Vestiges of The Bay’s retail empire will still be seen on Winnipeg’s streets

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2025 (200 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Hudson’s Bay Company will soon disappear from Canada’s retail landscape but here in Winnipeg signs of the once mighty empire will be seen on our streets for decades to come.

The oldest vestige of the company found in the city is one of the rear gates of Upper Fort Garry, a trading and administrative post established in 1822.

The Bay left the fort for its first modern department store at Main Street and York Avenue in 1881. Within a matter of months, many of the fort’s walls and interior buildings were removed to straighten out road access to the Main Street Bridge across the Assiniboine River.

All that remained of the fort by the end of the decade was a single gate. It was donated by The Bay to the city in 1897 for use as a park and is now part of Upper Fort Garry Provincial Park.

The Bay’s first department store was a success and it was expanded a couple of times in the 1890s. Even after Eaton’s opened its department store on Portage Avenue in 1905 and began drawing other large retailers to the street, The Bay doubled down on its faith in south Main Street as a viable retail strip.

In 1911, it expanded its Main Street store yet again and constructed two new buildings nearby to serve it.

One was a three-storey warehouse on Main Street at Broadway that was modernized in 1968 to house mostly company offices. When The Bay sold its Northern Stores division in 1987, it was purchased by a new incarnation of The North West Company, once The Bay’s fiercest rival, and the new company took over the building.

The other was a new garage on Garry Street that The Bay owned until 1950. It then became a warehouse and car dealership before being extensively renovated into The Keg restaurant in 1975.

By the 1920s, The Bay desperately wanted to replace its hodgepodge of a department store with a single, modern building and knew that it needed to be on Portage Avenue. It took years to finalize a land swap involving the company, city and province for it to assemble a large enough lot on which to build.

The six-storey Hudson’s Bay department store opened on Portage Avenue at Memorial Boulevard in November 1926 and the old Main Street store was eventually demolished.

The flagship store outlasted all its Portage Avenue rivals but through the 2000s it had to downsize by several floors to survive. It finally closed in November 2020.

The building was then purchased by the Southern Chiefs’ Organization, which is in the process of transforming it into the mixed-use Wehwehneh Bahgahkinahgohn (“it is visible.”) development