Long-standing city printer closes, massive near-century-old Portage Avenue building mostly empty

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This article was published 05/12/2023 (681 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After nearly 80 years, Kromar Printing Ltd. has closed its doors, leaving a massive building vacant on the edge of the city’s downtown core.

The Business Development Bank of Canada filed for a receivership of the Winnipeg-based printing business on Nov. 24 and the company shuttered last Friday.

Digitization and the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the company’s stability, and the collapse of the planned sale of the building at 725 Portage Ave. was the final nail in the coffin, director and chief financial officer Joseph Cohen told the Free Press Tuesday.

“(The sale) fell through in the last couple of weeks and, unfortunately, that just brought us to the spot we’re in now,” Cohen said.

Kromar had 23 employees when the doors closed, he said.

Founded as Kro-Mar Printing by Samuel Krolik and Harold Margolis in 1945, the company became a major Winnipeg printing supplier and counted the federal government and the Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries Corp. among its customers over the years.

Along with the application for receivership, the company was named in multiple lawsuits in recent years, including an Oct. 26 statement of claim from Manitoba Hydro that is currently before the courts.

“We ran our business with honesty and integrity. And unfortunately, it came to an end,” Cohen said.

The near 118,000 square-foot space will sit mostly empty at the edge of Winnipeg’s West End. A local historian said finding new occupants will be a challenge.

“It’s a department store-sized building, it’s not going to be easy to overhaul,” said Christian Cassidy, who runs a history blog and lives in the area.

Recent figures from CBRE Canada commercial real estate services show Winnipeg’s downtown is facing a 17.4 per cent vacancy rate, and the suburban office market sits at a 12 per cent vacancy.

Kromar’s building had been for sale for four years, Cohen said. A listing of the space, advertised by Shindico, showed the building with a $6-million price tag. New Directions, a non-profit organization attached to the east side of Kromar, was not listed as part of the sale.

“It often gets overlooked because it’s in that part of Portage Avenue where people are leaving the downtown area. (It’s) going to be very difficult to rehabilitate.”–Christian Cassidy

The Tyndall stone and brick building was constructed in 1929 to house The Security Storage and Warehouse Co. It went through renovations and upgrades until Kromar took over the entirety of the space in 1975, according to the Manitoba Historical Society.

The building accommodated a warehouse, multiple commercial spaces and an office area before Kromar took primary use of it.

Cassidy said the closure is a loss for local printing, as it was one of the few companies left in the city operating traditional presses.

The tenancy of such a large building is a loss, too.

“It often gets overlooked because it’s in that part of Portage Avenue where people are leaving the downtown area,” he said. “(It’s) going to be very difficult to rehabilitate.”

Unlike other vacant buildings that have been acquired for transformation, such as the Southern Chiefs’ Organization’s plan to turn the former Hudson’s Bay store into a mixed-use downtown hub, 725 Portage is not a marquee location.

“Calls for buildings that big aren’t high… it’s difficult to fill a building that size,” Cassidy said.

Paul Kornelsen, vice president of CBRE Canada, said as buildings similar to 725 Portage become available, the question becomes what to do with them.

Floor space, parking spaces, windows and location of elevators are all factors in redeveloping buildings, Kornelsen said.

“All these things play an important part in whether that is actually a realistic discussion for a building or not. So that’s kind of the issues that are that are facing the downtown Winnipeg office market,” he said.

In a brochure advertising the building’s sale, Shindico proposed the space be bought and redeveloped into a Portage-facing multi-unit residence structure with parking behind it.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca