Friends pave way for park

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This article was published 02/06/2009 (6059 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Pedestrians and motorists will be able to get a direct glimpse of what remains of Winnipeg’s birthplace when the Petro-Canada station at Broadway and Main Street is demolished to enlarge the future Upper Fort Garry heritage park.

The provincial government has purchased the gas station that has obscured the view of Upper Fort Garry Gate, the sole remaining piece of the fur trade-era fort, paving the way for the future heritage park to extend all the way from the Assiniboine River to Broadway.

"I’ve said many times I wanted a green corridor to go all the way from Bonnycastle Park," Premier Gary Doer told reporters on Monday, the day the Friends of Upper Fort Garry took possession of two parcels of surplus city land in and around the former fort’s footprint.

In a deal brokered in part by businessman and philanthropist Hartley Richardson, the province paid Petro-Canada $1 million for its Main and Broadway gas station and will assume possession on Sept. 15.

Petro-Canada, in turn, will donate $1.35 million to the heritage park. The Friends of Upper Fort Garry had always eyed the purchase of the gas-station property but were more concerned with raising as much of the $10 million they needed to meet the terms of a city deal to create the park, said Jerry Gray, chairman of the volunteer group.

Right now, the Friends do not know when the Petro-Canada station will be demolished. The province has already begun an environmental assessment that will likely see some form of remediation take place at the gas station site. But the Friends will begin working on the heritage park this year. Some landscaping will be conducted this summer and a former city office building at 100 Main St. will be demolished in the fall, Gray said.

Construction on the park as well as its interpretive centre will begin in earnest in 2010, he added.

The entire project will see the heritage park occupy almost an entire city block bounded by Main Street, Assiniboine Avenue, Fort Street and Broadway.

To make way for the park, the Friends already have a deal in place to purchase and eventually demolish the Grain Exchange Curling Club on Fort Street, which sits on top of part of the former fort’s footprint.

But the group has no plans to acquire and demolish what will eventually be the sole remaining building on the block — the Manitoba Club, which has sat on Broadway since 1905.

"The Manitoba Club is historic. The Petro-Canada gas station is not," said Richardson, who’s both a Friend of Upper Fort Garry and a Manitoba Club member.

Upper Fort Garry was dismantled in stages between 1881 and 1888. The site served as a lacrosse club, an athletic stadium, the regional headquarters of Imperial Oil, Metro Winnipeg’s pre-Unicity headquarters and a city public works building before the land was declared surplus in 2006.

In 2007, the city decided to sell the southwest corner of the site to Crystal Developers, which wanted to build an apartment tower at the corner of Fort and Assiniboine.

That led to a successful lobbying effort by the Friends that culminated in Monday’s formal land transfer.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca