Corydon is a fine neighborhood street and I'm not sure we should expect anything more of it. It had its day in the '90s as the city's go-to street when it was the furthest point north that didn't terrify suburbanites. Nowadays it's OK if you don't mind hanging out with Kelvin coke heads--the source of some of the shadiness at Bar-I and Spin you guys have been talking about. Corydon actually has a hilariously similar dynamic to lots of suburban areas in that its bars are full of losers who went to the local high school and never moved out of their parents' basements. Whether it's the Nor-Villa in North K or the Thirsty Lion in Charleswood, their patrons are primarily cradle to grave shit-heels who can't be fucked to get on with their lives. The same story is true of Bar I.
In any case, the Corydon neighborhood is doing a fine job of incrementally increasing density, which will eventually feed into greater demand for services. It already has a strong base of services so it won't be stuck in a high-population, low-service trap like Bro-Ass is trying to dig its way out of. As far as neighborhood streets go, it's actually pretty terrible when it comes to basic amenities. It could really use another grocery store and a liquor store. I'm sure over the next 20 years we'll see it fill in towards Pembina and the RT line and we won't even think about it any more.
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Originally Posted by Simplicity
One thing they both have in common is that, like Corydon, 'Downtown' is trendy at the moment and areas move with the times. That goes for pretty much everywhere. 10-15 years ago downtown wasn't fashionable because the trends favoured other aesthetics. Von Dutch trucker hats and $400 7even jeans did well in places like Bar Italia because Corydon represented an inner city suburbia. Today the trends are towards things that are better represented by 'character'-driven, dirty, downtown environments, but that will change too. It's sort of notable that eChildren is one of the only stores in the Exchange that never turns over. The rest will go out with their clientele. There was once a decent retail presence on Corydon too.
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This is a hilarious commentary. I took a rare trip to Corydon a few weeks back for dinner. I couldn't get over the people. It wasn't like they were from Fargo and still wearing Von Dutch hats and jeans with fleur-de-lis stitched on the ass pockets, but they were the people who dressed like that ten years ago. They all had their Hitler Youth hair cuts and cuffed selve-edge denim like good trendy-boys, but they were just too damn neat about it. Their parts were too clean and their cuffs too ironed. I like to think that them all being 35 had nothing to do with it but the effect was to make them look like jerkoffs.
My point is that Corydon has picked up the artifice of today's style and the people stuck in that scene try to look the part but they, like Corydon itself, are missing a crucial element. You suggest it's the gritty authenticity that's become trendy today and I think you're right. But remember how graffiti was the scourge of Corydon ten years ago? The defining aesthetic of the last decade was definitely more flashy and douchey than today's, but to the suburban hip-hop kids who tagged up Corydon storefronts, that neighborhood was authentic.
The obvious irony here is that what they were doing was incredibly inauthentic and was, in fact, fake as fuck. But as hip-hop--and greater douche culture--has fallen by the wayside and hipsterdom has risen to the mainstream and crashed to irrelevance they've both proven to be as much artificial chaff as all the undercuts on Corydon.
This is all just the greater march of gentrification and in Winnipeg it follows this city's clear economic geography: North is poor, south is rich. For most of my adolescence the Assiniboine River seemed like an impassible frontier with civilization to the south and the Great Sioux Nation to the north. Of course, it was an easy idea to disabuse myself of and thousands of others have managed to as well. The push north is on and it's manifest destiny for all us south-end bitches until we hit the CPR line.
We aren't witnessing a change in taste from smooth to rough as much as we're witnessing a constant search for novelty. Just like Americans used up the land in the east and moved west, then used up the cities in the east and moved west more, Winnipeggers are using up the authenticity of their neighborhoods and moving north. Remember when Osborne Village was the bohemian heart of the city? Nowadays, it's the "EMS workers living in condos" heart of the city. What authenticity it had left got kicked out of Collective Cabaret by American Apparel. Authenticity moved to West Broadway ten years ago and now it's moved north again. The only artists I know who still live south of Portage have lackeys expert in writing grant applications.