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I was asked to do a bit of writing about Winnipeg. It's not going to be published anywhere, and I like the way it turned out, so I thought I'd share it with you guys. It opens with some quotes from other Winnipeggers:
“Winnipeg is a Siberia, a skagway, a vast plain of ice… All is enveloped in a sad atmosphere. My city is plunged in the perpetual night of its notorious winter, lugubriously ice-encrusted, bedecked with crystalline stalactites and crosscut by great white ways of snow banks, all arrayed behind an intricate scrimshaw of frost. The city is a bleak and wind-buffeted Luna Park carved from a glacier—an Expo of melancholy. Here, we throng no midways, cavort in no pavilions. Winter pedestrians are less common than wild dogs.”
- Guy Maddin, “Death in Winnipeg”
And in the turning lane
someone's stalled again
he's talking to himself
and hears the price of gas repeat his phrase
I hate Winnipeg
Up above us all,
leaning into sky
our golden business boy
will watch the north end die
and sing 'I love this town'
then let his arcing wrecking ball proclaim:
"I...hate...Winnipeg"
- The Weakerthans, “One Great City”
Is this all exaggeration, grousing, sour grapes, bile from some of Winnipeg’s most prominent citizens? Does Winnipeg have anything remotely cosmopolitan to offer, or is it, as the above excerpts imply, merely remote: little more than a glacier topped with a few ugly buildings and grumpy citizens in ragged, frost-fringed parkas?
By way of descriptive rebuttal, Osborne Village – the most densely populated neighbourhood in all of Canada – is a good place to start. Its main strip is a narrow canyon of vitamin shops, sushi bars and music stores, and the cracks between are filled with bars, progressive publishing companies, yoga shalas, designer boutiques and restaurants serving continental cuisine at semi-reasonable prices. Here, pedestrians can actually be seen dotting the busy landscape, staring up at the decorative Bells of Glenmurray (a tall, chiming clock which serves as the neighbourhood’s centrepiece) or else doggedly trekking the rutted, excremental sidewalks.
This commercial corridor is flanked by apartment housing of every description, from rambling, multi-suite houses to expensive, vintage condominiums. There are towering blocks overlooking the river, and vast, past-their-prime buildings where once, as legend has it, the Queen of England herself slept. In the summer, the area is populous and verdant, with a canopy of green providing shade to the coruscating hipsters below.
Across the river we find Broadway Avenue, as broad and grand as its name implies, with a wide, fountain-dotted median bisecting the fifties modernist structures which make up the city’s financial district. Here, hot dog vendors hawk their street meat to the nattily-dressed adjuvants of capitalism; the mustard-stained lapels which inevitably follow, and which would be grounds for dismissal in any other city, are proud badges of proletarian honour in laid-back, grass-rootsy River City.
For in the land of the baseball cap, the mullet-headed man is king. And we find no shortage of those in the meat-packing district, deep within the here-chic, there-shabby district of St. Boniface. This part of the city is in a time warp, perpetually two decades behind the rest of the world. Here the abandoned skeletons of great slaughterhouses provide a scenic backdrop to grimy, gas-lit strip clubs. Cheerful marquees announce the next week’s headliner: “Miss Twin Peaks 2002,” perhaps, or the red-blooded charms of “Arkansas Annie And Her Idiot Stepchild.” Within, sullen monobrows concentrate as much on their half-empty bottles of Canadian as on the pole-humping routines mechanically playing out on stage. Here is your chance to see what purple neon does to plaid flannel, cellulite and gin blossoms.
Sound grim? Winnipeg is anything but! Eclectic is the word: full of hidden corners, unexpected surprises and obscure meaning. A vibrant arts scene plays out amidst a population who entertain themselves by sucking on shafts of wheat. Bizarre murals depicting scenes of incongruous tropicalia decorate the shops and restaurants. Once, years ago, Winnipeg was the “Chicago of the North,” the hub of commerce in Canada, the “Roundhouse of North America;” and the glory these epithets imply still remains in the beauty of its architecture, the abundance of its railroad tracks, and the fierce, proud hearts of its citizens.
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