Streetcar sculpture impedes Pantages sale

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This article was published 12/06/2020 (2289 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The future of the Pantages Playhouse Theatre will take one step forward and another step back on Tuesday.

That is when the city’s property and development committee will vote on the sale of the 106-year-old theatre at the corner of Main Street and Market Avenue to a group led by Alex Boersma and Lars Nicholson for $530,000.

A condition of the theatre’s sale was an easement that would allow the Bloody Saturday sculpture, which commemorates the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, to remain at its location in front of the theatre, facing Main Street. The sculpture features a streetcar sunken into the ground at an angle, commemorating the streetcar tipped during the strike and the deaths in the resulting riot.

The Winnipeg Land Titles Office has rejected the city’s easement application, the committee’s agenda says. It says the city will instead seek to subdivide the land and keep that portion where the sculpture is installed, selling the theatre and the rest of the property to Boersma and Nicholson.

“Really that’s to protect the sculpture indefinitely, and I think it’s the right thing. It’s actually a far better long-term solution than what had initially been proposed,” says Boersma, whose company, Futuremark Development, aims to collaborate with the Manitoba Centennial Centre Corporation (MCCC) to program the 1,475-seat venue.

Boersma says any immediate plans for the Pantages have been put on hold by a familiar foe of all entertainment and sporting venues in 2020 — the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Everything that we’ve been working on up until this year has been put on pause due to COVID,” he says.

The Pantages has been shut since fall 2018. Prior to that, it was operated by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, whose bid to purchase the building was rejected by the city.

The city took over the Pantages in a July 1944 tax sale. The theatre was added to the city’s list of historical resources in 1981 and it became a national historic site of Canada in 1985.

If the sale is approved, it will be the second Exchange District property that a Boersma-led company has been involved with in the past year. A conversion of a Princess Street warehouse into loft-style apartment rentals, called Warehouse 1885, is near completion and he says tenants are scheduled to move in Aug. 1.

“It’s a part of our city’s fabric,” Boersma says of the Pantages. “It’s immensely important culturally to the city and the vibrancy of the Exchange District as a whole. We’re definitely doing everything we can to keep that space accessible to the public.”

Council will have the final vote on the sale.

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall