White tide floods downtown Winnipeg streets
... but what happens when the playoffs are over?
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/04/2018 (2170 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
When the white-capped tide started rising, it seemed as if it would submerge all of downtown. A sea of people, flowing through the crowd-control fences, filling narrow streets built in a time when none of this was imagined.
They came to the party as couples, as families, as friends. They came, in at least one case, as newlyweds fresh from their Friday afternoon wedding, the pearlescent details on the bride’s dress the most jubilant whiteout of all.
By the time the puck dropped on Game 5 of the Winnipeg Jets-Minnesota Wild first-round NHL playoff series, downtown Winnipeg was bursting at the seams. An estimated 15,000 people, jammed shoulder to shoulder, wedged in for one shared purpose: to see Jets history happen together.
For the second time, organizers expanded the size of the fenced-in street party, adding more TV screens and food trucks and portable toilets. They may have to expand it again, before this heady post-season ride is over.
The people who came to the party, they are Winnipeg. Some are downtown residents, or workers; but like many Winnipeggers, others rarely visit downtown at all. Sometimes, all it takes to lure people to a place is an invitation.
Now, for those who care about the city’s future, there’s a question that hangs over the playoff festivities.
So far, they have lit the city aflame and brought tens of thousands downtown. But when the playoffs are over, when the excitement of the Stanley Cup chase simmers back down to normal, will these folks stick around?
***
On a recent Thursday night, Candida Rifkind, an English professor at the University of Winnipeg, was walking through downtown. Near the intersection of Broadway and Donald Street, she was approached by two young women.
It was around 7 p.m. and the pair — visitors from Norway, it turned out — were looking for directions. Where could they go, they asked, to find a downtown street where there would be “lots of shops and cafés that (were) open?”
Rifkind paused. “You’re not from here, are you?” she replied.
Like many Winnipeggers faced with this question, Rifkind was momentarily stymied. She suggested The Forks, but the Norwegian visitors were already staying at a hotel near there, and were looking for something different.
Eventually, Rifkind dispatched them to Forth, a hip café on McDermot Avenue, just east of Main Street. But the familiar challenge of this common tourist question reveals the uphill climb Winnipeg’s downtown still faces.
Yet, downtown has changed, and it is visibly changing. True North Square’s towers will open in phases over the next two years; several attendees at the outdoor party Friday mentioned excitement about that, for next NHL season. (True North Sports and Entertainment Ltd. owns the Jets and the Bell MTS Place arena.)
Some much-touted plans may not pan out. The SkyCity condo tower, envisioned as a 45-storey spire, may be in limbo after its developer, Fortress Real Developments, had its Toronto-area headquarters raided by RCMP last week.
But The Forks is moving forward on its railside development, an ambitious plan to transform 12 acres of space — currently covered by dusty parking lots — into a mixed-use melange of shops, public amenities and residences.
To those invested in downtown’s future, the prospect of more people filling up its streets is exciting.
“I think you’ll start to see more people living downtown,” says Larry Brown, the longtime owner of downtown stalwart Oscar’s Deli. “When you’re trying to grow something, it grows from the inside out, not the outside in.”
At 72, Brown has seen downtown Winnipeg’s life turn in cycles. As a child growing up in the 1950s, he soaked up the energetic hum of the city, in the days when Eaton’s and the Bay brought people flocking to the Portage Avenue strip.
On weekends, he recalls, downtown sidewalks were so crowded you could barely thread your way through.
By the time Oscar’s Deli opened its Hargrave Street location in 1982, that life was already gone, flung to the suburbs and new malls. Downtown was never the same, after that: it became a place of work, not play.
In those early years, Brown kept the deli open into the evening. But late business was sparse — customers were largely a lunchtime crowd — so he cut back. For 30 years, Oscar’s closed in mid-afternoons.
Earlier this month, Brown decided to try it again. Inspired by a new spurt of business from online delivery service SkipTheDishes, and by a slowly growing buzz in the downtown core, the deli will now stay open until 7 p.m.
“Since the Jets came back (the former Atlanta Thrashers relocated to Winnipeg in 2011), it’s become vibrant,” he says. “The Jets put us back on the map, I think.”
It’s true the NHL franchise brought both fresh traffic and new focus to the area around its home base. Yet, the revitalization of downtown is still very much a work in progress; there is, still, a lot of empty, lifeless space.
That’s the central challenge of downtown Winnipeg, but it’s an opportunity, too. We cannot recapture what downtown meant to the city in the 1950s — or through decades before — but it can, in time, be made anew.
“If you think about the early 1900s, and what downtown represented then, and what it is now, there’s no comparison,” says Matthew Robinson, a planning consultant. “We’re trying to find our identity again.”
It’s just after 9 a.m. Friday, at Thom Bargen Coffee & Tea, itself part of a new crop of downtown hangouts. (Launched on Sherbrook Street, the business opened a second location on Graham Avenue in the spring of 2016.)
Already, the buzz of the day is building. At the coffee shop’s corner table, there’s a man in a 2016 Heritage Classic Jets jersey. On the street outside, Jets jerseys. On the Winnipeg Transit bus from Osborne Village, even the driver wore a Jets jersey.
Hours from now, the downtown will start to swell with more people, more jerseys, and the peculiar frenzy so unique to this moment in the city’s sports history. But Robinson knows it will not last; these days will be gone in a flash.
“Bringing people in for Jets stuff downtown is part of a general culture shift in showing that downtown can be a viable place,” he says. “But it’s just one of the many factors, and kind of more of a small factor.”
Robinson is one of the new generation of Winnipeg planners. His recent master’s degree thesis focused on tactical urbanism, studying how pop-up efforts — such as, say, big street events — can effect change in Winnipeg itself.
The core of that perspective: yeah, the city’s pumped up but we ought not get ahead of ourselves.
The Jets playoff street parties have been electrifying, and not only locally. Broadcasters and the NHL itself have happily wallowed in the images of cheering throngs. For True North and the Downtown Winnipeg Business Improvement Zone, it’s sensational advertising.
It shows what is possible downtown, given the right set of conditions.
“These events are great for the city in these very short bursts,” Robinson says. “Every time you shut down a street… people will be like, ‘Oh, they’re going so far as to shut down a street, we need to check that out.'”
Yet, if the lesson of the street parties is simple — if you extend an invitation by closing a street or throwing up giant TV screens, people tend to come — the reality is complex. It will take more to sustain interest, beyond the Jets.
“I think we need to take advantage of that (street-closure) tool, showing that the more space you give to people downtown, the more they’ll want to go,” Robinson says. “On one hand, that’s what doing those things can do.
“Unfortunately,” he adds, “I just don’t think they’re in place long enough to make any meaningful change.”
Because Winnipeg, after all, has seen this movie before. The old 1990s street parties under former mayor Glen Murray drew thousands downtown; when the Jets came back, Winnipeggers flocked there to celebrate together.
Yet, after those shindigs were over, nothing major had changed. Portage and Main still sat surrounded by unwelcoming barricades. Surface parking lots still reigned. There was, again, a lack of open invitations.
Still, that part is changing. Amongst advocates and stakeholders, there is a vision coalescing around Winnipeg’s downtown could be; ideas to make its spaces more vital, and more inviting. More like places people want to be.
Maybe, someday, it won’t take the Jets to draw thousands of people to downtown’s streets.
“You talk about that culture shift of how we see downtown, and maybe this (playoff parties) can be an opportunity to evaluate what it could be,” Robinson says. “Maybe this won’t be the silver bullet to change that, but that’s fine.
“There are a lot of people that are out there trying to make things happen down here, and I think we’ve been heading in the right direction.”
melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca
Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large (currently on leave)
Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.
History
Updated on Friday, April 20, 2018 8:14 PM CDT: Updates headline
Updated on Friday, April 20, 2018 8:24 PM CDT: First edit
Updated on Friday, April 20, 2018 9:18 PM CDT: Adds video
Updated on Monday, April 23, 2018 7:46 PM CDT: Fixes spelling of company name.