Putting Winnipeg On Track

Using Heritage as a Tool for Downtown Rejuvenation

After incorporation in 1873, the city of Winnipeg flourished, growing from 25,000 people in 1891 to almost 180,000 by the beginning of the 1920s. During this period of rapid expansion, a number of American architects headed across the border to leave their mark on Winnipeg’s skyline. Much of their work was carried out in the 20-block area of the downtown known as the Exchange District, which housed the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, lavish theatres, banks, and some of the tallest skyscrapers in the British Empire.

Today, Winnipeg’s Exchange District is an exciting and slightly Bohemian area of the city. As a National Historic Site of Canada, it also contains a range of preserved, architecturally significant assets that illustrate Winnipeg’s role in shaping Western Canada from 1880 to 1914. Unfortunately a majority of the recent city centre development initiatives have focused on the portion of downtown south of Portage Avenue, ignoring the historic area. As a result more architectural testaments to Winnipeg’s past are torn down almost every year

To counteract such decay, the City of Winnipeg is committed to inner-city revitalization and heritage conservation. Promoting heritage assets has worked in other cities to rejuvenate the city centre, and Winnipeg should capitalize on its own beautiful heritage architecture to rekindle a sense of pride for the downtown. The City should consider transforming the Exchange District into a major attraction that, like a museum or arena, draws people and investment to the city’s core. The Exchange could become an interactive living history museum, showcasing one of North America’s best examples of preserved early 20th century architecture. The life line of this living museum would be a streetcar system that, by linking the Exchange to the other historic sites in the city centre, takes passengers on a journey through 10,000 years of Canadian history.

As streetcar tracks were a prominent feature of urban design in the early 1900s, re-establishing a heritage tramline using traditional-style streetcars could unify scattered structures into a collective historical whole. The urban railway could also be used to help revitalize the downtown. Rail systems are different than other public transportation initiatives because of their sense of permanency. Tracks are a symbol of a lasting commitment by the city government to encourage development along the transit corridor. Investors see that commitment, and focus their own efforts on these areas. Since the original construction of a streetcar line in Portland, properties along its length have reportedly experienced $2.3 billion in new investment.

Some of American cities have traditional-style rail systems. City planners in these municipalities recognize that vintage trams offer a look and feel that fit well into a downtown made up of elegant historical buildings. While the Winnipeg streetcars would be a year-round feature of regular public transit, during the summer months they could also be an integral part of a living urban museum. Special cars would be used to offer hour-long tram tours throughout the day, with a costumed conductor acting as a guide as the streetcar made its way from the Aboriginal gathering place at the Forks, past the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Upper Fort Garry gate, and through the Exchange District.

To truly turn the Exchange District into an urban museum, however, the new streetcar would be complemented by a number of other initiatives. In the summer months, actors could be deployed around the Old Market Square, portraying characters—war veterans, nurses, railway workers, suffragettes, and business people—living in the summer of 1919. They could act out short 20- 25 minute plays throughout the day around the Exchange, and during streetcar tours board the trams to speak with passengers. As well, food carts could be set up along the streetcar line selling foods, like perogies and latkes,that would have been popular in Winnipeg in 1919. An historical newspaper or magazine stand could be situated along the route, along with a jazz ensemble to perform music appropriate to the era.

Ultimately though, the goal of this venture is not only to showcase some of the most interesting aspects of Winnipeg’s evolution, but to spur development in the downtown. Unlike a conventional museum or arena, the streetcar tour would not be a feature in isolation; rather, it will introduce passengers to the city centre in its entirety. They will be able to see the many shops and restaurants located along the tram route, while the historical activities in the Exchange District encourage them to explore the neighbourhood. With urban rail lines already appealing to businesses because of their permanence, this influx of potential customers makes investment in the area even more attractive.

 Additionally, this project would help Winnipeggers envision a city that is less car-dependent. With a streetcar line connecting the Exchange District to the parking lots and other transit routes available at the Forks, it could even be feasible to make a number of city blocks in the Exchange car-free during the summer months, assisting with the municipal government’s goal of creating a more pedestrian-friendly city.

 Learning the history of the neighbourhood would familiarize Winnipeggers with their downtown, making them more interested in its preservation. Furthermore, a number of themes appropriate for the tour—including Aboriginal heritage, the women’s suffrage movement, and the Winnipeg General Strike—would strongly complement the exhibits found in the new human rights museum, by illustrating Manitoba’s critical role in the development of human rights in Canada.

