Creative spirit could help dodge a Detroit future

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/08/2023 (744 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The forecast called for sun that morning, so I took advantage of West Broadway’s proximity to downtown, and decided to walk to my meeting in one of the tall towers overlooking True North Square. I headed straight north to Portage Avenue, as I wanted to take streets with high traffic in case I ran into trouble.

Outside Lions Place, itself a battleground for housing equity, someone was sleeping in the bus shelter, wrapped in a purple sheet. I wondered if they chose Portage Avenue for the same reason I did: being visible means help will be nearby if something goes amiss.

Nearby, a sidewalk sinkhole had provided habitat for an enormous mushroom, recently kicked over by some other passerby.

Past the bridal stores showing their Barbie-pink gowns, I crossed into downtown. My journey now marked by boarded-up windows of the former Bay store, and the intermittent empty shopfronts and peeling streets signs (Kennedy Street reduced to just ‘dy’) along the Graham Avenue Transit Mall.

A security guard nodded at me across the empty plaza near the front of the Manitoba Hydro building. This urban quietude was unsettling but familiar.

In my pre-parenting days, I was a frequent road-tripper to the U.S. One such trip was taken with my now-husband to Toronto via Minneapolis, Chicago and Detroit.

En route we learned the Stanley Cup playoffs would be in our path on the return trip, and we quickly organized to get tickets and spend some extra time either in Detroit or Chicago, depending on the playoff schedule.

In the end, we saw the Red Wings play the Blackhawks at the old Joe Louis Arena in Detroit.

The view from the People Mover train offered a view of a city that seemed frozen in a time of past prosperity.

Detroit is peppered with vacant buildings, beautiful historic architecture built during the city’s boom days now falling into disrepair. That was nearly 15 years ago, and at that time I would have never drawn comparisons to our own sweet home, once dubbed the Chicago of the North.

I hadn’t really thought about how those empty streetscapes made me feel until my recent eerily quiet downtown stroll, but the depleted infrastructure and empty shopfronts suddenly seemed very foreboding.

Chicago, in fact, with its thriving arts scene and historic districts, old neighbourhoods built up over generations and waves of immigration, feels like an alternate reality, like peering into a parallel Winnipeg, one where the buildings never emptied and the streetcars never stopped running. Where laughter and music spills out of historic buildings, never vacant, onto Main Street.

Winnipeg has branched off from its Chicago past and is beginning to feel the cold creep of a Detroit future.

The Winnipeg of the past seemed predestined to be a shining, roaring northern city like that.

We overbuilt our legislative building and our aqueduct to serve an expected burgeoning population.

We laid out a broad Main Street and Portage Avenue, and lined them with jaw-dropping architecture by the world’s finest professionals.

This was to be a grand and important place to be. But now, like Detroit, the windows on many of these once-proud facades are now dirty and dark. Winnipeg has branched off from its Chicago past and is beginning to feel the cold creep of a Detroit future.

Walking home again, I wondered: Maybe we need to shed comparisons and be brave enough to look within.

If we did, perhaps we could find the things that define us that we do well in this present time, and nurture and celebrate them, not just to visitors, but to one another.  Finding and sharing the spaces and events that give us meaning, doggedly resisting me-first attitudes toward less fortunate neighbours, and honouring our own collective journey and gifts.

That might be the path we should be exploring; it’s what makes Winnipeg, well, Winnipeg.

We are no longer a major centre for commerce, despite decades of attempts to woo big business here, with limited success.

Our past may be Chicago, and our present may be Detroit, but our future can and should be decidedly Winnipeg.

Business dollars are essential to our economy, but Winnipeg today has a tremendous arts community, architecture, Indigenous culture and vision, and a dynamic citizenry built by wave after wave of newcomers.

We have a fully independent local newspaper, a few pro sports teams, and a world-renowned fringe festival and ballet. We have a robust independent music scene and an enormous folk festival.

We have all the ingredients of a world-class arts and culture city, but our arts organizations exist in spite of the single-minded pursuit of business dollars, consistently defining and defending their own existence with stubborn and scrappy Winnipeg resourcefulness.

Winnipeg has changed from its boom era a century ago. Our past may be Chicago, and our present may be Detroit, but our future can and should be decidedly Winnipeg.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca