Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
^ In hindsight, turning Broadway into an office district in the 60s was the wrong move. It spread the office market out way too thinly over downtown. It would have been way smarter for the city to have focused office growth along the Portage and Main spines except maybe for a small provincial government office hub near Memorial, but I guess there was too much money to be made. The fact that there really hasn't been any substantial office construction on that strip since the 80s tells you about its viability in that market.
But with many of those Broadway office buildings getting long in the tooth now (like Wawanesa), residential conversion would be a great idea... it could reinforce the existing strength of Bro-Ass as a residential neighbourhood.
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I suppose Winnipeg's downtown as an office district fared better than other cities in North America in the postwar years on the whole -- new office construction moved a few blocks south and west instead of to new suburban areas.
The draw of Broadway for builders, I would imagine, was larger parcels that were relatively inexpensive. Easier in 1960 or so to buy up an old mansion or vacant land on Broadway (with a lot width of 65 feet or more), than to cobble together costly parcels around Portage or Main.
The public and planning expectation of all this would have been that 1950s-era economic and population growth would keep chugging along through the rest of the 20th century, and that eventually the unattractive and underbuilt gulf between Portage and Broadway would fill up with modern development (see
Metro government's 1969 Downtown Plan). Of course anyone who's walked down Donald Street from Broadway to Graham recently will tell you it hasn't happened yet.