We can’t accept being a city of burnt buildings and rubble

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/09/2023 (763 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a house at the end of my block that used to have a business on the main floor. Upstairs was an apartment occupied by a friend, his daughter and their dogs. He used to look out his fire escape to see if we were outside and invite himself over for a visit.

After the business closed and the friend moved away, the building went up for sale but there were no buyers. At one point, it looked like someone had spliced the hydro mast to get power into the building via an open window. When I phoned Manitoba Hydro, I was told the property had been cut off from service months ago.

That was the window smoke poured from during the first fire.

We stood in the lane as firefighters hacked into what used to be our friend’s apartment with an axe, hoping no one was inside, hoping everyone was safely out.

A second fire, earlier this year, burned a hole through the roof (since covered with a tarp). After that fire, the stairs leading to the 2nd floor suite were removed. But then the coal chute was kicked open and I suppose people are living in there again.

Friday morning there was a familiar burnt smell in the air and I looked outside to see if the house had finally met a flame-engulfed demise. Instead, it was wildfire smoke, clouding the air in the backyard.

Last week I drove down Portage Avenue, en route to bid goodbye to a high school friend who is moving back to Toronto. I was in quite a state of self-pity, indulging my sadness around my lost youth and departing friend to a soundtrack of late ‘90s Weakerthans.

Traffic was awful and driving from Memorial to Main was interminable. Garry Street was closed and the smoke from the Windsor Hotel fire filled the downtown.

Looking toward Portage and Main, the obscured tops of buildings were wearing mourning veils of smoke and in my nostalgic reverie I wondered if they were gazing down at the historic Windsor as it burned, like a funeral for buildings, and our city the graveyard, with surface parking lots in place of headstones, piles of rubble as cairns. Here Lies the Windsor Hotel.

I’m saddened and a little afraid, at another headstone downtown. I’m afraid for the not-as-empty-as-we-think houses that will burn and the collateral damage they may bring.

I’m scared for my city’s future, for the lack of planning and foresight to ensure each of us has a safe place to call home.

I am saddened by piles of rubble, a testament to what we don’t have the power, will or resources to resurrect.

I am saddened by piles of rubble, a testament to what we don’t have the power, will or resources to resurrect.

These cairns and headstones are monuments to our unwillingness to look after one another.

Here lies kindness, compassion and self-sacrifice. Here lies honouring our past. Here lies a vision for our future. Here lies a home where a friend used to live.

Winnipeg’s abandoned houses, hotels and apartment buildings are homes to many who have no other options because our leaders and ourselves have made none available to them.

The pandemic of greed, the narrative of preserving what one has and the rest be damned, of putting self-interest in front of, instead of within, the needs of our community has brought us to this.

When the boards go up on the windows of the house next door and the childhood friend is replaced with unfamiliar and desperate faces, when the smoke rises from the roof and the wrecking ball comes, are we bound to continue merely shaking our heads and decrying the wasted real estate?

When a parking lot thrives for decades where a historic hotel poured memories onto our streets for over a century, will we notice?

We are becoming accustomed to a city on fire, a city of rubble, and we should be alarmed.

We are becoming accustomed to a city on fire, a city of rubble, and we should be alarmed.

We have the most unique and intact historical buildings on the continent. We have little bars and restaurants and hotels and character apartments with architectural details other cities would envy. We have a tradition of welcoming strangers and caring for one another.

The history of the Windsor Hotel is not one that most us were alive to witness.

If we acknowledge its legacy and life, the street scenes witnessed from the windows for 120 years, and the century of people sheltered in warmth as they slept, perhaps we can envision a city where all may find shelter, where all may sleep in warmth and security, where buildings haven’t, as the Weakerthans sing, “gone missing like teeth.”

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca