Duelling with Progress & Shiny New Glass Buildings

By Barbara Romanik

I got my introduction to Winnipeg through reading Marvin Francis’s long poem city treaty (Turnstone, 2002). So when I arrived in this city I expected to duel with clowns in back alleys, to travel trashcan trails encountering graffiti of senselessness and nasty poignancy, and to taste Winnipeg treats such as welfare red plate special, Grey Owl burger and mcPemmican. Marvin Francis made me believe that as strange and as much of an outsider as I was, in Winnipeg I could walk and find ways to navigate the edges and borders of the city’s downtown. That I could learn to take on my own demons even if my pockets were empty. And if I was as sneaky and crafty as Marvin Francis, I would be able to draw a map of a city, a plan, or urban treaty (to callously steal from Marvin) that would allow me to write and live here.

Colony Street as urban-planning mystery

Through stupidity, luck and maybe some foresight too, I ended up living on Colony Street in Winnipeg’s West Broadway neighbourhood. Colony is a long-necked, upside-down bottle street that at Portage completely gives up the grandiosity (even if it cannot the disconcerting historical allusions) of its name and derails behind the Winnipeg Art Gallery. I live on the stretch between St. Mary’s and Broadway. It’s a nicely contained pocket of shabbiness with early and mid 20^th century brick apartment buildings. Parts of Colony Street are traffic-ed off from each other in such a way that it’s impossible to obey traffic rules and actually drive straight down the street. Even I am slightly baffled why mid-street the traffic changes from two to one way, but I love that the only means to really see the whole street is to walk it. And people do walk it. All times of the day and night, all kinds of people, including those who scream obscenities or talk to themselves. A young writer, a wandering poet, or even a treaty-busting clown would not feel out of place on Colony.

And rummaging through University of Manitoba archives, it reassured me to find out that Marvin Francis wrote about this area too with the “Downtown Army Surplus” or “New Crossing” poems. The first one referred to the Army Surplus Store which once stood on the corner of Colony and Portage and the second to the bus stop outside of Portage Place. These are unapologetic, angry, witty poems about everyday urban violence. Exiting the Greyhound Bus Station behind the Holiday Inn after my twenty-hour ride from Edmonton, I imagined that Marvin Francis probably would have loved to people-watch here as he sat anonymous with his pen or pencil writing on scraps of cigarette boxes and chocolate wrappers. It’s not that big of a stretch to speculate that it’s the escalators of the Bay, diagonally across from the Holiday Inn, that Johnny Muskeg is riding when he tries to pick up city women in his gum boots claiming “I’m interesting” in bush camp (Turnstone, 2008).

Final days of the Army Surplus store

So I do wonder what Marvin Francis would have thought about the Greyhound Station and the Army Surplus Store becoming urban phantoms at Portage, Memorial and Colony and what they’ve been replaced with. Myself, I do feel like this downtown Bermuda triangle of unabashed thrift and shabbiness is going to the dogs: the city’s and the University of Winnipeg’s dogs of progress, urban renewal and generally very shiny white glass buildings. I am not opposed to any of those things on principle, and I understand that the University of Winnipeg’s expansion could be a positive thing.

And I do worry what this all means for us who actually live in the vicinity and even for the University of Winnipeg students who are the supposed beneficiaries of these new projects. As great as a toilet with two settings for liquid and solid waste seems, is the new Buhler Centre — which houses University of Winnipeg’s Faculty of Business and Economics and the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art — that much more beneficial for students and the community than a place where one could get cheap canvas sneakers or an inexpensive winter coat?

I don’t want to condemn the University of Winnipeg and the Plug In project (with gallery space and proposed bookstore included) offhandedly. But with the removal of the Greyhound Bus Station to the Winnipeg Airport and even the Bay trying to outwrestle its recent shabbiness by relinquishing its dungeonesque bottom floor to Zellers and re-vamping the cafeteria-style Paddle Wheel, I am nervous. It’s been only a couple of months since Zellers moved in and I already see a reduction in the comforting downtown geriatrics and freaks who used to cram onto those escalators and into the elevators to descend to the lowest level of the Bay to argue over reduced dairy products and 99 cent spices. With the building of the Buhler Centre, I feel like a stance is being taken about art and education where movement and accessibility has on some level lost out to the interests of respectability, prestige and capital.

Most people would be surprised to hear that in its early days, Manitoba College, the predecessor of the venerable University of Winnipeg, had to compete with Colony Creek brothels that were already in business north of Portage pre–1883. While local clergy preached about needing to protect the college’s vulnerable youth from the dens of ruin and vice, it was not until land developers stepped in that the brothels actually moved west to Thomas (presently Minto) Street. From its earliest days Colony Street, in spite of its proximity to the University, has been a contested urban space rather than a quiet suburban street. Long before Great West Life Building Complex swallowed Colony Street’s bottom half there was a brewery there and another where the Winnipeg Art Gallery now stands. Since at least the 1970s the church has even come around, with the over a century-old Anglican All Saints’ at Broadway and Colony providing services such as emergency food, low-cost meals and counselling along with choir practice and Eucharist to a neighbourhood made up of transient, low-income dwellers (including an immigrant, native, elderly and student population).

Shiny glass & Culture replace Army Surplus & bargains

In refusing in their expansion to recognize that it is precisely these transient and perhaps not always commercially profitable populations that have made the neighbourhood affordable and alive, the University of Winnipeg and the city may inadvertently be sabotaging themselves. Perhaps ultimately the greatest function of a space like the Buhler Centre may be to serve as an antithesis, a duelling companion and worthy opponent for artists like Marvin Francis who not only tried to understand and make sense of urban places, but fought against respectability and expectations of where art should be displayed and what it should do and be.