 A living museum would bring people to the city’s core, nurture development in the downtown, and support the preservation of Winnipeg’s architectural heritage. Lastly, it would promote alternative modes of transportation by offering passengers an informative and fun historical tour, or simply a pleasant ride past a gorgeous early 20th century streetscape.

 After one hundred years, it is time to put Winnipeg back on track.



Benjamin Gillies is a recent graduate of the global political economy program at the University of Manitoba, where he focused on energy policy and urban development.



Published in Fast Fact, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, February 17, 2011

Another Historic Building to be Demolished

The City of Winnipeg Property and Development committee has recommended the demolition of the Shanghai Restaurant Building at 228 King Street.
According to Jenny Gerbasi, Councillor Fort Rouge-East Fort Garry who spoke on the value of the building to Winnipeg’s cultural history and economic development, “What we have here is a classic  case of demolition by neglect where the building has been allowed to fall into a state of decline.”

 Read more about the building on Councillor Gerbasi’s blog.

LEGISLATION TO PROTECT HISTORIC PROPERTIES

Manitoba News Release

............................................................

November 26, 2010



New legislation is being proposed that would enhance the City of Winnipeg's ability to preserve and protect historic properties, Local Government Minister Ron Lemieux announced today.



"It is important to preserve, protect and develop our heritage," said Lemieux.  "Historic buildings and sites provide us with a sense of identity and teach us about the people and events that make up our shared past."



Currently, the City of Winnipeg only has the authority to designate buildings as historic properties. Through this legislation, that authority would be expanded to also allow sites such as parks and cemeteries to be designated as historic.



The legislation would also require the city to register historic designations of buildings and sites on property titles.  The minister noted the city requested changes to the legislation to ensure that property owners and others with an interest in the property are aware of potential development restrictions of a property with an historic designation.



"We are pleased to work with the city to safeguard buildings and properties that hold special significance from the past to preserve them for future generations," said Lemieux.



The proposed legislation would give the city the same power as all other municipalities, which already have authority to designate sites and are required to register historic designations on property titles.

PROVINCE, MANITOBA METIS RENEW RELATIONSHIP ROOTED IN DISTINCTDEMOCRATIC HISTORY: SELINGER

Comprehensive Metis Policy Will Strengthen Partnership Through Greater

Recognition, Capacity, Accountability: Robinson, Chartrand

One hundred and twenty-five years after the Northwest Resistance and the

death of Louis Riel, Premier Greg Selinger today unveiled a permanent

display of historical documents and photographs that pay tribute to the

central role of the Métis in the political and social history of Manitoba.

Selinger said the ceremony marked an important step toward appropriate

recognition of the contributions of the Métis in the creation of Manitoba.

This recognition is a key principle of a new provincial Métis policy,

announced today by Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Minister Eric Robinson,

intended to address persistent disparities between Métis and non-Métis

Manitobans.

"Manitoba, as we know it, would not exist without the fundamental

contributions of the Métis," said Selinger. "Working with Métis people to

close gaps in the historical record will help us move forward in our

commitment to close gaps of opportunity that persist to this day."

Developed jointly by the Government of Manitoba and the Manitoba Metis

Federation in consultation with the Métis people, the Manitoba Métis Policy

Framework consists of four strategic goals:

· enhancing Métis participation in the provincial decision-making

process,

· promoting better understanding of Métis history and culture for all

Manitobans,

· applying a distinctions-based approach that respects the unique roles

of Métis people past and present, and

· improving relationships between the province and all organizations

representing Métis interests.

"Given that 2010 is recognized across the homeland as Year of the Métis, it

is very timely that we make this announcement. I am very pleased by the

province's forward-thinking approach in establishing a Métis policy and I

commend Premier Selinger for his leadership throughout this process," said

David Chartrand, president, Manitoba Metis Federation. "This historic

government-to-government relationship will ensure that the Métis of Manitoba

will be a full partner in future socio-economic opportunities and provide

much needed direction for future decision-making. It's a positive first

step that will benefit not only the Métis but all Manitobans as well."

The historical documents and photographs unveiled today include the original

sessional journal of the legislative assembly of Assiniboia and a portrait

of its members. This missing link between the Comité National des Métis and

Convention of Forty, commonly known as Louis Riel's provisional government,

and the legislative assembly of Manitoba, was discovered and interpreted by

a team of researchers in the summer of 2010, the Year of the Métis.

The records show the legislative assembly of Assiniboia was formed during

the Red River Resistance and ratified the Manitoba Act in June of 1870,

allowing Manitoba's entry into Confederation. In making the transition from

martial law to representative democracy in a period of months, and

ultimately negotiating terms acceptable to the Red River settlers it

represented, the assembly is a unique political body in Canadian history.

The display will be permanently located near the member's gallery at the

Manitoba Legislative Building that includes portraits of every member of the

legislative assembly of Manitoba since 1871.

"Today is an important step on the path of truth and reconciliation," said

Robinson. "In the spirit of the commission that bears the name, today's

events remind us all of our responsibility to teach our children the real

history of this land. This recognition is essential as we begin writing a

new chapter under the policy announced today."

Robinson noted the new Métis policy builds on recent progress including a

new $10-million Métis Economic Development Fund designed to stimulate the

economic development activities of the Métis people of Manitoba by providing

better access to equity and capital for Métis-controlled businesses.

Victoria Park Memorial Update Sept 2010

Victoria Park Memorial

It was two years ago that our labour history proposal for rejuvenating the memory of Victoria Park was being prepared for Winnipeg City Hall presentation.

Since then;

The committee of Council responsible for planning and development selected a bid for a hotel complex to be built near the site from Senator Rod Zimmer.  It never got off the ground as Zimmer reportedly said the time was not right for getting the financial commitments needed to build the complex.

There was also some coverage in the press about a proposal to use the old pumping station (to the south of Victoria Park) as a farmers market but there has been no details shared publicly on what could develop.

The Red River Basin Commission also wanted the Harbour masters building also but apparently they could not raise the funds needed for a major office and information centre proposal they put forward. They were talking about a partnership with Senator Zimmer at one point but nothing came of it. The ED of the Commission claimed there was also room for our historical content, but he could never find the time to meet with us to talk about our contribution to their proposal.



Currently, there is a restaurant group that has an option on the Harbour Masters building, but no detail of who is involved and what could develop is being made public.

In the agreement to sell the land that was once Victoria Park to Sky Waterfront Condominiums, there was also a requirement that the new condominium building include some kind of commemoration of the park. This has not been done.

So it seems Victoria Park continues to be shunted into the dark corners of history. While our proposal may have been weak on financing and management, it was the best proposal so far for developing the area around Victoria Park so that all Winnipeggers could benefit.

We continue to monitor what CentreVenture is or is not doing with the land around Victoria Park.

When Women Became Persons

 

 

This is the story of women who were ground-breakers. These brave women from the early 1900s made all the difference in the lives we live today.

Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

The women were innocent and defenseless, but when, in North America, women picketed in front of the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote, they were jailed.

And by the end of the first night in jail, those women were barely alive.
Forty  prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing
went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of
'obstructing sidewalk  traffic.'

(Lucy Burns)
They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above
her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping
for air.

(Dora  Lewis)
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed  her
head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate,
Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging,
beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the  women.

Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15,  1917,
when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his
guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because
they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right
to vote.

For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their
food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms.

(Alice Paul)

When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited.  She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

All women who have every voted, have ever owned property, have ever enjoyed equal rights need to remember that women?s rights had to be fought for in Canada as well.  Do our daughters and our sisters know the price that was paid to earn rights for women here, in North America?

2009 is the 80th Anniversary of the Persons Case in Canada,
which finally declared women in Canada to be Persons!

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know, so that we remember to celebrate the rights we enjoy.

?Knowledge is Freedom: hide it, and it withers; share it, and it blooms? (P. Hill)

The Magna Carta Manifesto

The Magna Carta Manifesto
Liberties and Commons for All
Peter Linebaugh (University of California Press, Berkeley 2008)

In The Magna Carta Manifesto, Peter Linebaugh takes a moment in our ancient past and makes it a contemporary beacon in the social history of advancing human rights. He puts the 1215 Magna Carta at the centre of a complicated network of the legal, constitutional, cultural and political efforts to assert the primary importance of public rights and property to political history.
Linebaugh takes the signing of the Magna Carta as a formative moment in history, that captured principles which have been fought for and which continue to be fought over around the world. "Behind the event lay powerful forces of pope and emperor, dynastic intrigues of France and England, wicked deeds of progrom and bigotry in the name of God Almighty, the disintegrating effects of the money economy and the multifaceted popular defence of the commons." (p. 24) He situates the Magna Carta and what he believes is an equally significant parallel document of the time, the Charter of the Forest (1217), as key icons in the advancement of public or collective rights over what he generically calls "the commons".
The book traces the use and possibly the abuse of the principles embedded in these two documents through history and to different parts of the world - the United States, Mexico, Nigeria, England, India. Linebaugh ties together a number of forces that compete over private versus public property, and exposes how this competition relied on these principles or distorted them according to contemporary standards. In effect, he traces how the principles of the Magna Carta have evolved according to forms of subsistence production, resource accumulation, industrialization and the development of capitalism.
For example, Linebaugh writes, "The dissolution of the monasteries took place in 1536, a massive act of state-sponsored privatization. More than any other single act in the long history of the establishment of English private property, it made the English land a commodity." (p 49)
The book traces how the Magna Carta and its principles of collective rights has fed legal and constitutional struggles that led to The Habeas Corpus Act (1679), the abolition of slavery in England (1807), the Declaration of Independence (1776), the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) and other important rights achievements. He also traces how peasants and working people fought for their rights to the commons through popular revolts in Germany (1548), England (1632), Mexico (the 1800's) and the Unites States (1770's).
How women were denied their rights as citizens in a process that is closely aligned to the competition over the commons, is highlighted. His commentary on women and jury duty for example, exposes the gap between constitutional icons and chauvinistic idolatry that have plagued women through the 20th century. "The devaluation of women's work and the degradation of her body related directly to the enclosures of open fields, the loss of commons, and the depopulation of villages. Prostitution becomes the synecdoche for commodity production. She is a proletarian (she has "no external thing to lose"). She becomes prostituted and cheated simultaneously by the commodity." (p.65)
With a rather sweeping generalized approach to finding cause and effect, the author progresses through history and writes about key formative moments. "At the dawn of modern capitalism in the sixteenth century, Magna Carta was ignored for two reasons. First the centralized monarchy of the Tudors tended to monopolize force, where the Magna Carta tended to hedge the power of the king. Second, in the sixteen century the commodity began to become the local, national and imperial form of economic accumulation, replacing the many forms of communing. But in the seventeenth century this changed, as Magna Carta took on its modern form - the protector of individual rights and free trade - just as private property (the legal form of commodity) was reconciled during the English Revolution with mixed forms of political power." (p.171)
It is also an important contribution of this book, to note that the Magna Carta lost its essence in the USA as the founding fathers constructed the institutional means to colonize aboriginal land then commodify industrial labour. While treating the great charter as a constitutional icon, Linebaugh shows how the Magna Carta was idolized to the point that the "idol destroys what it purports to preserve." (page 243)
If there is any deficiency in this book, it is the attention allotted to the linking of political advocacy in the 20th century to the contribution of the Magna Carta. There are many contemporary examples of people striving to regain the commons or collectively gaining their rights that could have been examined. In particular, I would have liked to read more about the process of economic globalization that has shunted the commons aside as corporate interests have succeeded in promoting finance capitalism and its required individualization. I think there could have been more written on how the foundations of western democracy, embedded in the principles of the Magna Carta, are being eroded by economic globalization and its undermining of sovereignty, unionization, social programs and the fair distribution of wealth and opportunity.
I think the book could have reflected on how progressive organizations (unions, non-governmental agencies, public interest organizations, community groups) around the world are fighting globalization and in effect promoting a return to principles of the commons. I think we need to expose and examine how corporate efforts to promote privatization (of public services and state enterprise), to downsize government (shift power to international bodies like the World Trade organization) and to open up natural resources to the power of the marketplace are taking private control of public assets, much like royalty had done for centuries. And the historical path of the development of human rights that has been laid out in the book, could also include some analysis of how communication technologies have redefined the commons and the ability of advocates to promote the principles of the Magna Carta.
However, for anyone engaged in the struggle to claim back public control over private interests - corporate, cultural, class, or state - this is an insightful book. For anyone trying to understand the process of achieving personal security in a world dominated by an ideology of ‘might is right', this is useful reading. For people around the world seeking ways to protect our environment, guard our water or promote renewable energy, this is a basic resource. For those interested in situating the struggles of aboriginal people for their cultural and legal autonomy, to appreciating the value of the International Court, this is fundamental reading.
I found Linebaugh's depiction of how human rights have developed instructive and oddly reassuring. This analysis helps clarify the progress, albeit slow and incremental, of human rights. This account exposes some of the frailties and frustrations that people have encountered and continue to encounter in social advocacy. And in a subtle way, this book creates its own commons, a historically and geographically unbounded collective of living and dead, who committed themselves to sharing the benefits of society in opposition to those who chose to concentrate those benefits in the hands of the few.

Dennis Lewycky
Winnipeg, CANADA
March 2009
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