Don't fear the chain store

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

"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

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...

...starts slowly.

Incidentally, President Obama's daughters attend private school.

H/T, Cafe Hayek

Not a good sign

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

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

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.)

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

Red (and yellow) tape

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

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!

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

"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

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!

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