Preserving past reminds us who we are as we build future

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/10/2024 (369 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Cinderella dances in the arms of her prince at one minute to midnight. Three bears hold empty porridge bowls and regard the girl sleeping in Baby Bear’s bed. Little Red Riding Hood stands by a bonneted sleeping wolf, a moment before the wolf awakens.

Every scene teeters at some moment of discovery. They repeat their animated motions again and again, eerie and tattered from years of service on the 6th floor of the downtown Eaton’s store.

In my memory of the fairy-tale vignettes, they are at eye level, and housed in shadow boxes in a darkened narrow hallway.

I am particularly entranced by the Little Match Girl, who lights her final match over and over to try to stay warm enough to survive the cold night, even as families can be seen through warm windows behind her. Somewhere in my young mind, I fall in love with her tragedy: that in trying to warm herself she burns through the one thing she might have to sell to improve her lot.

Caught in time, these visions of Winnipeg’s past anchor me to this place. Even now, restored and nestled in their new homes at the Manitoba Children’s Museum, brightly lit and visible from all sides, I still see them as creaky and dimly lit dioramas of the dying days of a dying downtown department store.

I like to think they, too, have a memory, and perhaps recognize me from their former home.

I’m getting older and I’m starting to see layers of time and streetscape stacking up around my city. I can still see the old Winnipeg Arena and Stadium when I drive down St. James Street, and a snapshot of the “old” zoo entrance will never cease to fill me with childlike anticipation of a day out.

But there are more layers to unseen and vanished Winnipeg than in my short life. At the Manitoba Museum, in the Winnipeg Gallery, I marvel at the stone heads of newspaper boys, carved off the old Free Press building, and a stained-glass window salvaged from our “gingerbread” city hall.

Both of these places are long gone, of course, yet somehow seeing these small shards of our history evokes the entire context in which they were originally situated.

Even the frame displaying a film montage of Winnipeg historical moments is made from a grand brass door frame that once admitted shoppers to Eaton’s, and generations of Winnipeg children on their way to see the vignettes.

Using relics like these as a theatre proscenium is fitting: These vestiges of our physical history are the pieces of set design upon which the story of Winnipeg continues to play out. They are not only the stage furniture, but the stage itself, and the costumes, the sets, the curtains and the lighting for the story of who we are.

These broken but cherished pieces of our past are mementos arranged in a scrapbook that tells us, and those to come, who we are and how we live.

Our efforts at preservation of our past provide a small evocation of what once was and a way to carry some of the past into the future, a way to link our generation to those who already passed this way and those yet to come.

I don’t have personal memories of the McIntyre Block, the Devon Court Apartments or the Northern Crown Bank, but I still mourn the pieces of these ghost buildings that were pulverized in the remodelling of Air Canada Park. The city’s defence is that public consultations yielded no sentiment toward preserving the shards. However, it also seems no one asked this question.

There is no going back, of course, not to the spooky vignettes of my childhood, no more than to the McIntyre Block or the Devon Court Apartments or the Northern Crown Bank.

In a Winnipeg vignette, dimly lit and creaking, again and again, the wrecking ball is an inch away from destroying a piece of our past. We are forever suspended in a moment of decision about how the rest of the story might play out. Like a mechanical Cinderella, spinning, glancing over the prince’s shoulder for a view of the clock, over and over, for more than a century, we, too, have had the mystical ability to stop time and preserve the pieces of our own story.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca