2009 and got occupancy. When we did our due diligence in November I was told 120 Higgins [Gobiel's business] was not affected at all by this Disraeli project by city planning so we proceeded to buy and was allowed to start renovations inside. We applied for occupancy in December 09 and again asked about the bridge and was again told no worries not affected and was given occupancy on the 24th of Dec 09.

The offer the city has made in the letter we finally had emailed to us [is] peanuts to what we invested."

Well, whaddaya gonna do? Who is John Galt, right? It's not like the rest of us have businesses on Higgins Avenue or bought houses in Elmwood.

But for those who are concious enough, there are two open houses hosted by the City and Plenary Road consortium next week, one on Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at Bronx Park Community Centre (131 Chelsea Pl.), 4 - 7 p.m. The second is Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at Norquay Community Centre (65 Granville St.), 4 - 7 p.m.

These "Information Open Houses" are billed as having detailed information on "one of Winnipeg's most attractive and innovative engineering projects." Representitives from the City and Plenary will be on hand to offer spin and calmly direct your concerns to computer-generated pictures of cyclists and flowers.

I've been to about five or six City open houses in my life, but that's enough to tell me they are a joke: a pointless excerise in manipulation; not a consultation, just a con.

And that's exactly why people need to go.

Good policy; even better if it worked

2010-03-27T00:45:00.005-05:00

Don't get me wrong: I want to believe. I want to believe that $20-M in tax dollars will buy more residential units downtown than what will get built over the next five years anyway. But I have a hard time joining in on today's teeth party on Waterfront Drive.

Because the rule of economics still apply even when they are ignored, and economies are driven by consumption, not production.

Until there are stronger advantages to consumption in the Exchange District (and not just buying on spec), the city will not see anymore than the same slow rate of progress (I mean slow when compared to any other city on this continent) in new housing than what downtown has seen over the past five years.

***
Edit: Brian Kelcey says it better than I could.

In da club

2010-03-24T18:39:00.004-05:00

According to Facebook (which is never wrong), the Whiskey Dix nightclub at Main near McDermot Ave. are intending to close their patio adjacent to the club, and convert that corner lot into a "VIP" surface parking lot for their customers and staff. If they think that this is all going to happen after the 3rd, they are in for a surprise.

(Were the club to go ahead with this, they would quickly find their customer base of loutish urban cowboys and cowgirls disappearing, as the people in Winnipeg who plan their nights according to parking availibility or "safety" are already at Pembina Highway clubs, and are not about to pay to get a spot in the VIP lot. At the same time, existing patrons will quickly find a club that does have a patio in the summer months.)

Courtesy of the University of Manitoba's Winnipeg Building Index

Not that the club owners are complete fools for thinking they could just put up a parking lot on Main Street; they are already surrounded on either side by surface parking lots that line the historical heart of Winnipeg, including a sprawling source of civic shame, the Canwest-owned gravel lot where the the McIntyre Block was torn down needlessly in 1979. And as this blog has pointed out ad infinitum, creating new off-street parking is the primary focus of public downtown renewal efforts of late. Everyone else is putting up parking lots: why can't this nightclub?

Well, because their patio is not zoned for parking, and the City has said that creating new surface parking lots (that are zoned as such) is no longer permitted downtown. Free Press reporter Bartley Kives called the City's Property, Planning & Development department about this today, and told me that PP&D has yet to receive an application from the owners of Whiskey Dix to convert it to a parking lot, and would not have permission to do so anyway.

This looks to be a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Here's to many more proposals for new surface parking lots being turned down.

University of Potemkin

2010-03-22T07:56:00.011-05:00

How did this borderline critical article on the University of Winnipeg get past the editors? Is U of W Chancellor and Free Press owner Bob Silver out of town? Were they too busy polishing the shrine to His Lloydship upstairs to notice reporter Nick Martin squeak this one by?

Anyway, University of Winnipeg vice-president Bill Balan downplays the operating budget crisis, confident that the Province will come through to save the day. Besides, he explains, most new buildings just pay for themselves. It's just that easy.

Among other expansion projects, Mr. Belan did not mention the U of W's planned makeover and expansion of its largest and most used building, Centennial Hall. It is hoped that this project will be completed by 2012, when the building celebrates its 40th anniversary. The vision is that the hall will not only be restored to its original 'glory' as a landmark of the late Modernist period of architecture, but also have improved entrance points, enhanced "communal space," and a Library that wil be expanded by building and addition to Centennial Hall along Balmoral Street toward Portage Avenue (thereby obstructing the 115 year-old Wesley Hall).

The way things are going, this makeover is going to have to involve more than a fanciful celebration of the "engineering aesthetic and the democratization of culture and education" (this according to the handout). After years of defered maintainance, the University notes that the exterior cladding of Centennial Hall is rusting, and windows are leaking. Water dripping down from the ceiling in the Library and elsewhere on the fourth floor has not been uncommon over the past year, and right now there are whole bookshelves in the Main Stacks of the U of W's Library covered in platic sheets to keep the water from damaging books.

The less said about the state of bathroom facilities on campus, the better.

This is what universities look like when the operate within a broken system: students pay next to nothing to go there, and they get every cent they pay for by being taught by an underpaid grad student on a campus that is falling apart. Governments pay the difference, however they know it looks better in the news to "transform Portage Avenue" than it does to keep the Library fully operational. If the U of W doesn't like this system, they should say so. Unfortunately they don't, since they, too, are more concerned about how good the University looks on the TV news and the page of the newspaper, rather than how it looks for the student looking to sit in a chair that is not broken, under a ceiling that is not leaking, and at a University that has its priorities straight.

