Quote:
Originally Posted by rgalston
You're right, Winnipeg's downtown is larger, with several different neighborhoods within it. It's also in a poor city (in a comparatively poor country) that is home to a huge hordes of dysfunctional underclasses.
At the same time, for many Winnipeggers, Downtown Winnipeg is/was essentially one street a few blocks long--Portage Avenue. Sure we've also got Main and Broadway, but Portage is still Winnipeg's main street, the street that most Winnipeggers associate with downtown, just like Broadway is/was the street most Fargoians would have associated with their downtown. But unlike Fargo's Broadway, Portage Avenue is failing as a whole strip: architecturally, it's incoherent; commercially, it's marginal; socially, it's what North Main Street would have been like 30 years ago. What the host of revitalization agencies and other "stakeholders" (Ie, the U of W) has and is doing to "save" Portage Avenue will not change this. Maybe the same type of bold tax credits that the City of Fargo and the State of North Dakota offered would.
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That's a rather astute observation.
You're right, most people do probably think of downtown as just the stretch of Portage between Main and Memorial.
In that way our 'one street' downtown is very similar to Fargo's.