Winnipeg history among ruins of Air Canada Window Park demolition, say heritage advocates

Winnipeg history buffs and heritage organizations are shocked and angered to find pieces of the city's past left in ruins during the demolition of the downtown Air Canada Window Park.

"I just am very upset that they didn't reach out to us and give us an opportunity to have a conversation about [saving them]. They have to be accountable for this," said Cindy Tugwell, executive director of Heritage Winnipeg.

"We're getting a lot of emails on this. I think a lot of Winnipeggers are upset that they were smashed."

Local historian Christian Cassidy, who writes a blog called West End Dumplings, discovered the ruins on Sunday.

He has been documenting the site at the corner of Portage Avenue and Carlton Street since the city announced plans in 2022 to remake the space into something that better celebrates Indigenous culture.

The shape of the new park will be a turtle, with the main gathering place on an area resembling the shell, a performance space near the tail and a storytelling area closer to the head where gatherings with water and fire can be held.

When it was first built in 1985, the park incorporated remnants from now-demolished buildings in the city, including two stone columns from the Northern Crown Bank, which once stood at Portage Avenue and Maryland Street, and stone balustrades from Devon Court Apartments that once stood on Broadway.

"The most prominent structure in the park was probably the silver cast-iron column from the McIntyre Block, which stood on Main Street from 1899 to 1979. That was the decorative column that was right in the middle of the fountain [in the park's centre]," Cassidy said.

When Cassidy stopped by the park on Sunday, those columns and balustrades lay in rubble.

"You can clearly see damaged fragments of all those different things laying around the demolition site. It's just really disappointing to see that," he said. "They're important because they're part of our heritage and once they're gone, they're gone, like the buildings they came from.

"And they knew that this was coming. It wasn't like a building that the foundation failed or caught fire and had to be torn down right away. I mean, this has been a process, so they would have had time [to remove and save them]."

In an email to CBC News, City of Winnipeg spokesperson Kalen Qually said many community partners collaborated on the redesign project to determine key elements and community needs, and it was decided that Greek columns and the colonial-era style of the items didn't belong in an Indigenous setting.

While it is the preference of the city to preserve historical assets wherever possible, "the shards themselves did not hold any official heritage status under the Historical Resources Bylaw and the decision was made by those consulting on the design that it wasn't possible to preserve during the park's demolition," Qually wrote.

Cassidy doesn't buy the explanation the columns weren't historically significant.

"At one point somebody obviously felt that these were important enough building fragments to save them, put them in the park. They also all had interpretive plaques describing what they were," he said. 

"Sadly, almost 40 years later, they apparently they have no value at all."

Tugwell is angry her organization was never contacted. In the past, the city has offered up fragments and shards such as those in the park, and Heritage Winnipeg has arranged to have them removed and then sold to raise money.

Items like those have proven extremely popular in the past, she said.

"They've been working with us for decades. So I'm very perplexed as to why they didn't reach out about these," she said. "This is not unfamiliar territory to the city."

There are examples of columns being saved and reused in other places around Winnipeg, such as the one from the city's old post office, now on display in a pocket park west of the Granite Curling Club, or the ones from the Alloway and Champion Bank, now set up just east of Union Station at The Forks.

Or perhaps they could have been incorporated in other ways around the city, Tugwell said. For instance, the column from the McIntyre Block could have returned home, set up in the place where that building once stood — a site that has been a gravel parking lot since the block was torn down in 1979.

"It's a piece of history. We couldn't save the building but we made a concerted effort to keep a piece of its history," she said. "Now that's gone, too."