Buildings should respect traditions

DALLAS HANSEN

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Recently in the Free Press, David Witty, Dean of the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture, wrote about the importance of good design without specifying what might qualify as “good,” and without stepping on any toes by labeling anything bad.

Dean Witty did come close. He offered vague praises for the Provencher footbridge and the new Millennium Library. Yet he neglected to mention that upon its opening, the 1977 Centennial Library also was praised for its modern design — the original architect certainly thought it good — even though the Millennium project came about only because, by 1999, most Winnipeggers regarded the Centennial Library as unbearably hideous.

In 1965, our new city hall was considered a major aesthetic improvement over the 1886 “gingerbread house” it replaced; today, the Civic Centre’s monolithic modernism comprises some of the city’s most reviled structures, while the old Victorian City Hall remains much-lamented.

“Good design” is relative. Trends do come and go, but most buildings in Winnipeg that are universally accepted as beautiful were constructed before 1920. These designs were based not upon an architect’s egotistical whim or desire for experimentation. Rather, they conformed to the classic forms that manifested themselves in the contemporary styles of the day: Chicagoan, Richardsonian Romanesque, Beaux-Arts, Edwardian Commercial, Victorian Italianate.

Examples of each can be found in the Exchange District, a national historic site of which Winnipeggers are rightfully proud. But, before being demolished for the sake of modernist experiments or surface-level parking, Exchange District-style buildings were once laid over a much larger area of the city, throughout the downtown and into the inner city along such streets as Portage, Main, Notre Dame, Logan, Sargent, and Selkirk.

At the time, the demolitions may have seemed convenient, but they permanently transformed the urban environment into something comparatively repellent.

Recent new construction in the inner city has been unsympathetic to historical surroundings. Across from the brick, five-storey, 1909 Casa Loma Building on Portage was recently constructed a number of single-storey, box-style fast food outlets (and, set back a good distance from the sidewalk, a drug store) no different than those found among the subdivided outskirts of North American suburbs and small towns.

Perhaps the middle-class, suburban men and women who comprise the city’s planning department have decided the best course is to suburbanize the urban? Or maybe the problem is there’s no planning at all.

As legendary Winnipeg planner Earl Levin wrote in a 1984 paper titled Beyond the Core Area Initiative: Prospects for Downtown Winnipeg: “Major planning and development decisions affecting the City of Winnipeg are not being made by city council and do not involve in any formal way the city’s planning department.”

Speaking of Levin, it is he we have to thank for the wasteland of surface parking that exists downtown south of Portage and north of Broadway. Up until the late 1960s, the area was residential — tree-lined streets filled with row houses and walk-up apartment buildings; where now sits the Convention Centre once lay a school. Levin had a grandiose vision of a modern, Le Corbusier-inspired, towers-in-the-park sort of downtown, and the first of it was completed in 1972 between Hargrave and Carlton streets between York and St. Mary avenues — Lakeview Square. While the plaza in the centre of it all didn’t turn out to be the hit Levin expected — I find it a solitudinal spot to enjoy a surreptitious beer on a weekday afternoon — those who sit amid its shade might look at their surroundings and think, “That’s a lot of concrete.”

But Levin’s vision, minus the subway he and Bernie Wolfe had hoped for, only compounded the parking problem and left our landscape filled with holes.

If Winnipeg’s Exchange District might be compared to Vancouver’s Gastown, we would do well to do what they have done. New buildings in Gastown have aped the scale and the style of historical surrounding structures, often with a postmodern twist.

Winnipeg should work aggressively to develop empty lots and parking lots into new buildings of the old styles, expanding our Exchange District into the neighbouring neighbourhoods of Chinatown, Centennial, and West Alexander, while demanding that all new development in the inner city be aesthetically rooted in one of the historic forms we all agree to admire.

Petro prices could drive more to bus, try walking

Focus, Tuesday, November 8, 2005, p. A13

Repopulating of core, better transit are key to going without car

DALLAS HANSEN

ECONOMISTS and geologists have offered ample warning that the days of cheap oil would not last. This year, however, their words took on new meaning when gasoline prices rose beyond a dollar per litre.

Were it any other product, consumers might be induced to substitution, even a change in lifestyle. But most Canadians have instead opted to take the hit and keep on motoring, with many venting their anger in nasty letters to our dithering prime minister, demanding he take action.

On a macro level, even a complete elimination of the gasoline tax would do nothing to change the laws of supply and demand, conditions over which the government is helpless. But on a micro level, householders decrying the unaffordability of petrol could adopt one simple policy to rein in their transportation budgets. They can quit driving.

It’s not impossible. Motorists living in such urban enclaves as Toronto’s Bloor West Village or Vancouver’s West End will admit to seldom using their car for anything other than weekend getaways that seldom happen every week. Even here in Winnipeg there exist districts scaled to the wayfarer rather than the driver.

Upon closer inspection, the Everyday Low Prices of suburbia’s big boxes aren’t necessarily so low. To begin with, their location and layout presuppose automobile ownership.

At current gas prices, owning and operating even a basic vehicle will average over $400 per month. Driving something that invites ignominy will cost closer to $700 per month. Shopping at local grocers in the walkable central city might mean paying more for some items, but there’s little chance that the difference will add up to hundreds a month.

Corner store

Moreover, the overpriced independent grocer seems to be more myth than substance. Recently I ran to the corner store for an emergency bottle of lemon juice which I bought for $1.99. The nearest chain supermarket sold the same bottle for $2.69.

Besides the fiscal, other benefits to quitting driving concern one’s quality of life. Having somewhere to buy fresh produce between the transit stop and one’s home means fresher food. Missing ingredients can be had without wrangling through traffic and navigating a sea of seemingly endless parking. Smaller grocers are often family owned, and some, even in this day, still allow regular customers to run an informal tab.

Quitting driving can improve health too, for walking offers us exercise without the tedium or cost of visiting a fitness club.

While few would disagree that the automobile is unessential for the bachelor life, most Canadians would say that a car (or minivan or SUV) is a must for raising families. But the inner cities are filled with zero-car households that often comprise more than a kid or two. Many of these families can’t afford a car, but many can. Their children are obliged to get around on their own: walking, bicycling, skateboarding, even riding public transit. Our nation of chauffeured children is really a nation of coddled, overprotected, spoiled brats.

Until gas prices rise yet further, life sans auto won’t be a catching trend. How far up need they go? It’s possible that oil at $100 a barrel will draw mass demonstrations, even rioting, before it will draw people from their auto-centric lifestyles.

But in the last year or so, Winnipeg Transit buses have seemed much fuller, with many routes standing-room-only not just during peak hours, but throughout the day and indeed even the evening.

Most of these new riders likely did not opt out of driving; they were forced out, by economic circumstances. It would be an interesting statistic, the number of Winnipeggers who spend more on transportation than they do on housing.

Winnipeggers frequently congratulate themselves on having a lower cost-of-living than Canada’s three overpriced metropolises. What they fail to mention, however, is that in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver — in the central city at least — it’s possible to live without a car and not be stigmatized, ridiculed, or inconvenienced.

In Winnipeg this might not be so, but given a proper transit system and the repopulation of the inner city, more of us who can afford to drive will make the choice not to.

Category: Editorial and Opinions
Uniform subject(s): Inflation, prices and salaries; Oil and petrochemical industries
Length: Medium, 584 words

© 2005 Winnipeg Free Press. All rights reserved.
www.dallashansen.com

Katrina survivors suffer perverse indignity

DALLAS HANSEN

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Surely any civilians remaining in New Orleans by now could have been evacuated. That is, if they wanted to leave. But there remain some holdouts. Since Mayor C. Ray Nagin has repeatedly declared a mandatory civilian evacuation, remaining residents have been not so much evicted as evacuated –at gunpoint.

Those being forcibly herded into police and military vehicles and dragged out of town to shelters likely never imagined a scenario where they would be coerced from their homes by American National Guardsmen.

Ostensibly they are being removed for their own safety. But clearly the floodwaters are receding, and many residents feel sufficiently comfortable with their food stocks to stick around.

The disease factor is often mentioned, but has yet to arrive, and anyway, the police and military are no less susceptible than residents of the French Quarter.

In a free country, the Land of the Brave, the people of New Orleans who courageously survived the worst hurricane and flooding in that city’s history are being forced to abandon their homes. On top of all the indignities inflicted upon them by mother nature, these Katrina victims who have secured food and water are enduring a suspension of their civil liberties.

Johnny White’s Sports Bar and Grill, on Bourbon street in the French Quarter, never closed throughout the hurricane and the watery aftermath.

In nearby Lafayette Square, owners and staff of directnic, a large internet company, have been using diesel generators to keep their business going. A proprietor of directnic (and former U.S. Army Special Forces officer), Michael Barnett, has kept a fascinating blog (www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor) throughout the pre- and post-Katrina experience, including a telling incident wherein a squad of 82nd Airborne soldiers burst into their secured headquarters Wednesday morning “to investigate the lights and movement.”

Clearly, economic activity in New Orleans never did come to a complete standstill.

What prompts people to stay? Mr. Barnett has an essential business to run, but others remain behind out of a profound psychological attachment to their homes. Inner city residents without cars may not have left New Orleans in decades, if ever. And New Orleans, with all its splendid architecture and history, has an unusually strong sense of civic pride. There is the desire to protect one’s home from looters — even ones in uniform.

Besides, motivations to leave are especially lacking. However bad the French Quarter might look in Katrina’s aftermath, it’s certainly preferable to the scenery inside Houston’s Astrodome.

Forcibly evicting citizens from their own homes brings additional trauma to those who have endured the worst natural disaster in American history. As more people are removed from New Orleans, fewer are likely to return. So who will live there once it’s rebuilt? The city’s economy needs people — the more people who leave, the longer it will be before a return to economic normalcy.

In the absence of ATMs, paycheques, and regular work, an underground economy emerges. People barter goods or labour to get what they need. Some are no doubt already at work on repairs.

But being outside the “official” relief effort, their work is deemed illegitimate, and they are being forced to quit. Yet hundreds of millions of dollars have been donated to such charities as the Red Cross and the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. Billions have been released by congress. Couldn’t some of this money go toward hiring New Orleans citizens to clean up their own neighbourhoods?

Now that law enforcement officers and military personnel outnumber remaining residents of New Orleans, a total eviction will surely be swift.

This tragedy will be remembered not merely for destroying the economy of New Orleans, but also the sanctity of the American home.

Simple pleasures of downtown living

DALLAS HANSEN

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Everybody — from planners to politicians, plebeians to patricians — agrees that, to be successful, resurrecting Winnipeg’s downtown means a many-fold multiplication of its population. Yet more people talk about living downtown than actually move there: The proportion of Winnipeggers living within the city centre is less than one per cent.

While lacking the shine of those in similarly sized cities such as Quebec City or the upstart mini-metropolis Calgary, our downtown is redeemable. The Exchange District offers an abundance of splendid architecture fast being converted to homes. The Waterfront Drive project will add hundreds of new jobs and residents. Recent zoning changes invite mixed-use development — dwellings above storefronts — which was instrumental in raising previously dull districts, such as Vancouver’s Yaletown, to the acme of urban trendies.

In downtown Winnipeg today live 5,000 — a stagnant statistic for fifteen years. Contrast this with Vancouver — a metropolitan area thrice the size whose downtown will have 20 times as many residents by 2010. But given that most days 60,000 Winnipeggers are in the central business district until 5 p.m., there’s potential for thousands to cut their commute and live within walking distance from work.

A popular and successful downtown has been mooted and sought for decades. It’s questionable, however, whether we’re nearer to it now than we were in 1987. Young professionals craving an urban lifestyle are quitting Winnipeg for already prosperous city centres in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. And a car-dependent, idealized suburban culture continues to heap myths and stigmas upon public transit (“the loser cruiser,” “the ride of shame”) and on living downtown.

What keeps people from moving downtown? Regardless of whom I ask — young, old, male, female — I hear the same specious dismissals.

Too many panhandlers.

All cities have them. But in livelier downtowns their presence isn’t so noticeable or menacing, for they are a minority among a crowd. They are best quickly dismissed with a look in the opposite direction or the flick of a coin.

Nowhere to park.

Free parking spaces are scarce — unless a spot comes with your rent. Paid parking, however, is plentiful.

It’s dangerous.

Are the suburbs so safe? Automobile collisions kill more young adults than anything. Much crime happens in suburbia also. But busy streets are safe streets. As downtown becomes busier, it will be safer. Mixed-use zoning will put eyes on the sidewalks, as those who live above a busy street tend to keep aware of what happens below.

Where can I buy groceries?

There are countless places to buy good and inexpensive food. Besides The Forks Market and the shops of Chinatown, there’s The Bay, Food Fare on Donald, Safeway on Sargent, California Fruit Market on Main, plus Extra Foods and several ethnic grocery stores on Notre Dame. Certainly more options than one would find within the same radius anywhere in suburbia.

But what about a yard?

As a downtown, what you sacrifice is more than returned in public space. The Forks, Stephen Juba Park and Central Park all provide green space, and within a short walk lie tennis and basketball courts, a YMCA, Old Market Square, the main public library and several movie theatres. Besides, the backyard might be overrated. “One of the main attractions of moving to the suburbs,” writes David Owen in The New Yorker, “is acquiring ground of your own, yet you can travel for miles through suburbia and see no one doing anything in a yard other than working on the yard itself… The modern suburban yard is perfectly, perversely self-justifying: Its purpose is to be taken care of.”

My suburban upbringing, unusually transient, and nine years of inner-city adulthood have found me living from Charleswood to Transcona, St. Vital to St. James, Maples to Osborne Village — and, later, at several addresses downtown. For the diversions I enjoy — walking, browsing used bookstores, bumping into old friends on the sidewalk, live music, eating out — life in the city centre is most satisfying.

If you’re weary of buying gasoline to commute for six hours each week, if you fancy the thought of being able to walk home from work, dinner, a movie, the nightclub, etc., do reconsider downtown. Your welcome presence will only make our city better.