No-longer-popular Fort Garry Legion closing doors after 94 years

One of the city’s oldest legions will mark Remembrance Day for the last time before closing its doors.

Fort Garry Legion No. 90, which received its official charter on Feb. 2, 1931, will surrender the licence at the end of November.

The closure comes just three years after the branch moved from its home at 1125 Pembina Hwy. into to a former Pizza Hut a few blocks away at 762 Pembina Hwy.

“We thought it would be a recipe for success, but it wasn’t,” Garry Reid, the branch’s vice-president, said Monday.

“At one time we had 1,500 paid-up members, but today we have 300.”

Several other branches have closed in the past few years, including General Sir Sam Steele Legion No. 117, Andrew Mynarski Branch No 34 and General Monash Branch No. 115.

Even the country’s oldest legion, the No. 1 on Sargent Avenue, surrendered its charter in 2016.

Branches aren’t closing their doors just in Winnipeg. The La Verendrye Branch No. 220 in Ste. Anne shuttered in 2018.

Ron Wachniak, who had been a member of Branch 141 on Selkirk Avenue, known as the Ukrainian Canadian Veterans Branch, since 1969, said he can empathize with members of the Fort Garry Legion because he knows how sad he was when his own legion closed after 75 years in 2022.

“They say if you build it they will come, but they built it and they didn’t come, but what are you going to do?” said Wachniak, who also served as sergeant-at-arms at his branch.

Wachniak said many legions are in trouble because they don’t have lots for members to park in and, because of changing times, those who walk through the door don’t buy as many drinks as patrons did in the past.

He said many who do go to the legion today aren’t connected to the military or veterans.

“I’m part of the colour party and people today don’t relate to it,” he said. “I’m also one of the younger guys, and I’m 77.

“If you have no veterans left going, how can you have a veterans organization?”

Reid said the legion decided to move in 2022 when the membership faced expensive renovations and repairs of the building’s basement and roof, as well as the need for a new furnace and air conditioning system. A buyer came forward “with a deal they coudn’t turn down.”

“We didn’t have the money for all the renovations we needed to do,” he said.

There is now a six-storey apartment building at the site.

But Reid said the former pizza restaurant that the branch leased needed so many renovations that, including construction-cost overruns, it cost about $800,000 — most of the money it received for selling its former location.

The legion is currently in discussions with the landlord about the lease.

“It had been vacant for seven years and it was rat-infested,” he said. “We had a lot of work to do.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca