Main Street could have been Victoria Street

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/11/2021 (1408 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg didn’t have much panache when it came to naming things. Major parks were named for the geographic area they were in, bridges simply carried the name of the street they were part of, and who remembers the Winnipeg Arena and Winnipeg Stadium?

The same could be said for its major thoroughfares. Ellice was the trail that meandered its way to Fort Ellice, Pembina went to Pembina, N.D., and Portage went to Portage la Prairie. The trail names were established by the time the city began operations in 1874 and never changed as the region urbanized.

However, there have been a couple of half-hearted attempts to rename the generic “Main Street” for Queen Victoria.

The first came in 1897, the diamond jubilee of Victoria’s reign, when cities across the British Empire took stock of parks, roads and buildings that could be named in her honour.

Winnipeg mayor William F. McCreary wanted the city to install a jubilee clock in the dome of city hall and, as reported by the Free Press from a May 1897 board of works meeting, “… thought it would be a good idea to change the name of Main Street, which was more suitable for a country village, and to call it Victoria Street.”

There was little support for his motion, and it never made it past the committee stage. (He didn’t get his clock, either.)

Alderman Thomas Wilson revisited the issue at a July 1908 board of works meeting. His argument was that “Winnipeg was now beyond the stage of a city-village and the use of Main as the name of a principal street should be abolished”.

His motion to rename it Queen Victoria Street also failed.

The final time the matter appears to have come up at city hall was in February 1911, when the civic works and property committee received a letter from a citizen suggesting Main be renamed Victoria or Selkirk. The Free Press reported that it “did not meet with serious consideration”.

Perhaps hoping to put a permanent lid on future discussions of the sort, the city’s assessment commissioner, J. W. Harris, submitted a report to the committee’s next meeting. He argued that there were so many addresses, deeds and other documents that would have to be changed that renaming Main would “involve grievous complications”.

There was a brief time when a portion of Main Street did have a different name.

When the Hudson’s Bay Company sold its land holdings to the Dominion government in 1869, it was allowed to keep reserves of “strategic lands”. One of these was in Winnipeg from Portage Avenue south to the Assiniboine River, from Upper Fort Garry to around Osborne Street.

The HBC chose to name its section of Main Street “Garry Street,” as it connected Upper and Lower Fort Garry. Early businesses, such as the Winnipeg Hotel, began with a Garry Street address.

The HBC soon fell in line and by 1879 that stretch of road was referred to as Main Street South.