Unsurprising story of the week

2010-03-19T19:41:00.003-05:00

Capitalism and religion makes societies kinder and more civil.

And if you don't believe that, then spend the night walking (or riding a bus or a cab) around Winnipeg, and see what decades of state paternalism has done to this once great city.

Comparisons to residential schools are out of line...

2010-02-25T22:10:00.006-06:00

...this is more like a maximum security prison.

If architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was right when he said "God is in the details," then the conceptual drawing for Youth For Christ's recreation centre renders a Godless box.

This is architecture formless and void, employing all the brutal inhumanity of Modernism and none of its dedication to simplicity; setting the bar for horrendousness on Main Street (no easy feat). The winding coils that make up the "feature" entrance comes off like a pathetic whimper. For cheapness, ugliness, and architectural depravity, it is superlative. To build this on the industrial backroads of North Transcona would be a manifestation of society's declining values. To build this on a prominent intersection at the centre of Winnipeg would be tragic.

If there is any sense at the City (Council, Property, Planning & Development), any attempt to build according to this will be promptly sent back to whatever drawing board it crawled off of.

A district losing its edge

2010-02-22T19:52:00.007-06:00

Now that we all know what "proselytize" means (as "we've been protelyzed into believing a thesaurus is bad"), and on Saturday enjoyed a rather paranoid climax to a surge of militant post-Enlightenment secularism, there is a question of more earthly matters with regards to Youth For Christ's move to Higgins and Main.

What will happen to YFC's existing Edge Skatepark at the corner of Pacific and Lily Street? One rumor is that the building is set to be demolished. Centre Venture, who are helping YFC with the move to Higgins and Main, has put a great deal of effort into finding sites to develop a parkade. The district around The Edge skatepark--borderlands between what is considered the Exchange District and South Point Douglas--has long been eyed as the site of a giant parkade to be built with public dollars, and operated by the swelling and increasingly Stasiesque Winnipeg Parking Authority. That, plus the fact that it sits right in the centre of a district where anything micro-scaled and unable to store cars is not part of the equation. Last year, a warehouse similar in size to The Edge was unceremoniously demolished at Pacific and Martha Street.

Across Lily Street, Sport Manitoba wishes to demolish what is possibly the second oldest warehouse downtown. An though the building is perfectly sound, and has yet to go through the minor bit of red tape known as the de-listing a municipal heritage building, they have already been given permission by the City to demolish the building for a parkade whenever they get the money to do so. Sport Manitoba's plans also include closing Martha Street between Pacific Avenue. (To find out why this amounts to urban suicide, read Part Two of Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. )

Youth For Christ might be happy to leave behind the old building at 125 Pacific Avenue, but I suspect that once they do, the place won't be standing for long.

Downtown housing report won't be worth the wait

2010-02-16T21:40:00.007-06:00

Free Press reporter Bartley Kives compares the forthcoming downtown housing report to the Olympics: it is only arriving after four years of anticipation.

Unlike the Olympics, this report is likely not going to reward excellence, set new standards, or instill pride in citizens.

Studies and reports are exceedingly important, but looking at the key recommendations reported from the 2008 draft of this report, this one might not be worth the wait:
1) Establish a single office to promote downtown development and deal with enquiries from developers. [To complement the other single office established by the City in 1999 to do exactly the same thing.]
2) Create a list of downtown buildings and empty lots to redevelop as housing sites. [But it's going to take some funding: planning bureaucrats can't just walk around with a clipboard for free, you know.]
3) Modify existing incentives for developers and work with the federal and provincial governments to secure more sources of cash. [Which has never been done before.]

Judging by this, the downtown housing report promises to simply prop up the status quo: Portage Avenue sliding into Main Street-circa-1980 oblivion, and the ratio of buildings demolished in the Exchange Distric matching buildings redeveloped for housing there. The means by which downtown was destroyed, and was inhibited from renewing itself. And that won't change until, for one very cheap and easy example, the City acts on reports that recommend rush hour parking restrictions on downtown streets be elminated.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates misanthropic planning than destroyed downtown's humanity: this oft-overlooked blunder that is the hidden park/plaza, and not so hidden parking garage, located behind the Millennium Library on Donald Street. What was there before included Lee Court at 217-219 Donald Street, a Tudor-inspired apartment block designed by John D. Atchison in 1906. It was demolished in 1977 to make way for the parking garage.

Credit: Buflyer200

Credit: Mr. Christian

These and many other incompatible planning mistakes still survive, and the thinking that created them is increasingly common, as both Centre Venture and the Downtown BIZ share a growing fixation on storing automobiles in parking garages. Against this, another lazy report will be ineffective, and it could take another four years for the City to release it, and downtown as a enjoyable place to live would be no further ahead.

All you need to know

2010-02-14T21:51:00.008-06:00

This is a talk given in San Antonio, TX, back in 1991 by new urbanist planner and architect Andres Duany.

Duany talks about the elusively simple way to create a sense of place, the confused psychology of suburbia, separtion of building and neighborhood uses, building set-backs, the importance of on-street parking, height/width ratios, affordable housing, lack of choice on proximity to commerce/services. Duany points out that big box development is not a result of lax, laissez-faire approach to planning (a common thought among critics of sprawl), but by very rigid labrynth of codes dreamed up by several generations of planning groupthink. Urban spaces are simple and affordable to build, but illegal under codes (even in traditionally urban areas.

Although this talk was given 19 years ago, and dealt mostly with planning issues in suburban areas of the U.S. Sun Belt, it is totally (and unfortunately) relevent to Winnipeg of 2010.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Granny Flats and affordable housing, sense of place

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

Where's the party at?

2010-01-27T19:27:00.010-06:00

It is hopelessly naive to suggest that municipal politics is or can be free of partisanship, or partisan-like coalescence based on ideology--as if council should exist as little more than 15 people getting together to compare ward interests, with no discussion of directions the city as a whole is or should take. Allegiances based around common ideologies are a natural output of democratic governments. There should be a conservative/boosterism wing of Council, and there should be a liberal/progressive wing (or at least a group of liberals and progressives squabbling among themselves on how to align themselves), and they should be honest about it.

Winnipeg's ostensibly conservative, Chamber-of-Commerce-types at City Hall have had a hard time with this, countering progressive coalitions with their own coalitions with non-coalition names like Independent Citizens' Election Committee. Or in the case of Mayor Sam Katz in his State of the City address yesterday, claiming to be above all that nit-picky party politics his opponants do (which is, of course, completely bogus).

If for no other reason, I am happy that I ran under the Green Party banner in the last civic election to be forthright about partisan leanings. Other candidates in 2006 were backed by the NDP, a couple by the Liberals, and a number under the Sam Katz banner. But the Greens were the only one to admit their affiliation.
New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, State Governor Al Smith, and unidentified grand old men of the Tammany/Democratic political machine, c.1920s--an age of political honesty

In any case, Mayor Katz is correct when he states that many card-carrying New Democrats are fixing to give him a one way ticket to Scotsdale, AZ, but I doubt this is coming down straight from the top, since the Provincial NDP has learned over the past few years that they don't need a pigeon in the Mayor's office to control City Hall: they just need one that is fine maintaining the status quo of a city so desperately poor that it will take any gift the Province gives them.

Still, if there is any truth to this rumour that appeared on Skyscraper Page, this will turn out to be an interesting lead-up up to October: "I've heard that Viewpoints Research is currently conducting a survey on behalf of the left-leaning/NDP potential candidates [Vandal, Wyatta, Wasylycia-Leis, Thomas]. [...] I'd assume that these left-leaning candidates are going to use the survey results to try and determine which one of 'em has the best chance of beating Sammy in October.

Respondents are then asked a battery of about 15 questions on their level of agreement with a bunch of statements... almost all apparently regarding Sam Katz. Specifically, this is to determine the best talking points to use in a campaign against Sammy. IIRC some of the statements are (do you agree/disagree somewhat/strongly that):
- "Sam is more interested in helping his business friends than he is for the average citizen of Winnipeg."
- "I am concerned about conflict-of-interests Sam has with his position as Mayor and his private businesses."
- "While Sam often talks about being 'tough on crime,' yet he has not done enough to make our city safer."
- "Sam is either freezing or cutting taxes for sheer political interests, when our city's infrastructure is falling apart."
- "Sam lacks a vision for Winnipeg's future."
- "I am concerned about the response time of our emergency first responders."
- and some other typical stuff about potholes/roads, garbage & recycling collection, etc."

Where coaitions matter most of all

2010-01-23T23:18:00.007-06:00

I was up in the University of Winnipeg library this afternoon, so I missed out on all the illiterate action going on downstairs at the anti-Prorogue rally:

(h/t)

Embarrassing.

Demolition blues

2010-01-05T20:29:00.005-06:00

This is an email that has been circulating this corner of cyberspace:
"This Saturday at 2pm a group of protesters and musicians will gather in front of the Windsor Hotel to rally against the demolition of Winnipeg's most historic blues and roots venue. It is about to be thoughtlessly destroyed to make way for a parking lot. Despite the substantial one million dollar bid to buy the hotel by the owners of the Royal George Hotel: Rick Penner and Boyd Newton as well as their partners, the offer was denied. These bidders would surely respect the institution as a prominent institution in the history of Winnipeg and would keep the musical fires burning in the heart of Winnipeg. Definitely a better choice for our city! Charlie Chaplin stayed there and in the past 30 years, some of the best blues acts in the world have performed there, including numerous local artists who still faithfully frequent the location.

The Windsor is 107 years old and is a historic building."

A rumour of the demise of the Windsor Hotel was first heard in 2005, which was the same year that it was removed from the City's Historical Building Inventory--a move that typically precedes a building's demolition.

Naturally, the Windsor, located at 187 Garry St., straddled between two surface parking lots, and sitting amidst the most barren urban landscapes this side of Gary, Indiana, is to be replaced not by a new apartment block, or even another health authority office (so far conspicuously absent from this particular block), but a surface parking lot.

From the street, the Windsor--from where in 1913, local lore says, touring vaudevillian Charlie Chaplain wrote a letter to his brother saying he was getting into the movies--is hardly an architectural treasure, but it is a building with windows and doors, and is used. Its legendary blues bar is a lonely outpost of (generally) friendly humanity in a neighborhood already ravaged by this kind of destructively numb-skull thinking.

For what it's worth, contact your city councillor.

Too cozy to fail?

2009-12-29T18:36:00.009-06:00

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

2009-12-22T11:21:00.002-06:00

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

2009-12-16T21:22:00.007-06:00

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

2009-12-15T23:02:00.002-06:00

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

2009-12-09T14:38:00.003-06:00

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

2009-12-03T22:10:00.005-06:00

"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

2009-12-02T08:18:00.004-06:00

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...

2009-11-30T09:34:00.006-06:00

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

2009-11-27T11:00:00.004-06:00

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

2009-11-04T13:55:00.004-06:00

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

2009-11-03T07:17:00.011-06:00

"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

2009-10-28T22:25:00.004-05:00

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...

2009-10-27T19:24:00.003-05:00

...starts slowly.

Incidentally, President Obama's daughters attend private school.

H/T, Cafe Hayek

Not a good sign

2009-10-26T23:01:00.004-05:00

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

2009-10-25T15:07:00.005-05:00

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

2009-10-23T17:01:00.006-05:00

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.)

2009-10-17T15:30:00.002-05:00

Congratulations, Greg Selinger, you're finally the mayor of Winnipeg.

Red (and yellow) tape

2009-10-11T20:43:00.009-05:00

Rendering of a new University of Winnipeg building, SW corner of Portage and Memorial Blvd.
There is, I'm sure, a perfectly good explanation for why this entropic hocus-pocus escaped from the pages of a first year Bachelor of Environmental Design student's project, and might actually rise to inflict Portage Avenue with more abhorent destruction masked as "renewal" (hey, what's another 25 years of the same old crap?).

The building's siding is affixed with all the yellow and red cards handed to the designers by the referees of architecture. Or, the Post-it notes are put there to give the building some distinction from a tannery in an Eastern Bloc backwater.

This makes the Duckworth Centre look positively Beaux-Artes.

The carrot and the stick

2009-09-29T08:25:00.003-05:00

Coming to a billboard near you: the Minister of Vegitable Production and Distribution, reminding all of us that state collectivism is warm, fuzzy, and maybe even a little fun (carrot as a microphone? Zany!), provided the serfs continue to work for the "good of the industry as a whole."

(H/T)

We have taxis? Hot-diggity!

2009-09-25T08:05:00.004-05:00

Another day of Winnipeg's yahoo bumpkin mentality shining bright and true.

Taxis double parking in front of the Palomino Club or Northern Hotel at 2:00am, when there is no traffic on Portage or Main's other seven lanes, is simply unacceptable and something the police should crack down on.

Drunk driving, speeding through construction zones, drag racing on North Main, meanwhile, are perfectly acceptable acts that should be ignored by heavy-handed authorites.

This enforcement probably has less to do with enforcing the Highway Traffic Act than it does with male WPS officers wanting to get a chance to pull up to the curb so they can creep on young drunk girls exiting clubs.

Call in the professionals

2009-09-19T18:12:00.008-05:00

"Police are cautioning the public not to use a drug that was lost in downtown Winnipeg last Monday."

This will be tough, since most people take whatever drugs they find lying around downtown sidewalks. Or at least that's what I do, but I guess I'm just curious that way. Thanks for the warning, Winnipeg Police Service.

"Police said a quantity of methadone - used to help drug addicts - was lost in a clear plastic bottle somewhere downtown between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m."

Well then, a thorough search of all clear plastic bottles downtown seems to be in order.

"The drug looks like an orange liquid."

...but is actually a green solid.

*Update: the story has been edited to the point of not being as funny anymore. Oh well.

One small step

2009-09-15T19:10:00.004-05:00

It arrived with little fanfare; no Business page feature, no agency glad-handing, but over the past few weeks, the first grocery store within the political boundaries of the Exchange District has opened up at 333 Garry Street, just south of Notre Dame. Tropica General Food Supply appears to sell goods typically found in the central city's corner grocery stores: cigarettes, bottled water, basic grocery items, international calling cards, et c.

This small store might not be the magical giant chain supermarket everyone believes will be the panacea for the Exchange District, but for people who actually use the Exchange and see it as a place that could one day be a fully functional place with a great quality of life (as opposed to those that see it as an endless expanse of brick parkades and bike lanes), this tiny little grocery store is a definate step toward that end.

***
I must also give credit to the Giant Tiger outlet at the corner of Donald and Ellice, which for some four years has sold a small selection of groceries, which past and present residents of the Exchange District that I have spoken to swear by.

You don't say!

2009-09-10T07:38:00.005-05:00

"Jessica Siddle is 20 and has lived with the effects from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder her whole life." - Winnipeg Free Press, Sept. 10, 2009

Identifying a need.

2009-09-09T16:44:00.004-05:00

It appears that the United Way building under construction on Main Street will be set well back from the sidewalk on both the Main Street and Pacific Avenue sides of the building. This is a good thing, since Main Street has too strong of a compact urban form in this neighborhood, and suffers for want of yet more meaningless, undefined and void spaces. The more downtown Winnipeg starts to mimic the physical form of suburban Winnipeg, the better off it will be.

A spade is a spade

2009-08-24T20:04:00.011-05:00

"The old Indian burial ground in rear of Grace Church [SE corner of Main and Water Ave.] is being converted to other purposes, and the spade of the invader has turned up skeletons of the red man, and flint, steel and red paint, etc., with which he was provided when departing to the happy hunting grounds." - Manitoba Free Press, May 19, 1877

"Because the site has cultural significance to the aboriginal people of the region, a medicine bag is placed in each of the 505 foundation holes that have been excavated, then filled with steel rebar and concrete." - Winnipeg Free Press, August 24, 2009

***
In a letter to the Association of Manitoba Archaeologists, adjunct professor of Archaeology Dr. E. Leigh Syms writes that "[t]he large number of artifacts recovered from this tiny area will have been catalogued for storage but will be lying unnumbered in plastic bags in boxes and therefore virtually unusable and inaccessible, probably deep in the sub sub basement of HRB’s storage facility. [...]

"First Nations consultation apparently consisted of meeting with the Thunder Bird House urban elders. One of my elder colleagues who is a senior administrator at Thunder bird House has little use for archaeology and stated cynically that 'the record should be left in the ground for a 1,000 years until archaeologists learn how to analyze the materials'. [...]

"There appears to have been no consultation with the other First Nations sectors such as communities, teachers, students, and others who might be interested in their ancient heritage. [...]

"During processing, the staff did an excellent job of cataloguing the collections but they were not allowed to number the artifacts or even glue rim sherds that were found together. This decision was made due to the need to set priorities in a very limited, inadequate budget. [...]

"Unlike other provincial heritage branches which insist on the careful excavation of squares over and around the piling holes, these holes will be augured out, which we know from other excavations results in large numbers of broken items."

***
A spade is a spade. No matter what gets thrown down the holes; it is still a violent disruption of unknown artifacts, and possibly relics.

Oddly enough, many of the people who shrug off (or simply don't know) the area's importance in favor of getting the museum built, are the same winners who could not bear the thought of an apartment block's shadows darkening the "sacred ground" at Upper Fort Garry. Somehow, the buildings as retainers of buried artifacts argument does not apply to buildings not erected in the name of "human rights"--quickly becoming post-Modernity's most bastardized, entropic hocus-pocus of a concept--or by an out-of-town developer that is not part of Winnipeg's inbred coven of leading citizens.

The question is not should development ever happen on sites that were used for different people in the past (even for sacred purposes), but it is whether or not the past can be trivialized, contorted, and ignored--as it presently is by the CMHR. No one knows excatly what is buried beneath the soil at the H.B.Co. Flats, but it is clear from Aboriginal tradition, old newspaper accounts, and from the preliminary archaeology digs, that it was an immensely important place.

To feign sincerity by throwing a medicine bag down a hole, or to justify it by getting the stamp of approval from dubiously appointed "elders" of an allegedly corrupt, and certainly barely solvent and unqualified organization (why didn't the CMHR just ask the staff at the Dakota Tipi gas bar? They're Aboriginal. Isn't that enough?), is insulting to the history of The Forks, and to more than a thousand years of Aboriginal cultures in this region.

At least in 1877, there was honesty.

***
(See also: letter to Arni Thorsteinson by Dr. Gregory G. Monks of the University of Manitoba's Anthropology department.)

Any better ideas?

2009-08-20T19:36:00.009-05:00

It has been interesting reading in the Free Press today how Centre Venture has been rattling their sabres at CanadInns for stalling on the redevelopment of the Metropolitain Theatre on Donald Street. If private development downtown wasn't so risky, unconventional or slow-moving, there would not be any reason for Centre Venture to exist. They seem to have forgotten that.

There was a time that seeing a dynamic and lucrative business environment downtown was the ultimate goal of Centre Venture, but more recently they have seemed to become enticed by the pursuit of the "ideal tenant"; joining the downtown commercial real estate crowd in salivating at the thought of the central business district becoming one big bureaucrat ghetto for swelling, inefficent, bottom line-free government departments.

I'm not defending CanadInns, or the apparently slow progress at The Met, but are there any other, better ideas Centre Venture has for the heritage theatre vacant for 22 years? Is there another non-profit agency that wants to build a brand new headquarters on that site? Does that stretch of Donald Street suffer a lack of historical-themed parking garages? Is the WRHA "bursting at the seams" faster than Man-Shield Construction can put up brick composite? Maybe C.V. Chair Jim Ludlow's boss at True North and his consortium wants another kick at the cat?

Risky, unconventional and slow-moving project are what Centre Venture Development Corp. was created to offer. If they can't be there to make risky private money projects happen, why are they there?

***

Non-existant
Main Street north from Logan Avenue, 1962. From the U of M's Winnipeg Building Index. Click to enlarge

I'd've used a stickers pun, but none were a-peeling

2009-08-19T19:20:00.014-05:00

"At the heart of the Parking Authority is a Passion for Parking - an entrepreneurial spirit that values customer service excellence, and the drive to develop public parking services in new, innovative ways." *

"Hughes claims the paystations near his store have been missing the two-hour free parking notices for roughly a year. 'Give me the specs, I'll get them printed and I'll get the staff to put them up. It's a small thing. They're not waiting for a part from Siberia,' he said." *

Power-point buzzwords notwithstanding, this instance effectively demonstrates how the free market works better at achieving a public good most efficiently (ie, in less than a year) than the public bodies charged with doing so.

Aqua Books, which was dragged to the depths of red tape hell by the City when they attempted to open up a bookstore and restaurant in a vacant building on Garry Street (the nerve!), now operates as the biggest, best, most organized used bookstore in the city. Placing stickers on parking metres on Garry Street in front of their store to inform their customers that parking is free on weekends, Aqua Books raised the ire of the Winnipeg Parking Authority.

And while WPA boss David Hill doesn't see forgetting to let motorists know about free weekend parking as a big deal, what is a big deal is someone else doing it for them. Such a big deal, that it warranted Aqua Books recieving allegations of vandalism and bullying from WPA officials.

Meanwhile, Aqua's ostensible allies, the organization they pay tribute money to as a member of the Downtown Business Improvement Zone, shrugged off the issue of a business not waiting around for an ineptly useless "Authority" to improve their business conditions. "This sounds like just a heated discussion, more than anything... I'd hate to see any of my BIZ members charged with doing anything like that. Cooler heads will prevail," offered BIZ Director Stefano Grande to the Free Press. Go get 'em, tiger.

Anyway, under such regulations, downtown Winnipeg has become inhospitable both to the urban resident and the occassional visitor. For the resident, it is wiser to make a weekly commute to a regional shopping centre for errands. Or simply move to Fort Rouge, where one can enjoy an urban life free from all the pointless regulations. For the visitor, the byzantine traffic and parking regulations are too hostile to even bother comprehending. Has anyone ever attempted to park on Donald Street near Graham Avenue (say, to quickly pop in at their local library branch)? One could finish off War and Peace quicker than they could figure out the ridiculous myriad of on-street parking signs. And so, public organizations end up working for people just like themselves: suburbanites who commute by car Monday to Friday, 8:30 to 4:30.

***
By far, the quickest, most inexpensive and effective way to make downtown a more attractive place for people and money, is to completely de-regulate on-street parking to metred parking across the board (save for loading zones), do away with rush hour parking restrictions, and eliminate one-way traffic on nearly every downtown street. Get governments and public organizations out of the business of parking entirely. The Winnipeg Parking Authority should be dissolved. After all, they have been seeking to "create world class parking operation for a world class city" since 1956: how has downtown Winnipeg fared since then?

There are automatic doors in the middle of nowhere

2009-08-17T23:45:00.007-05:00

Reading both here, and here about how inconvenient passenger bus travel to and from Winnipeg is now that the new depot has moved out to the Airport, I thought I would dig out an old post from December 2006, which also appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press around that time.

"It seems the only people that do favour the terminal’s move likely never take the bus themselves. Winnipeg Centre MP Pat Martin, for one, seems happy the Greyhound terminal, along with its jobs and visitors, may soon be leaving his riding. Its current location is “a nuisance, a headache, an absolute disaster,” and “so inappropriate”, he told reporters. Clearly, any pretenses of social justice are lost on the NDP MP of one of Canada’s poorest federal ridings, as Mr. Martin--who travels by air at taxpayer’s expense--seems indifferent to the concerns of financially limited travellers."

Naturally, since King Pat and Don Axworthy want it, no one from the rank and file of the Red and Orange Armies--who normally never miss a chance to bleat for the poor--has yet uttered a word about this.

History is ignored by the winners

2009-08-15T22:02:00.007-05:00

"Bones.--The excavation going on in the mound opposite the northern gate of Fort Garry developes the fact that the mound is an old Indian burial place. Large numbers of very large human bones, skulls, etc, have been unearthed, and carried off by curiosity seekers." - Manitoba Free Press, Oct. 16, 1875

Image from Manitoba Historical Maps

"[T]he premier was casually asked whether there are plans to tear down the only building still standing on the historic city block.

The century-old Manitoba Club, symbolic home of the city's business and political elite.

The premier laughed." - Winnipeg Free Press, Feb. 6, 2009

Honk if you love LEED

2009-08-06T10:41:00.005-05:00

Smith Carter Architects, the firm that brought you the Air Canada Centre, Portage Place, Trizec, and Trizec jr., have been awarded LEED cerification for their company headquarters at 1600 Buffaolo Place.

You know what else reduces the need for hot pavement? Building in the heart of Winnipeg's entropic, sprawling mess, where travel by car is practically mandatory (hands up, anyone earning more than $15,000 a year who rides the #94 Kenaston Express bus). Occupying an old building in the centre of the city, where there is relatively good transit service and lunch meetings are within walking distance, is much greener than limestone paths in Linden Woods.

If the suburbs is where one wants to do business, that is completely fine, and I am not criticizing that decision, but don't think that it is contributing to a Greener Planet or whatever you want to call it. In cities, the whole is greater that the sum of its parts, and all the LEED-certified buildings in the world isn't going to make Winnipeg become any less wastefully decentralized automobile slum, of which, located at Waverley and McGillivray, Smith Carter Architects is definately a part of.

Quote of the Day

2009-07-27T16:38:00.003-05:00

"The No. 1 reason someone doesn't attend university, [sic]they haven't been asked in a meaningful way."

Can I ask in a meaningful way: are you serious?

If the kids are united

2009-07-20T20:28:00.006-05:00

When he is not finishing marathons in sixth place or, conversely, riding around enjoying American Spirits, Malibu and "North Enders" from Fazzo's takeout window with me, my friend Gareth is writing. Mostly iPhone apps, but also articles like the one that was published in the latest Summer of The Uniter. It deflates the flawed logic of the neighborhood saviors who moonlight as anti-gentrification crusaders (before buzzing off to the hipster quarters of real cities, that is).

It should be understood that there is a very real correlation between improvements at street level and the economic value of the property and the neighborhood. And so the best way to prevent gentrification is to quit cutting the grass and put off painting the picket fence. Don't plant a garden in a vacant lot, or apply for a fix-up grant, or think of joining a residents association. Start wearing more EXCO gear and less stylish Goodwill finds. Rottweilers running wild instead of pugs on leashes. Stolen mountain bikes instead of fixies. Or, better yet, just stay in the suburbs. Please--before a place that sells books [literacy promotion] or healthy food [chronic disease prevention] opens up north of Portage Avenue.

***
Speaking of displacement, here is another article in the The Uniter, an historical account of the ill-fated Lord Selkirk Park neighborhood, put together by yours truely.

The glass hidden in the grass

2009-07-16T21:44:00.008-05:00

A half-cooked, pie-in-the-sky masterplan for Point Douglas. Is it that time of year already?

A couple of months ago, Sel Burrows, Wanda Koop, Jordan van Sewall, and one or two others sat down over brunch with Premier Gary Doer to talk about Point Douglas. The talk got on the subject of one industrial land owner or another, and how that land, if in the wrong hands (say, the hands of those that are in the business of making money rather than distributing or recieving it) could become mixed-use condos or some other urban affliction. The Premier stops it right there; looks at them and says "Well, what if we [the Provincial government] expropriate the owners and make it into a Provincial Park?"

What would this look like? No one knows. When I asked one of the brunch attendees where exactly this park would be located, they could not say for certain, only that it would likely stretch along the entire bank of the peninsula neighborhood, from the north end of Waterfront Drive, all the way around to the vicinity of Norquay Park.

...but isn't it a good thing Gary Doer didn't forget to consult the community about what they think of his idea? [h/t to PHiebert]

How this works with regards to private property rights, the CPR mainline, the impending Disraeli and Louise Bridge projects, the City's secondary plan for south Point Douglas, and the citizens of Point Douglas that don't brunch with the Premier; again, no one knows.

No one knows how this will revitalize the neighborhood, since no one understands urban neighborhoods, or applies that knowledge to Winnipeg. This plans looks to simply be urban renewal in its most vile, misanthropic form, and will do nothing to make Point Douglas the wonderful place it could be. But I suppose when you don't understand or like cities, it makes sense to just expropriate them and cover them with grass. Native grass, of course--it's not the '50s anymore.

Premier Doer liked his idea of a Provincial Park, he told the crowd at the table, because it has precedence: the Manitoba Club/Friends of Upper Fort Garry, who were able to bring a Provincial Park to the corner of Fort and the soon-to-be-lost Assiniboine Avenue. This will be even easier for the prominent Social Democrat faithful of Point Douglas: no fund-raising campaigns needed, just set up a lunch date at the Premier's office, attempt to scare the locals with mentioning the phantom gated community idea from a few years ago, and just sit back and let the park come to your doorstep.

This pointless idea is rooted in arrogance from top to bottom. The Provincial NDP, obviously, exudes arrogance (and with good reason; who is critical of them anymore?). The tiny cabal of artists in South Point Douglas who want the whole neighborhood to themselves, are either too arrogant or too deluded to see that they make no sense: they want shops they can walk to, but they don't want cars or density; they want improvement, but they don't want their property taxes to rise (no joke); they want diversity and affordable housing, but want the Province to first concentrate on bike paths; they want the bear patrol, but they won't pay taxes for it.

Can we just have a little honesty down in Art Land? Can it just be said out loud:

We artists want the neighborhood to ourselves. We want our houses and studios and nothing more. We don't want other people to live here, we don't want other people to drive here. And we want this all without an increase to our property tax bills.

Anyway, giving this story to the Free Press this week worked as a nice diversion stunt for a Premier that lords over the men and and women who once lived the life of kings, but are now content with feeble servility. Please wake me up in a couple of weeks, when this plan is forgotten and people like King Gary the Superlative leave Point Douglas alone, for another year at least.

Looking toward Winnipeg from Point Douglas, 1872

Phony demand

2009-07-14T22:00:00.002-05:00

177

That's how many parking spots were available at the City-owned parkade next to the Library at 2:30 P.M. on a Tusday. Two hours later, it was practically vacant. This is an underground parkade (heated in the winter) that is connected to the skywalk system, and is two blocks east of the Hydro Building, two blocks west of Portage and Main. If there is a demand for off-street parking spaces downtown, I don't see it.

Country mice

2009-07-13T19:28:00.010-05:00

How is it that just three councillors from the suburban fringes of the nominal City of Winnipeg (Old Kildonan was little more than service stations and scrub brush 20 years ago) are all that come between the urban quality of the Exchange District and some brainiac with an idea for a parkade? (I'm dying to read what green and creative gimmicks are going to be added to the Grain Exchange's parkade. Is a penguin-themed-plaza still in the works?)

If there are members of Council who do not at once grasp how laughably pitiful arguments like "the proposed parkade will contribute to the ongoing vitality of the Exchange District National Historic Site and will contribute in a positive manner to the streetscape by replacing a large parking lot," why are they the ones that decide the fate of the Exchange District?

Another knee-slapper, also found at the City Clerk's desk: "The owners of the Grain Exchange building have been encouraged by both the Winnipeg Parking Authority and the Forks North Portage Partnership to construct a parking structure to meet the demands on downtown parking created by the growth of Waterfront Drive [where every single unit has at least one indoor parking space] and the pending Canadian Humanities Museum. The structure, if constructed on the site of the Annex, could access the skywalk system through the Grain Exchange Building."

The side of the Grain Exchange Annex seen from inside the Northern Sales Building, c.1953, when Lombard Avenue had a whole lot more of what it can't ever get back. Credit

Hit the snooze button, pt.2

2009-07-09T23:09:00.013-05:00

Downtown BIZ Events - The Role of Parking as a Catalyst for Downtown Development

It not being worth any serious discussion, my thoughts on this matter are summed up rather nicely here.

Thanks to Gord for bringing this important even to my attention.

Hit the snooze button

2009-07-06T23:13:00.009-05:00

Will somebody please wake me up when the Exchange District is totally and finally destroyed? This lazy and half-cooked approach is getting too boring. The progress just isn't coming fast enough: there are still to many parts of this photo not coloured in red, yellow and blue; parking rates are still not as cheap as they were in 1995; there are still too many smaller, plainer, cheaper buildings standing in the Exchange District that could become home to small businesses; I still have a few friends who haven't yet left Winnipeg for Montreal and Toronto.

If we're going to allow a city to die at the hands of improvident yokels, let's do it with a little more pizazz. Otherwise, I'll just go back up to the lake and continue to think in past tense of downtown Winnipeg as a place with, at the least, a few clusters of cohesive urban forma.

How hard was that?

2009-06-18T23:02:00.004-05:00

At some point yesterday, someone painted a long stripe of white paint on Princess Street from Logan Ave. to McDermot Ave. or thereabouts. It is a bicycle lane, painted on a downtown street that has plenty of room for bicycle lanes. Bike lanes are not going to be the things that turn this city around, and might not prevent errant cab drivers from sharply cutting me off on my morning commutes down Princess, but it will say something: that the City gave some thought to the people who ride bikes.

Remind me again, how bike lanes were created in Winnipeg during the tenure of Mr. Visionary Talker again?

Primary sources

2009-06-10T23:45:00.009-05:00

This is really no big deal, but it was funny how, when commenting on Heritage Winnipeg seemingly not paying attention, both Average City and Policy Frog got the address of the Dennistoun house wrong.

So say it with me now, MSM, City Historical Buildings Committee, and bloggers: it is the Dennistoun House, at 166 Roslyn Road. And yes, Heritage Winnipeg, apparently it is even being taken off the municipal conservation list an so it can be demolished.

The more people refer to the website of the venerable old Manitoba Historical Society, the better off we'll be.

"I can't get no respect."

Pages from the past

2009-06-08T16:06:00.007-05:00

Main Street is not a dangerous place, the story reporting this is not available online, and its reporter hit the pavement instead of the Rolodex. Just what decade did I wake up in on Sunday morning?

Anyway, Mr. Oleson's wholly enjoyable piece on the fabled Main Street Strip (at its most liberally defined span, 17 blocks from Portage up to Selkirk Avenue) touches on something that has been clear to keen downtown pedestrians for some time now: that Portage Avenue is in the same place Main Street was 25 or 30 years ago.

"It seems that Winnipeg's skid row has moved south, to Portage Avenue, where on any given day you will see more boarded-up buildings, panhandlers, public drinking and puking drunks than you will on the dreaded Main Street strip."

Indeed, who would have guessed that Portage and Edmonton would be more unsavory and dangerous than Main and Logan? Day or night, I know where I feel safer walking.

Why are strawmen such haters? pt.2

2009-06-02T20:00:00.012-05:00

People who are doing things:

BIOS Architecture, which began as a two-man operation at the corner of Main and Alexander Ave. last year, and will now be hiring and expanding.

Paterson Foods and Parrish & Heimbecker, two venerable agriculture companies that continue to be based out of offices in downtown Winnipeg. Prior to his death in 1963, my Great-grandfather A.W. Cross, a man of incredible business acumen, was a partner at P&H; a great man that helped make an important Winnipeg compnany great.

My former neighbors, who purchased a sordid rooming house in the bad old late '90s, moved in, renovated and sold (at a great profit to them) last year to a couple that moved here from Wolseley. And my new neighbors, who are putting in still more work in the house and in the yard, and contribute to the safety and civility of this charming little unslummed street.

Every person that has started a retail business in the Exchange District in the last five years. Any person that has started a business of any kind in this city.

Wellington West Capital Inc., one of the best companies in the country, and are growing apace.

Greenseed Development Corp. who are actually building new housing downtown on vacant land (and have so far not raised the jealous ire of the Friends of Fort Douglas).

Aqua Books and Eat! Bistro who completely transformed their Garry St. building, and are the best used bookstore in the city (and one of the best new cafes,) and keep a literary scene extant downtown.

Friesen Tokar Architects. Not that it was hard, but they built the nicest looking condo development on Waterfront Drive to date. And they moved the entire firm there.

The Black Sheep Diner at Ellice and Langside St., their proprietress and wonderful staff, who serve the best breakfast in town.

Those crazy Scotia Street socialists who re-opened Pollock's Hardware on Main and Atlantic Ave.

Andrew Marquess and B&M Land, who develops good market rental property across the city, especially downtown lately. He builds with geo-thermal, as opposed to putting out publicly-funded propaganda saying he would build it, then not.

Every person from my generation who left Winnipeg to find success in other cities.

The woman from Point Douglas who started a coffee shop on Sutherland near Annabella St. last year. Another Point Douglas woman who opened the Tallest Poppy on Main and Logan Ave. The young hippies who just moved in down the street that want to open up a laundromat and coffee shop here.

My good friend who is venturing out to develop iPhone applications, renovate his West End house, run marathons, and raise a daughter with his wife. Winnipeg grew by virtue of a hundred men like him that arrived here in the 1880s; not by a tired pack of fading grafters.

The men and women that flee violence, opression and corruption to come to Canada, and work tirelessly in corner grocery stores and restaurants for the sake of their children. Who still believe that one's mind and abilities can take them places.

Why are strawmen such haters?

2009-06-02T09:40:00.005-05:00

"As it is right now, anybody who tries to build something great in the city has to 'be prepared to damn the torpedoes, and suffer,' he warned."

Indeed.

"My money's on Gail Asper."

So is mine, not that I had any choice in the matter.

***
"But there are elements in this city that will always be sniping at the rich and/or the successful."

Successful at what exactly?