Why Graham Avenue matters to downtown

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This article was published 15/04/2016 (3497 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg has seen a rise in third-wave coffee shops since they first began appearing in 2012. A different approach to what Starbucks does, and on a different planet from Tim Hortons, third-wave shops are characterized by a particular attention to the quality of coffee served and an interior esthetic that is refreshingly simple.

Winnipeggers have not at all been averse to this trend, and third-wave cafés have become a fixture in just about every one of Winnipeg’s established hip neighbourhoods.

Not just a big-city thing, they have also sprouted up in Brandon, Winkler and Gimli.

First opening on Sherbrook Street in West Broadway, Thom Bargen Coffee and Tea opened a second location downtown last month, in what had recently been a vacant optometrist shop at the corner of Kennedy Street and Graham Avenue. The building’s dismal facade was replaced by one that is light and open, allowing sunshine to pour in and for the activities of the busy café and the busy sidewalk to animate each other. Modern Supply Co., a modish boutique specializing in vintage and local designers, subleases space in the building with them.

The success of these coffee shops offer lessons in how informal person-to-person connections still matter in an age of social media and social atomization. This particular location exemplifies the potential strength of the downtown neighbourhood along and near Graham Avenue, from the Bay to the Manitoba Hydro tower.

The story of downtown’s commercial health has often focused on diminishing crowds at the downtown department stores and the gradual exodus of major shops and chain stores to Polo Park and the suburban shopping malls carefully planned by the Unicity government.

But the retail heart of downtown was also home to countless specialized services, boutiques and restaurants, many of which cropped up on side streets such as Vaughan, Kennedy and Graham. Merchants took advantage of both the proximity to the big stores on Portage and the suitably smaller premises and cheaper off-Portage rents.

These places added texture and diversity to the downtown experience. A little, forgotten hat shop on Carlton Street was as much of an important part of my grandfather’s recollection of downtown Winnipeg in the 1940s as Eaton’s and the great movie palaces were.

In the 1970s and ’80s, many of these stores moved out to the sleepy neighbourhood main streets first built up in the streetcar era: Osborne, Corydon, Academy and Provencher.

These neighbourhoods offered a traditional urban esthetic with a post-’60s bohemian flare, while still being relatively easy places for customers to park their Volvos. New commercial development followed, and these streets soon became new centres of specialized retail, restaurants and cafés.

Winnipeg’s downtown didn’t enjoy the same appeal in these years. More importantly, fostering a concentration of small businesses there wasn’t major a priority for policy-makers and property owners. In the era of big megaprojects, luring small commercial tenants was too marginal and risky compared to demolishing buildings and waiting to be bought out by a development corporation.

While the construction of Portage Place obliterated what was left north of Portage Avenue in the 1980s, the collection of small storefronts on and around Graham Avenue remains largely intact, and today there is an opportunity to rediscover this part of downtown and capitalize on its advantages.

For enterprises such as Thom Bargen, Modern Supply and their tireless and friendly neighbour at Hue’s Shoe Repair, these advantages are simply commercial space that is not too big for their purposes and decent walk-by traffic.

Commercial concentration and diversity not only offer an array of specific little reasons to visit a neighbourhood, but one general, more intangible reason: it is an interesting and busy place to be. Few places in Winnipeg possess a winning combination of centrality and scale found on this stretch of Graham Avenue.

Amid a downtown too easily characterized by outsized parking lots, sprawling buildings and insular shopping malls, Graham Avenue is an island of humanity. Its granularity and pedestrian traffic make one feel like they’re in the heart of a big and purposeful city, more so than they might while standing in the deserted shadows of a dull skyscraper.

It may be too early to declare Graham Avenue Winnipeg’s newest cool neighbourhood, but the addition of another busy coffee shop certainly indicates how it is one of downtown’s most important ones.

Robert Galston is a master’s candidate in the city planning department at the University of Manitoba.