Cenennial Neighbourhood Walking Tour

 

Join me this Saturday at 11 am for another walking tour of the Centennial neighbourhood!

See inside the former Swedish Zion Lutheran Church / Christ the King Ukrainian Catholic Church / future Valiant Theatre on Logan Avenue at Fountain Street then go around the block to hear about its development and some of the businesses and people who have called it home.

We’ll explore the early years of Swedish immigration to the neighbourhood, the Chinese influence in the 1930s and 1940s, and the role that two railway yards played in keeping this block a working-class section of the neighbourhood.

Date: Saturday, April 27th, 2024 at 11 am.

Meeting Place: Future Valiant Theatre, 376 Logan Avenue at Fountain Street.

Cost: $10 donation to The Valiant Theatre development fund. Payment can be made at the tour, by Interac transfer to build@thevaliant.ca, or the "Build the Valiant” GoFundMe page.

This walking tour is approximately 1.5 hours long and the distance is one square block.

Manitoba's WWI Fallen: Joseph Andrew Bright McClure of Winnipeg

© 2024, Christian Cassidy

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, I am working on a series of blog posts and radio shows that will look at some of the Manitobans who died in action. For more about this project and links to other posts, follow this link.

March 22, 1918, Winnipeg Free Press

Joseph Andrew Bright McClure lived at 900 Aikins Street with his wife Gertrude and their three young children. The family relocated to suite 20 Acadia Apartments at 590 Victor Street just before he enlisted.

McClure, 40, went missing in action during the Battle of Vimy Ridge on August 21, 1917. His remains were never found and he was declared dead the following March.

McClure is commemorated at the Canadian Vimy Memorial in Pas de Calais, France. As he worked at the executive offices of the Bank of Commerce in Winnipeg, his name appears on the roll of honour in the entrance of the former Bank of Commerce headquarters (now Millennium Centre) in downtown Winnipeg.

Related:
Attestation papers

The Purcer Brothers of Wardlaw Avenue in World War I

 © 2024, Christian Cassidy

May 16, 1914, Winnipeg Tribune

I've written many stories about those who died in the First World War. Here is the story of the Purcer family whose three sons all served and survived.

Charles and Fannie Purcer and their three grown sons, William, John "Jack", and Garson, lived together at 388 Wardlaw Street at the start of the war. Charles and his brother Watson co-owned a local building company where William and John worked as bricklayers. Garson was a steamfitter.

The three Purcer boys were involved in the war effort. William, (born 1883), was the first to enlist in September 1915, followed by Jack, (born 1885), who enlisted in February 1916. Garson, (born 1888), was drafted into service near the end of the war in May 1918.

Garson Purcer recruitment papers

The family left the Wardlaw Avenue home after William and Jack enlisted. It appears that the parents moved back to the Ottawa area where they were originally from.

Garson moved in with his married sister, Mrs. Margaret Buttler of 5 Acadia Court, and it was from there that he was drafted. The brothers already in the service changed their home addresses with the war office to Acadia Apartments. 590 Victor Street.

Jack was wounded on two occasions with shrapnel to the eye and a gunshot wound to his left side. Both times he was treated and returned to action. Garson was drafted so late in the war that he only made it as far as England and suffered no injuries or illness.

The brother who paid the heaviest price was William Purcer.

According to a brief Winnipeg Tribune story a few days after he enlisted, William was on his way to his job as a maintenance man at a department store one morning when he read about the mass rape and murder of Armenian women by the Turks in what is referred to today as the Armenian Genocide. He was so moved that by the time he arrived at work he informed his boss that he was enlisting, picked up his tools, and went to a recruitment office.

Purcer did his basic training at Camp Hughes near Brandon, Manitoba. He arrived in England in October 1915 and was in France by April 1916. He was wounded three times during his service.

In September 1916 Purcer received a gunshot wound to the head at the Battle of the Somme, Belgium, and spent months recovering in a British hospital before being discharged back to service in November with "small metallic fragments" in his scalp.  In May 1917 he was back in hospital with a gunshot wound to the chest and again recovered and was sent back to the front.

Purcel spent five days in hospital in September 1917 with a case of scabies. The following month, he "reported sick in France with severe pains in his knees, ankles, hips and shin bones" that was later determined to be rheumatism. While in England receiving treatment for that condition he came down with a case of the bacterial infection trench fever.

