Daniel Klein is a Minnesotan filmmaker and chef who has been traversing the US, documenting his culinary, agricultural and hunting adventures on film in a series called The Perennial Plate, featuring long winters, urban gardens, ice fishing, slaughterhouses, foraging for wild edibles, and more. These documentaries have something for the food-justice Winnipegger to chew on.
The latest episode, 90, is on a refugee garden.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Friday, September 16, 2011
Recommended reading:
Reinhold & Tom Mitchell. 2011. When the State Trembled: How AJ Andrews and the Citizens' Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
On sale now ($35) at Mondragon Cafe.
The authors discuss the rightwing Astroturf strategies a small group of lawyers pursued to capture the judicial system, to manipulate the federal government and to promote anti-labor leaders to positions of direct control over labor leaders, in order to smash the working class advocacy movement in Winnipeg (1919). Great insight into how conservative capitalist hegemony is achieved (in the hinterlands), including the role of promoting racist alienation in class warfare.
(Perhaps this book would make a good dialectical complement to Jennifer Dalton's Making Minnesota Liberal, Vallely's Radicalism in the States, Gieske's Minnesota's Farmer Labor Party, and Haynes's Dubious Alliance. These books describe the successful strategies of socialist, anti-racist political parties in the US in the early 20th century. They show the importance of these socialist parties as well: Without pressure from Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party and other socialist groups, there would have been no New Deal. The Democratic Party leadership supported Roosevelt only very reluctantly.)
The title of the book is politely oblique-- too obscure and weak. The authors really didn't have to worry about scaring off readers with a more contentious, descriptive title because, as other reviewers have pointed out, the font is too small and gives the impression that this is a book that only specialists can penetrate anyway. Underfunded Canadian publishing.
Discussed in How The Citizens' Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike:
I) Conservative Strategies:
A) Conservatives worked to label active working class citizens "strikers" and to claim the title of "Citizens" for their small capitalist political group. This simple framing strategy portrays active working class citizenship as outside the boundaries of the community, while the corrupt, back room political machinations of a pro-capitalist minority are portrayed as representative of the will of a broad, stable, non-disruptive community.
In the face of working class advocacy responding to capitalist-origin socio-economic upheavals and disruption, the conservative labeling strategy also confers the ideological contention that capitalism is not disruptive, but rather orderly (as advertised by the grand buildings housing its institutions). Obviously, this contention had and has little face validity; but sneaking the dream of peace into pro-capitalist politics through the back door of framing (and sedition law, which permitted capitalist advocates to prosecute working class advocacy as a uniquely anti-societal form of politics) seems to work in hegemonic strategy in Anglo-American settler societies. (Peace as Manifest Destiny, eh? This is basically Nixon's "silent majority" political manipulation decades and a country away.)
Elsewhere I argue that working class advocates need to confront this traditional conservative hegemonic strategy by insisting repeatedly: Capitalism produces instability and disruption because 1) it destroys the environment with thoughtless growth, 2) it maldistributes wealth to the impoverishment of social relations and the destruction of human health, 3) it systematically cultivates people inclined toward predation and injustice, and 4) in its advanced form unleashes unchecked financial capital power secured by military policing, prison industrialism and slavery, and belligerent imperialism.
Peacefulness will never be stable or far-reaching in capitalism, and can never be secured by coercing and forcing the mute submission of the majority of the population. Peace is more reliably reached through disabling capitalism's four pillars of disruption, which is accomplished by promoting working class people's active participation and development--partly in capitalist-serving establishment institutions, partly in the streets and the workplaces--in politics, economics, policy, institutions and culture.
...
An interesting case in this regard, Canada's not bad at promoting cultural development within newcomer and aboriginal communities. But working class people not marked by race are unrecognized in Canada, and standing alone, cultural reclamation is closer to an ineffective silencing strategy than an effective opposition to racism-promulgating capitalist disruption.
The Canadian case shows well how addressing racism simply as an unfortunate issue of working class culture + elite colonial history (of course race is an historical cultural construct, but it is more), rather than an alienation-for-exploitation tool in the capitalist toolkit of accumulation, is certainly a polite, elite-flattering, consensus approach to social conflict; but such narrow cultural reclamation cannot do anything but maintain racism because of its failure to recognize working class whites as anything other than autonomous cultural agents of racism and its failure to recognize modern capitalists as anything other than civilized purveyors of anti-racist culture. The working class and the larger society's need for working class intellectual and cultural (not just isolated moral) development remains neglected, and so fuels racism that has not stopped benefitting political-economic elites' divide-and-conquer interests.
