Everybody loves the old town

Everybody loves the old town.

You know, the historical part of just about every city? With the cobblestones and cornices? Brewpubs and cafes? Buskers playing saxophone at sunset with maybe a river in the background, because there’s always a river in the old town, that’s the reason old towns exist.

Winnipeg, where I grew up, is the western Canadian prairie city version of an old town, where ‘old’ means turn of the 20th century - which wouldn’t move the needle much in some old towns around the world, but that’s OK.

‘AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCES’

What is it about old towns that draw us to them in every city we visit?

“They tend to be more walkable neighborhoods,” says Heritage Winnipeg’s executive director Cindy Tugwell, “which makes people feel safer, and they have so much rich history, you feel you are learning about this city’s and country’s heritage, as I feel we are all connected and heritage brings out social connectivity with quaint cafes, and restaurants, and is very much in support of “small businesses”.  

“Many old towns do not just have heritage buildings, but (also) full streetscapes (like the Exchange District), where they can marvel at the architecture and take walking tours to learn about the city’s history.

“People are looking for authentic experiences.”

(The Winnipeg Hotel on Main Street. Courtesy Heritage Winnipeg)

In Winnipeg, when I last visited during the folk festival of 2019 before the pandemic times arrived, there were signs of revival in the Exchange District, while Portage Avenue, once the heart of the city, had fallen on hard times.

That makes visiting Winnipeg a bit of a puzzle. Do you lament the decline of Portage Avenue? Do you mourn the closing of the Bay? Or do you marvel at the new science research centre of the University of Winnipeg, and the fieldhouse on Spence Street, the new Inuit art wing of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the complete awesomeness of the Human Rights Museum, marvel at the retail district they’ve built at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine River, celebrate the downtown hockey arena and downtown ballpark, a 7,000 seat mini-masterpiece?

All of the above, actually.

To drive to the ballpark and the aforementioned Human Rights Museum, one has to drive past the iconic intersection of Portage and Main, where Bobby Hull received that million-dollar cheque in 1972 to join the Jets, then continue through the city’s true old town, a collection of turn of the 20th-century warehouses that haven’t quite been given a second life as a brewpub or quirky small business - unless you count the Nutty Club, a manufacturer of nuts and candy.

I don’t know about you, but you gotta like a downtown that has a candy warehouse stuck in the middle of it that no one talks about, because it’s always been there - since 1903.

THE WINNIPEG HOTEL

The oldest building in the old town is the Winnipeg Hotel, on Main Street.

Originally built in 1873, the Winnipeg Hotel never really possessed the grandeur of some late 19th century architecture - or maybe it did, but it was eroded by one ill-conceived reno job after another over the decades.

It was, for lack of a better word, a flophouse across Main Street from the train station.

As the decades rolled on, it only got worse.

It’s located on a block next door to a diner that became the Blue Note Cafe, next to another old building, the Frost Block that was built in the late 19th century. My college roommate Mark and his brother Curtis ran the Blue Note Cafe in the early 1980s.

The Blue Note was the city’s musical heartbeat. It’s where the dishwasher was Brad Roberts who started performing original tunes on Wednesdays nights that turned out to be the origin story of the Crash Test Dummies.

It was where every musician in town would show up after finishing their set to unwind after shows. They would be joined by students, artists, locals and some nights, touring musicians who often accepted Curtis’s offer of an open stage jam, turning a one-time Main Street greasy spoon into something special.

Like the time former Winnipegger Neil Young showed up - after having avoided Winnipeg for most of the previous two decades - and jammed away onstage at the Note, and then on his next LP named the backup band the Blue Notes?

The Blue Note is gone now. There’s a Grapes restaurant on one side and an empty lot on the other side of the Winnipeg Hotel where the Note used to be.

Over on the north corner of the same block is the Fortune-Macdonald Building, built in 1883, which is the home of another Winnipeg musical institution, Times Change High and Lonesome, where blues singer Dave Maclean has been hosting a blues jam for close to four decades.

There was a plan to redevelop the block by knocking everything else down, but about five years ago, the city placed the Winnipeg Hotel and the Fortune-Macdonald block on its historical resources list, despite the fact that the developers estimated it would cost around $17 million to restore the old buildings - and who would spend that?

THE POLLARD FAMILY

Meet the Pollard family.

The hotel was purchased in 2016 by the Pollard family, who also bought the Frost-Macdonald building, and revitalized that, which wasn’t cheap.

(The Frost-Macdonald block in 2021. Courtesy Heritage Winnipeg)

Now the Pollard family have this notion that the Winnipeg Hotel might be worth more to them as a revitalized boutique hotel that celebrates its old-town-ness than it would if they knocked it down.

They’re currently conducting a structural assessment of the building to determine what to do with it, according to a recent feature story on CBC Winnipeg’s website by Darren Bernhardt.

Maybe a boutique hotel (it’s just up the street from the Fort Garry Hotel)? Maybe affordable housing? (The family has a non-profit that develops that, too).

That prospect of saving the block that’s the origin story of the city has heritage building enthusiasts over the moon even if others shake their heads in bewilderment.

"The transformation, if that takes place, from what it is now to what it could be, I think it would be forever changing of Main Street,” said Tugwell, in the CBC article.

That’s the thing about old towns: my heritage jewel might be your eyesore. My romantic attachment to a city’s past might not be shared by a property developer who needs to pay for the property, and all the other stuff a century-old building requires to become a two-century old building - in a part of the world where the weather is extreme.

And then there’s this nagging concern that loving the old town is a generational thing. While I grew up worshipping medieval European cityscapes, my teenage son hasn’t. He doesn’t dream about century-old homes. In Calgary, where we live, he likes infills with big windows and booming wifi.

Although somewhat surprisingly, when I took him to visit his grandparents in 2017, he thought Winnipeg’s large, old, haphazardly historic downtown was really cool to walk around, so maybe it’s not a generational thing at all.

Maybe loving the old town is just a human thing after all. Maybe our municipal memories are all we’ve got.

Maybe a place is a lot more than where you get your mail delivered and assigned your area code.

All those warehouses like the one that still houses Nutty Club candy got built at the turn of the 20th century, when the railroad transformed the way everyone thought about what was possible. Winnipeg was the gateway to the Canadian west, the hub that was poised to become a great metropolis like Chicago and Kansas City.

Only it kind of didn’t, much to the chagrin of all those warehouse developers.

Can Winnipeg reinvent Main Street for the 21st century? Could there be a match between a bunch of early 20th century architecture and early 21st century innovators, creators - and musicians, who still need a room to perform in for the community?

Cindy Tugwell at Heritage Winnipeg thinks it’s imperative to try - because, in a way, a city’s best bet moving forward is to embrace, and treasure and revitalize what came before.

“There are many positive reasons to preserve our city’s built heritage,” she says.  “They create civic pride and are a tangible reminder of the architectural, cultural and social history of the building and community. It is important to learn about our past, as many things repeat themselves.  

“In a present time of climate change,” she adds, “the greenest building is an existing building and heritage buildings in Winnipeg particularly at the turn of the 20th century were built to a standard we will never see again, with amazing craftsmanship and attention to details and with materials like concrete, brick and stone foundations, and took usually several years to build.  Some of the interiors of our “landmark” heritage buildings are irreplaceable and stunning and have marble and brass and details like Europe.  

“Also, heritage building rehabilitations use more of the local economy for the work undertaken and they are typically more affordable space and they make a great retrofit for residential conversions.  The Millennials love the beautiful architecture both inside and out and those professionals who want to live downtown whether they rent or buy a condo.  They are usually great creative spaces and surroundings, and that is why in our Exchange District, it is a hub for non-profit organizations, artists, tech companies and post-secondary students.”

And here’s a thought: if you really want to pay tribute to the role that block played in Winnipeg’s cultural history, how about including a lounge in the boutique hotel - and calling it The Blue Note? How about getting Heritage Canada to honour the fact that some of the greatest Canadian musicians - Bachman, Turner, Burton, the Dummies, Tom Jackson, William Prince, the Weakerthans, oh yeah, Neil Young - hail from the Peg?

Curtis Riddell, the drummer who created a huge chunk of the city’s cultural history, lives now in Altona, Manitoba, south of the city.

I asked him if he’d heard about plans afoot to revitalize the Winnipeg Hotel.

“I read a bit about it,” he wrote in a Facebook message. “I like it.”

When it’s suggested that they might turn it into affordable housing, he says, “Put me down for an apartment!”

Maybe, probably, there’s a young musician out there looking for a place to showcase their new band.

Someone like, I don’t know, Nic Dyson, a singer songwriter with a new CD out called Brain Fog who it turns out is a cousin of CNN’s Jake Tapper, who discovered he has a slew of Manitoba relatives and spent a lot of time on his recent book tour bragging about his Winnipeg street cred?

Winterpeg has always had a unique talent for creating spaces that allow its people to blossom.

And its candy.