Public Good Award

The Public Good Award goes to former Mayor Glenn Murray, for shepherding through Winnipeg's attractive bridges.  This was a unique contribution that amazes us every time we see these bridges, because very, very few things in Winnipeg are attractive. I would put these bridges in the category of eliciting Kantian enthusiasm.

Provencher Bridge.

Local Beer

Half Pints brewing company, at 550 Roseberry Street (visitors welcome), makes delicious beer. My favorite used to be the St. James pale.

Frontier Town

Administering a vast export agriculture territory and a great dam-studded hydro energy production territory, as well as a colonial Canadian gateway outpost to aboriginal land and communities, Winnipeg, Manitoba is a frontier town.

Instead of wallowing and pickling in a clueless, pathetic, assimilationist, LA commercial culture-envious, hard-bitten, hard-living 18-year-old's/Chamber of Commerce "culture" and "aesthetic," Winnipeg's denizens need to recognize and valorize the interesting, unique things and people they've got in their natural history, their history, their politics, their unique populace mix, and their socioeconomic location.

They need to wrap their utilitarian reflexes around a pillar of romanticism or two: Winnipeggers need to play up confluence-of-cultures frontier romanticism in their cultural life.

St. Boniface's Fort Gibraltar is a babystep disney version of what I'm talking about. I mean valorizing the aboriginal and metis and specific immigrant cultures in institutionalized public life, and incorporating a consciousness of Winnipeg as a frontier town now as well as in the past. I mean reinterpreting, redeploying and diffusing the heroic, grand or humane elements from the Fort Gilbraltar schtick.

The town's aesthetics need to reflect such a frontier romanticism, as well as play up the beauties of the unique environment. People need to collectively situate themselves, to be here now, and to remind themselves what's cool (unique) about it.

Wolseley

Wolseley could easily be the most pleasant residential neighborhood in Winnipeg. But it has one central, astonishing drawback: It may be the only neighborhood of its kind in North America and Europe--maybe the world--that does not have a neighborhood gathering institution, by which I mean a family-friendly neighborhood pub, with a small music venue and a verdant, wooden fence-enclosed, backyard beer garden.

Compared to what little the other Winnipeg residential neighborhoods have to offer, Westminister Ave. is a pretty nice stretch in the summer. Is there a bakery in Wolseley? Check. Half-assed coffee shop/used book store? Check. Precious horticultural shoppe? Check.  Overly-expensive Euro comfort shoe boutique? Check. Crumbling poverty grocery store? Check. Effing hippie massage and psychotherapy parlors? Check. Anything else? Not really.

Wolseley is imprisoned by not one but two (2) gaping car-thrufare, commercial-wasteland barriers (Portage Ave. and Sherbrook/Maryland streets). Now barriers are not all bad. They create incentives to build "intensive" quality institutions, as where oceans, rivers, mountains, and, in Europe, farmland have forced people to build quality cities. The only kind of barriers that you're going to get in this part of the world, however, are rivers, which are sort of nice (Though among rivers, prairie rivers are bottom of the barrel, consisting as they do of a clay sludge of industrial ag effluent--pesticides, herbicides, drug and fecal matter. At night they look pretty, though.), and long, tar-and-concrete automobile deserts, which are amongst the worst kind of barrier. So Wolseley's roadway barriers also pose high costs to quality of life. Yet potentially Wolseley could be the neighborhood to make every middle/working-class person who can't live there drool with envy.

Wolseley folks and Winnipeg lending institutions, this is what Wolseley desperately needs: Sam Bond's du Nord.

In the above photo, Sam Bond's from the inside. The cozy, convivial neighborhood pub, a former garage, has a warm wooden interior with high ceilings, large windows, local art on the wall (and sometimes hanging from the rafters), and a small stage at the end (that can also open to the back patio) for music and the occasional neighborhood cabaret fundraiser. It dishes up a small menu of healthy, local food, in burritos and on pizza, as well as serving local brews in preserves jars, and wine and spirits. Its intimate, fenced-in backyard patio, with trees strewn with lights, gardens, sitting ledges, and cafe tables and picnic tables, is a delight. The town's stringed instrument players convene there on Sunday afternoons. Children with their parents are welcome before nightfall. In fact, it is so convivial because it is perfect for people of all ages,  often simultaneously--because it is at heart a community pub. It is a neighborhood institution, a city institution that facilitates dynamic social interchange and builds social capital.

True, there are no mosquitos in Oregon to speak of and summer in Oregon is pretty much heaven on Earth. True, many, many people live in Eugene because they love and want to contribute to the gorgeous environment and the DIY culture, not principally for utilitarian survival or family-attachment reasons. But such differences cannot stop us in Winnipeg from likewise putting together some stronger quality of life here!

Later: I will discuss the other amenities Wolseley needs to complete itself, such as a browse-friendly hardware/gardening/DIY/craftworks store. They also might try to claim Sherbrook & Maryland near the hospital; that gaping maw separates them from one of the city's super-scarce branch libraries! And they need a Wolseley Zozobra festival. Am I pigeon-holing them, as I urge them to reach their potential? I only ask that people work with their strengths.