Crescent Drive Park is a jewel

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/06/2023 (1089 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Crescent Drive Park is a hidden jewel in the city’s parks system. It is made up of 25.3 hectares of woods and rolling lawns with a playground, pavilion, golf course, and a three-kilometre walking trail.

The origins of the park are unclear. Suburban development began in the Municipality of Fort Garry in the 1920s, but Crescent Drive only had a handful of houses on it until the post-war housing boom of the 1940s.

In the book Fort Garry Remembered II: Stories Collected In and About the R.M. of Fort Garry, Manitoba, there are a couple of references to the area’s pre-park days as home to a hot dog stand called the Gimsa Hut, where area youth flocked to in the summer. A 1942 Winnipeg Tribune article described the unnamed park as heavy with foliage and containing a small glen near the riverbank for picnickers.

The park we see today is very much the creation of the Metropolitan Corporation of Greater Winnipeg, a.k.a “Metro” — the body created by the province in 1960 to oversee planning, transportation, and parks in the growing greater Winnipeg region.

Metro assumed control of the park in 1961 and had planned several major improvements to it by the end of the decade. In 1963, Fort Garry’s municipal council gave Metro two additional acres of riverfront land it owned adjacent to the park and the portion of Crescent Park Drive that ran through it.

The first job carried out by Metro changed the character of the park. A December 1964 letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press complained that, over the course of the year, Metro’s parks staff removed and burned “every wild plum tree, saskatoon, hawthorn, chokecherry etc. as well as hundreds of large and small elms, oak, ash and others…” to make a large clearing.

Also in 1964, Metro announced that Crescent Drive Park would become home to a $150,000, nine-hole, par-3 golf course with a clubhouse. This style of course had become all the rage in U.S. and Metro’s parks staff were convinced Winnipeg needed one after visiting Minneapolis to check out the 12 it had to offer.

The course was designed by Gunter Schoch and, after a couple of years of preparation, its May 1966 opening had to be postponed due to heavy spring flooding. A hastily erected dike prevented the clubhouse from being washed away. It finally opened on Sept. 2, 1966, and was described as a “dandy course” by Winnipeg Free Press golf columnist John Down.

In May 1968, Metro opened a 14-foot-wide concrete boat ramp with two floating docks. Said to be the first free civic boat launch in the city, 667 boats launched from it in just its first six weeks of operation.

The most recent addition to the park is the all-season Forest Pavilion designed by Public City Architecture. It contains washrooms, a covered picnic area, and an enclosed fireplace patio. Opened in 2021, it received a Governor General’s Medal in architecture for its innovative design.