Portage and Main future draws plenty of interest at open house

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This article was published 10/05/2023 (880 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The opportunity to weigh in on changes that could transform Portage and Main drew Winnipeggers to an open house inside one of the controversial intersection’s office towers Wednesday.

City planners were on hand inside the lobby at 201 Portage Ave., to answer questions about a consultant’s study released last month outlining a variety of projects that could be done at street level and — in some cases — high above it, to improve access and esthetics in the divisive corridor.

The ideas, both restrained and grandiose, were generated by the inescapable reality that major surgery is required to repair the city’s deteriorating infrastructure heart.

The membrane below the intersection that since 1979 has protected the underground concourse of shops and services that also serves as the only pedestrian access, is well past its life expectancy and needs to be replaced.

That massive construction opens the doors to change, if not opening the barricades to foot traffic.

“If the real purpose of this is to make downtown a viable place again, it has to be done in a certain manner to make people actually want to be here, which I think is mostly in part to opening pedestrian traffic back into the area,” said Jeff Hodgins, who works near the vehicles-only intersection.

“Not only just that, but also making it a safe place for pedestrians, reducing people driving through.”

The consultant’s study included a fanciful six-storey-high “sky garden” offering access via glass elevators and another idea featuring lookout towers at each corner, along with possible large-scale art installations and attractive sidewalk and street paving stones and tree planting.

Hodgins was among visitors who stopped in to speak with city staff, wrote suggestions for improvements on sticky notes and applied red, yellow and green stickers to posters of individual ideas to denote interest.

By mid-morning, some had quite a few more green stickers than others. A poster describing edge-to-edge sidewalk paving with trees at the intersection was dotted with mostly green stickers, while the lookout towers, sky garden and public art options were, judging by the smattering of yellow and red stickers, more contentious.

Hodgins, who noted that he liked the lookout towers, placed a red sticker on the sky garden and a yellow on the large-scale art proposal.

“Before we start throwing up art pieces, we should probably really be addressing the core issues,” he said. “We can put up a beautiful art piece when we’re not broke as a city.”

Those “core issues” seemed to be the focus of many; a board left blank for people to place their suggestions was filled with notes including “Priority is opening!” “Bike lanes should be considered,” and “Public safety, more police and security.”

Others were concerned about the price tag that could be attached to some of the showier options.

Jim Moore, the property manager of 201 Portage, decried the overhead designs as “pie in the sky” and “way too pricey” on his suggestion sticky note.

“By far the best, most reasonable ideas are these ones where you take down the barricade, you make it waterproof again with a membrane, you put some bollards up for safety, some trees, some lighting and you’re done,” Moore said.

“And you don’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars, or whatever the price tag might be on sky decks or things like that.”

Kirby Cote’s suggestion took up two sticky notes: “Designs do not meet the Accessibility for Manitobans Act standard for public spaces.”

“We know what universal design looks like, we know how to create accessible, inclusive spaces and we know what vibrant communities need to be safe and healthy,” she said.

“And art is part of it, but we also need to think about the space that we are putting the art in, and can everybody move around that space?”

Cote, who is visually impaired, lives nearby and struggles to navigate the intersection.

“We can’t even keep a bathroom downtown open 24-7, or a transit shelter. How are we supposed to keep towers and bridges and elevators open?” she said.

“I feel like whoever submitted these designs was extremely out of touch with the people that are actually walking around in our downtown area.”

Critiques of the current set of ideas are what the organizers were hoping for, said Kurtis Kowalke, a principal planner for the city.

“If certain ideas don’t resonate with people, that’s what we want to hear,” he said. “We really want to put as many ideas on the table as possible at this stage where we’re really having those discussions about what works, what doesn’t, what resonates, what actually fulfils our project objectives.”

A second pop-up open house is being held in the underground concourse Thursday morning and the city will continue to accept online surveys (https://engage.winnipeg.ca/portageandmain) until May 26. A study based on the results, along with design recommendations, will be released in the fall.

“If this morning has been any indication, I think there is a lot of interest,” Kowalke said. “There’s certainly a lot of people that work right at the intersection or catch a bus in the intersection, there’s lots of people nearby, and I think they have a really strong opinion of what Portage and Main should be.”

While visiting the open house, Asper Foundation president and businesswoman Gail Asper felt the most important choice wasn’t on a poster. Rather than place a green sticker on any of the existing options, she scrawled her own on a small piece of paper — simply take down the barricades and allow pedestrians to cross the street.

Quickly, her paper was dotted with others’ green stickers.

“I think it’s good to have these discussions,” she said. “But what concerned me about the things that I saw posted in the lobby, none of them included opening the barricades, and that is a huge disappointment to me.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca