National Post (National Edition)
Winnipeg votes (no) with its feet
The intersection, over the decades, has borne witness to a historic workers’ strike, been overrun by despairing and euphoric hockey fans and provided sufficient space for a crowd of thousands to create a human depiction of a Canadian flag.
But as the result of a public vote made clear this week, most people in Winnipeg don’t want pedestrians to dominate the juncture where Portage Avenue meets Main Street on a regular basis.
Even as Winnipeggers returned Brian Bowman to the mayor’s seat in their municipal election on Wednesday, they rejected a favoured pet project of his by voting decisively against opening Portage and Main — the socalled crossroads of Canada and the point around which the Manitoba capital began to develop in the first years after Confederation — to foot traffic.
Bowman, the incumbent mayor, took office in 2014 having promised that he’d establish a crosswalk at the famed downtown intersection. Instead, Winnipeg city council decided earlier this year to put the question to voters via a non-binding plebiscite. While Bowman got 53 per cent of the vote, nearly two-thirds of the electorate said they opposed letting pedestrians cross the street.
“You may have been surprised: the way I voted wasn’t supported by Winnipeggers,” Bowman said in his victory speech on Wednesday night.
Elsewhere in Canada, a debate over whether to station traffic lights and paint walkways at a busy intersection might have been viewed as a humdrum urban planning issue. But in Winnipeg the future of Portage and Main became one of the defining disputes of the election. Speaking to the National Post in August, architect Brent Bellamy, a spokesperson for a group that advocated for the crosswalk, likened the schism to an “identity war,” pitting those who think a pedestrian path would promote business and accessibility against those concerned about its potential to snarl traffic and its projected $11.6-million price tag.
“I think too many people see downtown as a place to get to or get through, and they don’t really see it as a place that should be designed for pedestrians as much as cars,” Adam Dooley, another spokesperson for Vote Open Winnipeg, said on Thursday.
Concrete barriers have been positioned along the sidewalks at Portage and Main to prevent pedestrians from stepping into the road since 1979, a few years after the city said it would build an underground shopping complex below the intersection. By that time, the bustle of Portage and Main was a far cry from the state of the site in 1862, when settlers panned local merchant Henry Mckenney’s idea to open a general store there because the land was too far from the Red River.
Their doubts were short-sighted, to say the least. Portage and Main soon blossomed into the axis of transportation and economic activity in Winnipeg, the corner where police officers charged protesting labourers during a general strike in 1919 and where 3,600 people dressed in red and white formed a “living” Canadian flag on the country’s 150th birthday last year. Inspired, perhaps, by the unproven claim that the intersection is the coldest and windiest in the world, Randy Bachman and Neil Young gave it a shoutout in their 1992 song Prairie Town: “Portage and Main, 50 below.”
No entity has made its presence known at Portage and Main through the years quite like the Winnipeg Jets. Bobby Hull signed hockey’s first million-dollar contract there when he joined the city’s nascent World Hockey Association team in 1972. Desperate fans rallied at Portage and Main in the mid-1990s when the Jets were on the verge of relocating to Phoenix. Elated fans flocked there in 2011 when the Atlanta Thrashers moved to Winnipeg.
The last mass celebration to overcome the intersection took place this past spring, when the Jets won two playoff series and advanced as far as the Western Conference final. Police shut down entire blocks near Bell MTS Place for viewing parties of each game. The Jets’ deciding victories over Minnesota and Nashville, meanwhile, prompted thousands of gleeful Winnipeggers to congregate at the spiritual centre of their city.
“I think (Portage and Main is) viewed as something very iconic,” said Rod Palson, 67, an advertising executive who introduced the trend of hockey fans wearing white shirts to home playoff games when he worked with the original Jets in the 1980s.
“When the news came out that the Jets were coming back into the NHL in 2011, the young people of the day just automatically flocked there, almost like it was a given,” Palson said. “It was like, ‘This is a no-brainer. We don’t go anywhere else.’”
The sense in Winnipeg is that the pedestrian issue may have to be revisited if wear and tear in the shopping complex below ground continues to get worse. Bowman, though, said he plans to respect the outcome of the plebiscite, meaning the barriers at Portage and Main will remain in place for the time being.
“I’m not going to apologize for listening to Winnipeggers," Bowman said on Wednesday night. "They spoke today pretty clearly."