When Portage Avenue was known as Queen Street

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/01/2022 (1368 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last month’s column looked at the history of Main Street and attempts to rename it Victoria Street in the city’s earliest years. What about Portage Avenue, Winnipeg’s other major thoroughfare?

The Portage name dates to the early 1800s when it was “the Portage road,” a trail leading from Winnipeg to Portage la Prairie.

Its location was entrenched in 1869. after the Hudson’s Bay Canada surrendered most of its land to the Dominion of Canada. The company was allowed to keep reserves of land around its forts and one of them was comprised of hundreds of acres between Portage Road and the Assiniboine River, stretching from what is now The Forks westward past modern city limits.

When the fledgling City of Winnipeg tried to grade Portage Road as one of its first major public works projects in 1875, the HBC took it to court, claiming that it wasn’t a street but part of the survey line and considered it their property. It warned that anyone grading it or even travelling on it would be charged with trespassing.  

The HBC’s intention was to force Broadway, a street it had laid out on its land reserve, to be the primary east-west thoroughfare for the emerging urban centre.

In a letter to the Manitoba Free Press in September 1875, a “Citizen” urged the city to stick to its guns: “The roadway now being graded is the one the city requires…. The substitutes offered by the HBCo… are no equivalents. Broadway is a useless roadway at present running along one extremity of the city.…”

The city won the court case and graded Portage Avenue two chains (44 yards) wide, which required some fences and existing buildings to be removed.

For a brief time in the early 1880s, Portage Avenue, as it was called by then, went by the name Queen Street.

The change appears to have been promoted by alderman Alexander McMicken, a transplanted Torontonian. His Queen Street bylaw passed at the Nov. 21, 1881 city council meeting with, it seems, little opposition from his colleagues or the daily papers.

Some businesses adopted the Queen Street name and the city used it in official notices. For the most part, though, Portage Avenue remained in common usage. In January 1884, the Manitoba Free Press noted that a petition calling for the return of the Portage Avenue name was in circulation. Its editorial concluded: “Restore the old name. The thoroughfare will never be known by any other, at any rate.”

The name Portage Avenue was restored the following month.

What we now call Portage Avenue East went through an additional step to get its name.

This stretch of road had been called Thistle Street but was changed to Queen Street East when Portage Avenue was renamed. When Queen Street was dropped, it reverted to being Thistle Street despite many of its property owners wanting the more prestigious Portage Avenue address. Some businesses even referred to themselves as being located on Portage Avenue East rather than on Thistle.

It wasn’t until December 1901 that its name was officially changed.