Quote:
Originally Posted by Curmudgeon
When a certain big box store takes a large portion of every dollar spent the result for the downtowns in small to medium sized cities is very negative. This is seen throughout North America. In the past quarter century Canadian-owned retail has been decimated.
Winnipeg made a very poor planning decision in the 20 years following WWII to develop the once primarily residential areas south of Graham Ave. into the CBD as office and parking space, thus essentially doubling the size of downtown. The result is an absolutely massive downtown area for a city of its size. That combined with building and expanding a shopping mall and retail district within a ten minute drive of Portage & Main. Forty years ago Polo Park was a one level mall with not very much else around it save for the stadium and arena as well as industrial areas. Now it is a huge retail area and correspondingly downtown retail has really suffered. Portage Place did little to stop the bleeding, in fact downtown malls in most cities have been abject failures. Notwithstanding, increased residential construction, the addition of the Forks and improvements to the Exchange District and the Waterfront have resulted in downtown Winnipeg being considerably improved in comparison to what it was in the 90s. We will have to see how long the economy takes to recover from what has happened over the last year. I'm hoping the recovery will be quick but at Christmas '29 no one thought they were entering a decade long depression.
It's not unheard of for downtown areas to shift over time. Vancouver's downtown used to be centred to the east around Victory Square towards Main and Hastings. Over time it moved west to the area between Granville and Burrard.
|
I don't know Winnipeg too well, but if that hadn't happened, would they have just demolished the grand old warehouses in the Exchange District instead?
Downtown Winnipeg kind of reminds me of a smaller downtown LA, where they sacrificed an interesting, but not particularly unique residential area to be the skyscraper/CBD kind of area (Bunker Hill in LA), but, in the process left behind a much more unique collection of solid warehouse and early 20th century mid-rise blocks, which are now, far and away, downtown's greatest asset.
Threaded Mode