Purcell spent the next eight months or so in various hospitals and convalescent homes in England. In May 1918, he was transferred to No. 5 Canadian Hospital in Liverpool and the decision was made on June 26, 1918 to invalid him back to Canada.

The only high points in Purcer's military file is that he was awarded two gold bars for his injuries and three weeks before the decision to discharge him he went AWOL for a day and got drunk. (He was penalized two days of pay but was later admonished.)

Purcer's discharge forms listed suite 5 of Acadia Court as the address he would settle at, but he first made a stop at Ottawa to visit his recently widowed mother and to hopefully see Garson who was in basic training at Brockville, Ontario.

By September, Purcell was back in Winnipeg as he received his medical board exam on September 18th. It found no lingering effects with the head or chest injuries, just the rheumatism and a case of flat feet, the latter was something he had before the war but were made worse during is time in service.

The report concluded that though he could only return to his previous occupation "to a limited extent", Purcer was fit enough for light military duty back in Canada should the need arise. As the end of the war was just weeks away, he was never called on.

May 25, 1939 Winnipeg Tribune and Find a Grave

The Purcer family split up after the war.

Neither Jack nor Garson appear in Winnipeg street directories after the war. Jack died at Toronto in 1935 at the age of 49. Garson lived for a time in Detroit and died at Ottawa in 1949 at the age of 60.

William Purcer only appears in one edition of a Winnipeg street directory after the war; in 1930 as a bricklayer living in a rooming house at 370 Langside Street. He died at Deer Lodge Hospital, Winnipeg's military convalescent hospital, on May 23, 1939 at the age of 55 and is buried in the Field of Honour at Brookside Cemetery.

Another week - more historic buildings lost to fire

© 2024, Christian Cassidy

Google Street View

Another week has passed and a couple more substantial buildings have been destroyed by fire.

On Tuesday, Glenora Apartments on Toronto Street and last night the Guest Block on Main Street, (the middle building in the above photo). These weren't the only fires this week, just the largest buildings destroyed.

I'm gonna be an uppity inner-city person here and ask the question 'when do these fires raise a flag with politicians, police, etc?'

We are well past the point of it being the odd vacant house going up in flames. Over the past couple of years, substantial and inhabited buildings have gone up in flames every couple of weeks and that span seems to be getting shorter.

I can't imagine that if this was happening in St. James or East Kildonan or St. Boniface it would be greeted with what seems like just a shrug.

I'm not sure what can be done but could there be a meeting of officials to discuss ideas or if resources could be redeployed. Do we know if there are dozens of random people lighting fires annually or are we talking about a couple of firebugs responsible?

This is not normal and I don't get a sense that people in charge share that feeling or a sense that something must be done.

This isn't helped by the fact that when a big fire happens, the media will cover it because it is a great news story and the city will issue a release to warn about the traffic implications. Rarely will you ever get a follow-up story about the cause of the fire.

Are some of these fires down to wiring issues, as most tend to be century-old buildings, or is it arson? It is hard to tell.

For more about the history of the Guest Block.

Opening Soon: Portage and Main

Portage and Main, 1979, by Hugh Allan (City of Winnipeg Archives)

It looks as if Portage and Main will reopen after all.

I've done several skywalk tours of Winnipeg that end at Portage and Main with a discussion about its history and future. Whenever I am asked about it still being closed to pedestrians, I always say that when the cost to repair the concourse becomes known, it will reopen.

The issue of the pending redevelopment came up several times during the plebiscite debate but it got so emotional and divisive that it was largely ignored in favour of what's going to happen right now.

I haven't read the details of what the $73 million estimate entails but it seems much of it has to do with the cost of tearing up the road to replace the membrane above the concourse. Then there will be the often out-of-service escalators and wheelchair elevators that will need to be replaced. The lighting, electrical and tiles are also more than 40 years old.

Above ground are the street access points, most of which are crumbling and none of which are wheelchair accessible. (The city got around this by issuing the building permits for the concourse months before introducing sweeping accessibility regulations for new buildings.)

Deciding against replacing the membrane will mean abandoning(?) or filling in(?) the concourse which is a surprise. Even the most ardent supporters of opening the intersection, I think, assumed that above and below grade would both be options.

As for me, I support opening the intersection to pedestrian traffic. Like it or not, the downtown is transforming into a much more residential neighbourhood with thousands of new units being added over the past couple of decades.

One-time office buildings like the Avenue, Lindsay, Somerset, Dreman, Medical Arts, are now all residential. Many of the warehouses in the Exchange have at least some residential component to them. The recently-opened tallest building in the city is mostly residential as is one of the True North towers. A new residential development at the Forks slated for later this decade will continue on the work already done on Waterfront Drive and if/when Portage Place gets redeveloped, a residential tower will likely be part of it.

The future of downtown, and not just Winnipeg's, is not in new retail or office space, it is residential. As this becomes a bigger part of the picture, the city has to think about things like walkability, trees, parks, etc. and not just how to get traffic to and from the suburbs as quickly as possible.

Related:
Here's a look at vehicles and people sharing the intersection from back in 1958!
Seven stories about Portage and Main West End Dumplings

Farewell to 244 Jarvis Street

 © 2024, Christian Cassidy

The burning down of the North End continues, this time with 244 Jarvis Street.

The building was home to Chaim and Mordecai Weidman’s Weidman Bros. wholesale grocery business from the time of its construction in ca. 1910 to 1967.

It appears the family may have owned that land prior to this as there is a Weidman residence and a Weidman Scrap Metal at 230 and 232 Jarvis Street (or sometimes just listed as Jarvis and King) dating back to at least 1900. By 1908, it became "Weidman and Co. Grocers and Scrap Metal" which is an interesting combination of businesses.

In Alan Levine's 2012 feature in the Winnipeg Free Press titled "The Jews of Manitoba, the centre of its own diaspora", he describes the brothers as being among the first wave of Russian Jews to come to Manitoba in the early 1880s and, "They went from working as labourers to becoming, within a few decades, successful entrepreneurs and leaders of the Jewish community."

October 6, 1923, Winnipeg Tribune

Over the decades, the Weidmans distributed everything from Van Dyck cigars to Canada Dry in Winnipeg. They also packaged specialty products like spices under their own name.

In 1966, the company built a new, 50,000 square foot warehouse in the Inkster Industrial Park at 60 Bunting Street and left the north end. By 1971, it recorded $13 million in sales.

The company remained family-run. In the 1960s, John P. Weidman, a son of Mordecai, was president of the company. When he died in 1971, Donald Weidman took over. Bert Weidman, the company's board chairman, died in 1972.

Source: eBay

National food conglomerate J. M. Schneider Ltd. bought a 51% stake in Weidman Brothers in 1971.

The following year it purchased the remaining 49%. Weidman was then merged with another Schneider acquisition, A and A Frozen Foods of Winnipeg, and the company became Schneiders' regional distribution wing for its products.

Imperial Soap and Supplies, a janitorial supply company, moved into the building circa 1968.

According to the company's website, the firm has been around since 1963 when Ernest Tessler and Leonard Paul purchased the existing Imperial Soap on Logan Avenue and moved it to Provencher Boulevard.

Imperial Soap moved to a larger facility on Inskter Boulevard in 2003.

Most recently, a carpenter had been renting the building to house her cabinetry building. the fire began in a neighbouring building and spread to 244 Jarvis and both buildings and her business have been destroyed.

The building has had fires before the one that destroyed it in February 2024. There were smaller ones in 1923 and 1933, then a massive two-alarm blaze in May 1947.

The 1947 blaze started on the main floor and moved up the staircase to gut the second and third floor and cause the roof to collapse.

Farewell to 149 Spence Street

 
149 Spence in 2015 (Google Street View)

It is sad to see that 149 Spence Street burned down, even though it was vacant and set for demolition to make way for an apartment block.

It must have been quite the house in its day as it was advertised for sale at $8,000 soon after its construction in 1906. That's more than three times what a decent-sized West End house would have sold for at the time. This ad from October 1906 notes "suitable for doctor".

A "restricted zone" means "residential zone".

Back then, it was not uncommon to have a residential street with a factory or warehouse plonked in the middle of the block belching coal smoke and with smelly stables for its horses. Residential-only streets and districts were often advertised as "restricted".

The house spent many decades as a boarding house with a family on the main floor, (the Forbes' from the late 1930s to 1960s), and rooms for rent with optional light housekeeping and a meal included with rent.