Christian Cassidy
8 minute read
Monday, Jun. 14, 2021
Kildonan Park Golf Course, the city’s first municipal links, celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. It is the remnant of a failed $2-million plan to turn the park into an entertainment supersite.
Calls for the City of Winnipeg to create a municipal golf course began in the early 1900s. By that time, communities such as Virden, Portage la Prairie and Brandon already operated their own. In the Winnipeg region, golf was strictly a private affair with the opening of the Winnipeg — now Southwood — Golf Club in 1893, the St. Charles Golf Club in 1905, and Pine Ridge Golf Club in 1912. In August 1912, the Winnipeg Free Press ran a story headlined, “Time is now ripe for municipal golf course for the city of Winnipeg.” It included an interview with Tom Bendelow of Spalding and Co. of Chicago who had a hand in designing Pine Ridge.
Bendelow extolled the virtues of municipal golf courses and noted that many cities in the U.S. had already established them to make the game affordable for the masses. “The municipal golf course is simply an evolution of the municipal playground and the success of the latter scheme is a criterion of the success that awaits the former when the authorities have awakened to a realization of the needs of the community,” Bendelow told the Free Press.
Winnipeg’s parks board was finally ready to wade into the matter at its Oct. 21, 1914 meeting when it requested the board of control, the city’s finance committee, investigate if there was enough land available at the “new exhibition site” at Kildonan Park to include a golf course. Much of the land for Kildonan Park was purchased in 1909 on the recommendation of George Champion, the city’s superintendent of Public Parks. He worried that if the city did not act soon, finding land for a park in the north part of the city would be lost forever due to its rapid urbanization.
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