Farewell to Window on Air Canada Park

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This article was published 02/10/2024 (672 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Window Park at the southeast corner of Portage Avenue and Carlton Street is getting a facelift and will look much different when it reopens for its 40th anniversary in 2025.

Air Canada announced the construction of a nine-storey, 400,000-square-foot data centre at Portage Avenue and Carlton Street in 1981. The building was set back from Portage to allow for a park that could be used by the hundreds of employees that would work in the new building and be open to the community at large.

The park cost $537,000, which was split between three partners. The Core Area Initiative (CAI), a tripartite government agency created to revitalize Winnipeg’s inner city, contributed $400,000, the City of Winnipeg paid another $142,000, and the final $95,000 was covered by Air Canada.

The CAI began buying the properties needed for the park in the spring of 1982. The three buildings were the Bettes Block, a four-storey apartment with a main floor commercial space that housed Long John Silver’s arcade, and two smaller commercial buildings.

Negotiations to obtain the six-storey NEFCO furniture store, now the APTN building, ended when the CAI and building owner could not agree on a price. It was decided the park could still be built without that site.

The park was to be an oasis of calm in a busy downtown. To accomplish this, many of its design features were meant to shield its users from the sights and sounds of surrounding traffic.

The floor of the park was set a few feet below street level and its centrepiece was a large flowing fountain. A sloping lawn area provided additional seating, and a ring of trees and shrubs surrounded its periphery.

Included in the park were shards from various buildings that had recently been torn down. There were two limestone columns from the Northern Crown Bank that stood at Portage and Maryland from 1908 to 1983, a cast-iron column from the McIntyre Block that was on Main Street from 1899 to 1979, and limestone balustrades from Broadway’s Devon Court Apartments that was demolished in 1981.

The original name of the park was Window on Air Canada Park, though that was soon shortened to Air Canada Park or Window Park and the two names have been used interchangeably to this day.

The park officially opened on June 7, 1985, and office workers flocked to the space as expected. It did, however, have its critics.

“I despise it. It looks like some architect wanted to play artist,” artist Tony Tascona said.

A fine arts professor at the University of Manitoba called it a pastiche of old and new architectural items that bore no relationship to the Air Canada building. A Winnipeg Free Press editorial called it a “civic junk collection.”

In 2023, a new, Indigenous-themed design for the park was announced that promises to make it a safer space and allow it to host larger events.

Demolition of the old park is underway and it is expected to reopen with a new name in the summer of 2025.