Arlington Street’s great lengths

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/02/2022 (1342 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Arlington Street is unique in that it is Winnipeg’s only north-south thoroughfare aside from Main Street not to change its name when it crosses Notre Dame Avenue and again when it spans the CPR yards.

To accomplish this, three streets were merged under the Arlington name in 1910 for an urban highway that never materialized.

Mentions of Arlington Street can be found in land auction notices as far back as 1897, though it doesn’t appear in street directories until 1905, with just four residences on it.

It is likely named after Arlington Street in the St. James district of the City of Westminster, London. This tony enclave, just steps from Pall Mall and St. James’ Palace, was home to noted figures such as Lord Salisbury, a former British prime minister, whose name and address appeared often in local newspapers in the 1890s.

This area of Winnipeg was also known as St. James until the city’s boundaries expanded and pushed it further west. Both Arlington Streets (in Winnipeg and London) are also minutes away from St. James’ Park, though Winnipeg rechristened its version Vimy Memorial Park in 1925.

By 1905, the city and the private company that operated its streetcar system were desperately seeking another thoroughfare to get passengers from the North End to Fort Rouge by streetcar. The only option at the time was an increasingly congested Main Street.

The new Arlington Street fit the bill. It could cross the Assiniboine and connect to Harrow Street at its southern end; and, at the time, it became Brant Street north of Notre Dame Avenue, and beyond the CPR yards it aligned with Brown Street, once part of Magnus Brown’s estate.

This Central Belt streetcar line was announced in November 1906 and required two bridges to become a reality. One was the Arlington Street bridge to cross the Assiniboine River and the other was the Brown – Brant Street Bridge to span the CPR yards.
Both projects ran into difficulties.

The population south of Portage Avenue grew rapidly between 1905 and 1910 and by the time construction tenders were ready to be let for the southern span, residents and local politicians had cooled on the idea of running an urban highway through the neighbourhood.

The northern bridge opened in February 1912 but never served its primary purpose as a streetcar connection to the North End, as streetcar operators refused to drive down its steep grade. Despite years of legal wrangling between the city, the streetcar company and the drivers’ union, a compromise couldn’t be reached and the tracks on the bridge were removed.

Aside from the Arlington Bridge and the lengthy, by Winnipeg standards, Arlington Street, there is one other remnant of the failed Central Belt Line that can be seen today.

Arlington Street is a strange width between Notre Dame and Portage avenues (in case you’re wondering, it is legally just two lanes wide). This came about in 1907, when a streetcar line was laid down the centre of the roadway. It was to have been expanded in both directions when the bridge projects were in place and ready to link the city from end to end.