Historical Winnipeg discussion

[1ajs]

Beside the old bus shacks on assinboime was an interest Wearhouse as well shame we lost that

[esquire]

Originally Posted by 1ajs

Beside the old bus shacks on assinboime was an interest Wearhouse as well shame we lost that

Yeah, some losses of older buildings are especially annoying and that one is in that category, because you know something nice would have been done with it if it were still around.

[Urban recluse]

The lofts to developed in all of the beautiful warehouses the city lost: sigh.

[esquire]

Shocking news regarding the sad state of affairs of the City of Winnipeg Archives... apparently it has been vacated since storm damage was incurred a few years ago and there are no plans to renovate.

It's amazing that this has passed under the radar for so long.

http://heritagewinnipeg.blogspot.ca/...ther-city.html

[Urban recluse]

I remember the damage, but I just assumed they were back in the building. Sad.

[EndoftheBeginning]

Looking back 10 or so pages, I see Osborne Stadium was talked about. Here is the layout from a 1948 aerial photograph.



You can also see U of W had an outdoor soccer field. I guess it was called United College in those days.

[esquire]

^ It's funny that Osborne Stadium was built in such a cramped location where neither the football or baseball fields were even close to regulation size. It looks about as ramshackle as a stadium can get.

I wonder why they didn't build something a little more lasting, perhaps not quite as big as Bryant-Denny Stadium (pictured below as it appeared in the 30s, around the time Osborne Stadium was built), but at least with proper dimensions and solid stands? Considering that Winnipeg was a major city in the 30s, the stadium looked something more befitting of a small town.


Bryant-Denny Stadium in the 30s
Source: alabamapioneers.com

[TimeFadesAway]

Originally Posted by EndoftheBeginning

You can also see U of W had an outdoor soccer field. I guess it was called United College in those days.

Here's a shot of that field from the U of W Archives. I think this is looking north from Wesley College.

[EndoftheBeginning]

Yes, that would be looking north. Amazing crowd for a baseball game! Thanks for the picture.

[Andy6]

Originally Posted by esquire

^ It's funny that Osborne Stadium was built in such a cramped location where neither the football or baseball fields were even close to regulation size. It looks about as ramshackle as a stadium can get.

I wonder why they didn't build something a little more lasting, perhaps not quite as big as Bryant-Denny Stadium (pictured below as it appeared in the 30s, around the time Osborne Stadium was built), but at least with proper dimensions and solid stands? Considering that Winnipeg was a major city in the 30s, the stadium looked something more befitting of a small town.

I believe someone just built a grandstand around a field that was already being used as a playing field (and for stuff like dog racing). The Bombers would have played a handful of games per year and were not really a bigger deal at first than any of the college teams around town. Also, Winnipeg was in very dire straits in the 1930s and I doubt that public money would have been spent on a stadium other than as a make-work project. I looked into the history of Osborne Stadium a bit because the house my grandmother grew up in was demolished around 1930 to make way for the stadium (as was nearly all of their street, within a couple of years of that, although that one house survived that is now being turned into the daycare by Great-West Life). I believe my father said that Osborne Stadium was very small and the field was consequently a bit more like an American field in its dimensions.

[esquire]

^ That sounds about right... a stadium that grew around a playing field. It certainly didn't have the look of a facility designed from the ground up.

It's just a little surprising that even with the hard times of the 30s, a city of Winnipeg's stature made do with such a rickety venue... although I suppose it must have been an improvement over what existed before then.

[biguc]

I really enjoy how Ellice west of Colony connects to Webb place and dead-ends at Vaughan, rather than actually connecting to Ellice east.

[LilZebra]

Originally Posted by esquire

Shocking news regarding the sad state of affairs of the City of Winnipeg Archives... apparently it has been vacated since storm damage was incurred a few years ago and there are no plans to renovate.

It's amazing that this has passed under the radar for so long.

http://heritagewinnipeg.blogspot.ca/...ther-city.html

I'd love to work there, but now that the building needs some work, IDK.

There, or the Prov. Archives.

[Andy6]

Originally Posted by biguc

I really enjoy how Ellice west of Colony connects to Webb place and dead-ends at Vaughan, rather than actually connecting to Ellice east.

That is one of the oddities of the street grid. Originally Ellice (the West End part) ran straight into Balmoral and connected into Webb Place, or Isbister Place as it was prior to that. The downtown section of Ellice stopped at Vaughan, so you had to use Webb Place and Vaughan to connect between the two. In later years, the downtown section was extended to Balmoral but there was still a jog at that point down to West End Ellice and Balmoral. That lasted into the 1960s, when a number of commercial buildings were torn down on what was then the NW corner of Ellice and Balmoral, allowing Ellice to be put through. It was around the same time that the Cumberland extension was built just to the north.

The boundaries between Winnipeg's clashing street grids continue to create choke points in traffic flow to this day, even though you might have suspected that, as a city built on some of the world's flattest and most featureless land, there wouldn't be any such fractures in the grid.

[BigG]

I wonder if anyone has any powers to post pictures prior to Cumberland existing. I grew up on Furby in an old house just near the corner at Cumberland. Ah, the smell of hops and corn brewing at the Molson plant. That's when that area was a neighbourhood. All the kids knew each other, from Maryland to Spence and beyond.

[esquire]

Originally Posted by BigG

I wonder if anyone has any powers to post pictures prior to Cumberland existing. I grew up on Furby in an old house just near the corner at Cumberland. Ah, the smell of hops and corn brewing at the Molson plant. That's when that area was a neighbourhood. All the kids knew each other, from Maryland to Spence and beyond.

I know exactly which smell you're talking about. I grew up in Tyndall Park and quite often went by the Labatt Manitoba Brewery on Notre Dame... occasionally I catch a whiff of that scent while travelling and it takes me right back to childhood!

[EndoftheBeginning]

Have a 1948 aerial that shows the neighbourhood. To orient yourself, the hospital is upper left, Central Park lower right and Notre Dame is the main diagonal street through the picture. You can see Cumberland dead-ended just east of Isabel at that time.

More than 20 years ago, had a project that required an inspection of that building and property. This was after it had closed down and was basically completely empty. Don't have the photos from that anymore.

[EndoftheBeginning]

Another one from 1962, also pre-Cumberland westward extension. I have a 1972 aerial that does show the Cumberland extension to Notre Dame, so sometime in those 10 years was also the time Notre Dame would have become one-way leading out of downtown.

[TimeFadesAway]

Originally Posted by Andy6

The boundaries between Winnipeg's clashing street grids continue to create choke points in traffic flow to this day, even though you might have suspected that, as a city built on some of the world's flattest and most featureless land, there wouldn't be any such fractures in the grid.

It's a result of the clash of 3 things: the Red River lots, the Assiniboine River lots and the HBC Reserve.

The Red River lots ran north west off of the river, ending at the 2 mile road, which is now McPhillips. The Assiniboine lots, though, ran essentially straight north from that river, resulting in an eventual intersection of the lots at an angle of less that 90 degrees.

The difficulty is that in the early days of subdividing these farm lots into city lots, each owner hired their own surveyor who would subdivide the lot in a grid which matched up well with lots that were the same orientation, but where the lots intersected with lots of a different orientation, weird angles resulted. Nobody cared because there was no strong central oversight or planning and people were making loads of money selling to speculators.

To further complicate things, the 'triangle' of land in the southeast corner of this mess was given to HBC in compensation for Rupert's Land. This is the area bordered by Colony Creek on the west, the rivers on the south and Water/Notre Dame to the north. HBC subdivided these areas as a grid that angled slightly northwest, in other words out of line with both the Red and Assiniboine lots.

Where all of these things come together are right in around the area we are talking about: Balmoral between Portage and Notre Dame.

Sorry for being so long-winded, my dad was a land surveyor who owned one of the oldest firms in the city (originally McColl Brothers) and he did his thesis on the river lot system, so I've been bombarded with this stuff from a very young age. The more you get into it, the more you can look at a map of Winnipeg and see where boundaries must have been and how they still are evident in the street layout today.

[BigG]

Wow! Thanks. I see the old Molson breweries plant and the old Somerset School which is now Shoppers Drug Mart. Wonder why they didn't connect Wellington to Cumberland since it seemed like a natural connection. Even at present, there's just a little plot of green space there just south of KFC. Wellington would be very different today if that happened. I also see my childhood home. Thanks a lot TFA! I really appreciate it.