II) Structure of capitalist politics:
A) The capitalist class warriors in Winnipeg were affluent lawyers (Andrews, Pitblado, Crossin, and Sweatman) who earned their living representing the interests of the propertied capitalist class. They came from religious backgrounds--usually had a minister father who was not paid as well as they were. Essentially, these were people who came from families that maintained cultural capital in service of controlling the working class for the capitalist class. The extension of their family cultural capital from managing working populations with networks (churches) cemented in religious spirituality to managing property relations through the law had permitted them to augment their family wealth, confirming in their minds the capitalist political claim that capitalism bestows affluence on the elect. These capitalist class lawyer-warriors had inherited the know-how and disposition to do this large-scale population management work, and obtained their income and wealth from variants of this kind of work. Combining their strategic know-how to crush a working class advocacy movement was both a logical extension of their cultural capital and occupational work, and a strategy for preserving the economic, social and political relations that provided them a relatively-privileged and ego-affirming management-status berth in the community.
Backgrounder to the Winnipeg General Strikes, adapted from a review by professor emeritus William Bruneau of British Columbia:
The main facts are these: between 1896 and 1912, the prairie provinces received a huge flow of immigrants under Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s settlement policy, but without ending Anglo-Canadian dominance in the region. Just before the conclusion of World War I, the Bolshevik-led revolution of 1917 had begun in Russia, a convulsion that was deeply worrisome to any who feared labour activism of any sort.
Then Canada’s soldiers returned from war, pressing for employment and opportunity. Economic uncertainty, racism, the rapid movement of entire populations, and finally the unsettling effects of a pandemic (the 1918–1920 flu) all added to an atmosphere of uncertainty.
As in 1945 and 1955, the end of war brought high unemployment, an industrial turndown and inflation, which combined in Winnipeg with the fact that workers from both the private and public sectors had been underpaid for years. The authors also show how the legal system, mainly by making picketing difficult or impossible, helped to lead working people to organize themselves, in hopes of decent wages and working conditions.
The Winnipeg strike began as a municipal labour action, but rapidly intensified as city council voted compulsory arbitration of disputes with its workers, and as federal mediation failed. Building and metal trades workers quickly grouped in union federations. By early May 1919, the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council had joined the cause and unionists from more than 50 locals voted to support the strike call. On May 15 the largest strike in Canadian history began.
The media claimed the working class citizen advocates were Bolsheviks. In indignation, 30,000 workers walked off the job, closing the city’s factories, crippling its retail trade and stopping the trains. But the causes for the strike lay deeper than the media's slavish insults.
The response of Winnipeg’s business and political élite was the creation of a capitalist political organization known as the “Citizens’ Committee of 1000.” The organization, actually numbering about 50 members, was modeled on similar political organizations in the United States. The authors amusingly show how A.J. Andrews, a prominent member of the Winnipeg legal community and founding member of the Citizens’ Committee, along with other leaders in the campaign against Winnipeg’s working-class revolt, used their influence to convince governments at all three levels that the Central Strike Committee and the Trades and Labour Council had taken over Winnipeg by late May. It was a short distance to the claim that strike leaders were guilty of sedition.
By June 9, the capitalist Citizens’ Committee had persuaded the federal government to bring in the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (the RCMP’s predecessor) and special constables. The arrest of strike leaders in early morning raids on June 17 triggered a demonstration and violent police response four days later on “Bloody Saturday” that ended with two dead, dozens of casualties and federal troops occupying city streets.
An inquiry under Mr. Justice R.A. Robson, launched by the provincial government in July 1919, recognized, backhandedly, the justice of the workers’ cause. But by then the strike was long over and the preliminary hearing and trial of those accused of inciting a riot — an illegal act under sedition law — was over. One labour leader had been deported, and several found themselves behind bars for many months.
It is a signal contribution of the book’s authors to show, using previously unknown letters exchanged between Andrews, directing the operations of the Citizens’ Committee, and acting Minister of Justice Arthur Meighen, how far the business community had co-opted the apparatus of state in 1919–1920. Equally valuable is the authors’ carefully evidenced and well-written discussion of the ethnic and race (racist) views of the elite Committee of 1000, and the administrative and judicial implementation of those views.
Reinhold & Tom Mitchell. 2011. When the State Trembled: How AJ Andrews and the Citizens' Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
On sale now ($35) at Mondragon Cafe.
The authors discuss the rightwing Astroturf strategies a small group of lawyers pursued to capture the judicial system, to manipulate the federal government and to promote anti-labor leaders to positions of direct control over labor leaders, in order to smash the working class advocacy movement in Winnipeg (1919). Great insight into how conservative capitalist hegemony is achieved (in the hinterlands), including the role of promoting racist alienation in class warfare.
(Perhaps this book would make a good dialectical complement to Jennifer Dalton's Making Minnesota Liberal, Vallely's Radicalism in the States, Gieske's Minnesota's Farmer Labor Party, and Haynes's Dubious Alliance. These books describe the successful strategies of socialist, anti-racist political parties in the US in the early 20th century. They show the importance of these socialist parties as well: Without pressure from Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party and other socialist groups, there would have been no New Deal. The Democratic Party leadership supported Roosevelt only very reluctantly.)
