Winnipeg is dead set on destruction

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/04/2016 (3457 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Wednesday, city council handed a death sentence to downtown’s Public Safety Building. People who find it ugly could not care less.

They ought to, however, if only because demolition is something Winnipeg does so well. When it comes to finding creative reasons to flatten interesting structures, few other Canadian cities can compete.

Consider the recent track record:

1. Public Safety Building

Born: 1966. Death: Pending.

Cause of death: Municipal incompetence and possible malfeasance.

Love it or hate it, the brutalist home of the Winnipeg Police Service has cast a unique shadow over the Civic Centre neighbourhood for two generations. Unfortunately, the building’s most important feature — the Tyndall-stone cladding — has proven to be its fatal flaw.

By 2006, decades worth of freeze-thaw cycles has loosened that stone from the building, prompting the City of Winnipeg to come up with a repair plan. After elected officials balked at the cost, the city decided to find out if it made more sense to replace it instead.

According to a city-commissioned study, it would have cost about $184 million to renovate the PSB and expand it over the site of the Civic Centre Parkade. The same study figured it would cost about $180 million to instead buy the Canada Post complex on Graham Avenue and turn it into a new police HQ.

For reasons only a public inquiry can discern, council wasn’t told about the renovation option and also was led to believe the Canada Post plan would only cost $135 million. Council also wasn’t told about an 1875 caveat that restricts the land below the PSB to some form of public use.

Adding insult to injury, the Canada Post purchase saddled the city with a mostly empty Graham Avenue office tower that faces $20 million worth of its own renovations. And after the city bought that lemon of a tower, council went out and approved long-term municipal office leases in other privately-owned downtown buildings.

The myopia is astounding. On Wednesday, council approved the demolition of the PSB because a costly renovation makes no sense when the city is hamstrung by existing office leases and is also trying to peddle the Graham Avenue office tower.

The only thing uglier than the building is the manner in which its fate was sealed.

 

2. Luke’s Machinery

Born: 1948 Died: 2015

Cause of death: Manitoba Hydro land assembly.

Between 1948 and 1977, a trio of humble storefronts rose on Notre Dame Avenue, where they served as a vital part of the pedestrian streetscape. They were toppled last year as part of a domino effect that began in 2009 when Manitoba Hydro was denied the right to gut the interiors of three far more handsome McDermot Avenue heritage buildings in order to expand an Exchange District substation.

Still in need of space for a substation, Hydro bought a surface-parking lot on Adelaide Street from the Calvary Temple. It then helped broker a deal that saw the church purchase and demolish the low-rise structures at 312-318 Notre Dame Ave. to ensure it would still have enough surface parking.

Whatever Hydro wants, Hydro eventually gets.

 

 

3. Shanghai Restaurant building

Born: 1882 Died: 2012

Cause of death: Demolition by neglect.

The Chinatown building variously known as the Robert Block, the Coronation Block and the Shanghai Restaurant building arose on King Street shortly after Winnipeg was first served by a railway. The building briefly housed city hall offices and had both commercial and residential tenants before the first Chinese restaurant set up shop on the main floor in 1929.

The Shanghai name first appeared in 1941 and stuck around for seven decades, until city council allowed the entire structure to come down. The upper floors hadn’t been heated in decades, the building was beyond repair and the ironically named Chinatown Development Corporation sought the land for a residential tower.

All that remains now is a plot of grass.

 

4. Old Richardson terminal

Born: 1964 Died: 2012

Cause of death: Expediency.

After the Second World War, a relatively cocky Canada was big on using architecture to make a statement. In order to convey an image of a cutting-edge country, the feds commissioned the construction of several modernist airports, including the original terminal at Winnipeg International Airport.

It was decorated with purpose-built art, boasted space-age furniture and had the clean lines so closely associated with modernism. Half a century later, the construction of its ultramodern replacement left the Winnipeg Airports Authority with a cavernous white elephant that was too expensive to maintain.

So down went the original terminal, imbued with all the hopes and dream of a postwar era that now seems foolishly optimistic.

 

5. Albert Street Business Block

Born: 1877 Died: 2012

Cause of death: Electrical fire.

Up until this decade, Albert Street boasted one of the Exchange District’s most attractive streetscapes, thanks in part to the Albert Street Business Block, a quirky little low-rise built around one of Winnipeg’s oldest existing homes.

In 2007, when the owner of the neighbouring St. Charles Hotel sought to knock down the Business Block to make way for a parking-lot entrance, heritage advocates fought hard to convince city hall to intervene.

Council, in its wisdom, demanded the hotel be redeveloped as a precursor to the block’s demolition. But fate had other plans.

An electrical fire took down the building, leaving the lower portion of Albert Street just as desolate as anywhere else in a downtown where empty lots and new developments trade places like an immense, asphalt-and-steel version of whack-a-mole.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca