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Description
Even before Winnipeg had celebrated its first decade of existence Alexander Begg and Walter Nursey had already begun the process of telling the story of the city(1)--and thirteen decades later there is no sign that the propensity for writing books on Winnipeg's past is declining, as witnessed by the success of such recent works as Jim Blanchard's Winnipeg, 1912 and David Arnason and Mahri Mackintosh (eds.) The Imagined City: A Literary History of Winnipeg. However, with only a few notable exceptions, ever since the spate of publications associated with Winnipeg's centennial celebrations in 1974 and Alan Artibise's 1977 contribution to the History of Canadian Cities series, (2) precious little attention has been paid to Winnipeg in the years following the Depression. Thus, it is refreshing to come across a number of works that deal almost exclusively with this more recent period of Winnipeg's history.
At first glance the three works examined in this essay would seem to have little in common. The first, Russ Gourluck's Going Downtown: A History of Winnipeg's Portage Avenue, is patently a work of popular history on what he describes as the "golden age" (1930-1980) of Winnipeg's retail and entertainment district. The second, Winnipeg Modern: Architecture 1945-1975, is a collection of essays that are primarily academic examinations of Winnipeg's modernist "built environment" and the architects whose vision helped to transform the cityscape during this crucial thirty-year period. The third and final work under consideration, The Winnipeg Connection: Writing Lives at Mid-Century, is a compilation of critical commentaries and literary pieces pertaining to, or emanating from, Winnipeg (in one way or another) in the middle of the twentieth century. But aside from the obvious sharing of a temporal framework, all three are also marked by a genuine and often unabashed affection for Winnipeg. Still, this is less important than their shared focus upon Winnipeg during a period of profound change: a time when the very shape and form of the city was being altered and when new social, intellectual, and economic trends were creating and recreating Winnipeg's collective identity.
As might be expected though, the three books do not make equal contributions to our understanding of Winnipeg. While Russ Gourluck is a fine popular historian--as demonstrated by his award-winning, A Store Like No Other: Eaton's of Winnipeg--one cannot help but feel that he has missed the mark somewhat with Going Downtown.
To begin with, almost from the very first page there are little editorial glitches which could and should have been cleared up in a more thorough line edit--for example, it is obvious that going from one draft to another some words that should have been deleted were not--and these glitches persist throughout the book. This, however, is but a mild irritant. It is the structure that Gourluck has chosen for writing Going Downtown that is far more problematic. After a strong start, with a Preface that proudly announced the author's intention to celebrate the life and work of the people who made Winnipeg's downtown such a vital place to be, and with an even stronger Prologue that does a fine job of explaining how and why Portage Avenue supplanted Main Street as the city's primary retail location, the text becomes increasingly frustrating. Instead of following any sort of chronology, the author has decided to present the story of Portage Avenue in the form of a travelogue, running from east to west. In effect, each of the twelve chapters deals with a roughly one block stretch of the famous avenue--often progressing on a buildingby-building basis. The result leaves the reader leaping through time, without enough context to help make sense of what are essentially disconnected vignettes of individual buildings and the history of their construction, renovation (and in many cases, destruction) as well as the story of their various inhabitants over a fifty to eighty year period. Even worse, some of these vignettes--especially for still existing businesses--read more like paid advertisements than history, popular or otherwise.
There is, of course, a story line of sorts in Going Downtown. Gourluck charts the rise, the glory days and the rather sad demise of Portage Avenue as the Mecca for Winnipeggers looking for both goods and a good time in a host of downtown locales. While the Prologue and Epilogue make a clear and reasonable case for this somewhat obvious thesis, the intervening material does not explore the social, economic, or cultural dynamics (at least in any sustained fashion) which produced this pattern.
All of this is not to say, however, that this book is without redeeming features. Some will be attracted to its... |
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