[balletomane]

…which decade or era in your city’s history would you want to most experience? I started a thread in the Canada section about Canada’s Golden Age and it got me thinking that the” golden age” for each city and region across an enormous country like Canada is going to be different.

In my city of Winnipeg, I would be most interested in traveling back in time to the decade preceding the First World War, at that time we were one of the most economically aggressive, fastest growing cities in North America, growing from a population of 50,000 in 1902, 100,000 in 1906 to 250,000 by 1914. Politicians and business owners really believed we were “it” and looked to Chicago and even New York for inspiration to plan what was anticipated to be a prosperous future. Many of Canada’s first “skyscrapers”, some of the tallest in the British Empire back then, were built during this time and still stand today, being spared demolition a few decades later due to Winnipeg’s slow growth when many other North American cities were “modernizing” and demolishing heritage buildings.

In this same era many of my ancestors first settled in Winnipeg from across the Atlantic, and I imagine myself in their shoes as they stepped out of one of the city’s two grand railway stations for the first time. What did they see, hear, feel…
A young city with an overly optimistic, everything is possible attitude, yet also home to some of the most squalid living conditions in a North American city at that time, the “foreign quarter” north of the CPR railyards. A city so focused on growth and business that the quality of life for many of its citizens was sacrificed in the name of progress.

So back to my question, if you could travel back in time, which era in your city’s history would you most want to experience?