Turning the page on tragedy

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This article was published 27/03/2012 (4918 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In an optimistic sign for inner-city Winnipeg, a West End restaurant that closed in the wake of a high-profile 2005 shooting may soon reopen as a new establishment.

On Wednesday, the City of Winnipeg’s board of adjustment will consider a request to allow a restaurant and cocktail lounge to operate in a two-storey structure at the northeast corner of Sargent Avenue and Maryland Street.

The building is famous for housing Picasso’s Seafood Restaurant for more than two decades — and infamous for being scarred with bullet holes during an October 2005 gang gunfight that resulted in the death of 17-year-old bystander Phillipe Haiart.

A West End mainstay since the 1980s, Picasso’s was famous for both its Portuguese food and annual outdoor midwinter meals under the proprietorship of Arnaldo Carreira, its original owner.

After the restaurant changed hands, both the business and the reputation of the neighbourhood declined, the latter reaching a nadir when shots fired from a crack house across the street killed Haiart.

The building has stood empty for six years. Two Vietnamese-Canadian entrepreneurs now own the structure and plan to reopen it as a restaurant and lounge, city documents say.

The board of adjustment — a council body that handles minor zoning requests — has been urged to approve the plans.

“The proposed development will find a new use for a vacant building and provide a desirable commercial use along Sargent Avenue, which is a community mixed-use corridor,” city planner Michael Robinson writes in a report.

The prospective development is a welcome sign to people who live in the immediate vicinity, which remains stigmatized by the shooting.

“I look out my window and I see vacant storefront, vacant storefront, vacant storefront. As soon as buildings are occupied, the area gets a lot safer,” said Rob Park, who plans to move into a house he’s fixing up near the corner of Sargent and Maryland.

“This is good for all of us. There will be no resistance to this (application) in the neighbourhood.”

Park said he remains annoyed when media focus on crime in his neighbourhood instead of focusing on Sargent Avenue’s diversity of restaurants.

“For one of the most impoverished parts of the city, we have better eating than anywhere else in the country,” he said, referring to the Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, Korean, Indian, Caribbean and Peruvian establishments on the ethnically diverse strip between Balmoral and Wall streets.

Area councillor Harvey Smith (Daniel McIntyre) said in a statement he, too, is pleased to see the former Picasso’s reopen, even if it won’t be a new Portuguese seafood restaurant.

But the West End’s revitalization does not just lie with the restaurant business, suggested Park, who urged city council and the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission to ban the sale of single cans of beer from vendors.

“If they really want to improve safety, they can end the panhandling for $3 to buy a king can,” he said.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca