THE RISE AND SPRAWL

Over the weekend, the WSO maestro Alexander Mickelthwate paid some glowing compliments in the Free Press to Parlour Coffee, a new venture that was opened (after a couple of months of pointless delay) on Main Street near Bannatyne by an old friend of mine, the always enterprising aesthete, Nils Vik.

Maestro Mickelthwate’s piece was a pleasure to read: a short feature on some of his favorite places that have the power to transcend the dreary nature that life in Winnipeg can take in its coldest, darkest months. Stunning warehouse spaces in the Exchange, the new play area at Assiniboine Park (as a parent of two young kids, I’ve spent many evenings over the summer here), and the aforementioned Parlour Coffee. As a city dweller, these are all part of the Winnipeg I enjoy living in.

Curious what others may have thought about Parlour Coffee, I glanced through the comment section at the bottom of the story. Comments on news websites are among the most banal features of the internet (as one Free Press reporter told me: “the comment page doesn’t reflect our general readership. At least I hope like hell it doesn’t.”) Lunacy was likely in store, but feeling in the mood for cheap amusements, I proceeded to scroll down, and soon came across this gem: 

“Shady area? check
Crappy Parking? check
Don’t work downtown? check
Sorry chances are I won’t ever be visiting this coffee shop.”

One could react to this with despair, or with a resolve to argue that this block is not, infact shady (save for some nights when the Woodbine Hotel next door is in full swing). But I would venture to guess that this person hasn’t checked out a new coffee shop since Tim Horton’s opened their first drive-thru. Sprucing up Main Street or adding some more parking spots will not change this.

There are, and will always be a good proportion of the greater Winnipeg region’s population that will never go downtown for anything but a major event (concert, hockey game) or something they have to do (meet with a lawyer, go to work). This is not a unique to Winnipeg. In the metropolitan regions of any North American city, even ones with thriving urban cores, many people avoid the place simply because they don’t like it and are unfamiliar with it. They don’t like shortage of parking, the walking, the unfamiliar shops, the grimy old buildings, and the strange people doing strange things on the sidewalks.

These people are quite content with the predictability of new suburban environments. Even if they are downtown for 40 hours a week for work or school, they seldom venture out of their building, or the maze of skywalks and underground concourses. There is very little that anyone can do about this.

You don’t need a billboard campaign to tell these people to come downtown. Photo by Leif Norman

There is a legitimate concern about safety and order downtown, and it should not be ignored or understated, but for many people, the area is “shady” by its nature.

That’s ok with me. If the suburbs is your thing, that’s fine.

Still, great public expense goes in to trying to lure folks like that commentator downtown. Efforts should instead be placed on getting existing city-dwellers downtown. A middle class family living in Crescentwood, Scotia-Luxton, or Wolseley has already shown that they’re probably not going to be scared off by relative density, old buildings, variety, or parallal parking.

Downtown should stop trying to compete with Kenaston, and start trying to compete with Corydon. It is people like Mickelthwate, who will go downtown for fun if it means finding places that feel like a little piece of Montreal, London, or Chicago in their very own city. Trying to create a downtown that meets the unrealistic standards of people like the above commentator, means we’ll be left with not much a downtown at all.

If the wish is for a downtown to be thriving and livable, then it should act as the centre of the surrounding city first, and the centre of the region second. This is one reason why the small and organic is preferable to the massive and contrived (and is why a smart commentator on the Parlour story asked for “[m]ore of this and less Centre Venture, please”).