The title of the book is politely oblique-- too obscure and weak. The authors really didn't have to worry about scaring off readers with a more contentious, descriptive title because, as other reviewers have pointed out, the font is too small and gives the impression that this is a book that only specialists can penetrate anyway. Underfunded Canadian publishing.
Discussed in How The Citizens' Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike:
I) Conservative Strategies:
A) Conservatives worked to label active working class citizens "strikers" and to claim the title of "Citizens" for their small capitalist political group. This simple framing strategy portrays active working class citizenship as outside the boundaries of the community, while the corrupt, back room political machinations of a pro-capitalist minority are portrayed as representative of the will of a broad, stable, non-disruptive community.
In the face of working class advocacy responding to capitalist-origin socio-economic upheavals and disruption, the conservative labeling strategy also confers the ideological contention that capitalism is not disruptive, but rather orderly (as advertised by the grand buildings housing its institutions). Obviously, this contention had and has little face validity; but sneaking the dream of peace into pro-capitalist politics through the back door of framing (and sedition law, which permitted capitalist advocates to prosecute working class advocacy as a uniquely anti-societal form of politics) seems to work in hegemonic strategy in Anglo-American settler societies. (Peace as Manifest Destiny, eh? This is basically Nixon's "silent majority" political manipulation decades and a country away.)
Elsewhere I argue that working class advocates need to confront this traditional conservative hegemonic strategy by insisting repeatedly: Capitalism produces instability and disruption because 1) it destroys the environment with thoughtless growth, 2) it maldistributes wealth to the impoverishment of social relations and the destruction of human health, 3) it systematically cultivates people inclined toward predation and injustice, and 4) in its advanced form unleashes unchecked financial capital power secured by military policing, prison industrialism and slavery, and belligerent imperialism.
Peacefulness will never be stable or far-reaching in capitalism, and can never be secured by coercing and forcing the mute submission of the majority of the population. Peace is more reliably reached through disabling capitalism's four pillars of disruption, which is accomplished by promoting working class people's active participation and development--partly in capitalist-serving establishment institutions, partly in the streets and the workplaces--in politics, economics, policy, institutions and culture.
...
An interesting case in this regard, Canada's not bad at promoting cultural development within newcomer and aboriginal communities. But working class people not marked by race are unrecognized in Canada, and standing alone, cultural reclamation is closer to an ineffective silencing strategy than an effective opposition to racism-promulgating capitalist disruption.
The Canadian case shows well how addressing racism simply as an unfortunate issue of working class culture + elite colonial history (of course race is an historical cultural construct, but it is more), rather than an alienation-for-exploitation tool in the capitalist toolkit of accumulation, is certainly a polite, elite-flattering, consensus approach to social conflict; but such narrow cultural reclamation cannot do anything but maintain racism because of its failure to recognize working class whites as anything other than autonomous cultural agents of racism and its failure to recognize modern capitalists as anything other than civilized purveyors of anti-racist culture. The working class and the larger society's need for working class intellectual and cultural (not just isolated moral) development remains neglected, and so fuels racism that has not stopped benefitting political-economic elites' divide-and-conquer interests.
II) Structure of capitalist politics:
A) The capitalist class warriors in Winnipeg were affluent lawyers (Andrews, Pitblado, Crossin, and Sweatman) who earned their living representing the interests of the propertied capitalist class. They came from religious backgrounds--usually had a minister father who was not paid as well as they were. Essentially, these were people who came from families that maintained cultural capital in service of controlling the working class for the capitalist class. The extension of their family cultural capital from managing working populations with networks (churches) cemented in religious spirituality to managing property relations through the law had permitted them to augment their family wealth, confirming in their minds the capitalist political claim that capitalism bestows affluence on the elect. These capitalist class lawyer-warriors had inherited the know-how and disposition to do this large-scale population management work, and obtained their income and wealth from variants of this kind of work. Combining their strategic know-how to crush a working class advocacy movement was both a logical extension of their cultural capital and occupational work, and a strategy for preserving the economic, social and political relations that provided them a relatively-privileged and ego-affirming management-status berth in the community.
Backgrounder to the Winnipeg General Strikes, adapted from a review by professor emeritus William Bruneau of British Columbia:
The main facts are these: between 1896 and 1912, the prairie provinces received a huge flow of immigrants under Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s settlement policy, but without ending Anglo-Canadian dominance in the region. Just before the conclusion of World War I, the Bolshevik-led revolution of 1917 had begun in Russia, a convulsion that was deeply worrisome to any who feared labour activism of any sort.
Then Canada’s soldiers returned from war, pressing for employment and opportunity. Economic uncertainty, racism, the rapid movement of entire populations, and finally the unsettling effects of a pandemic (the 1918–1920 flu) all added to an atmosphere of uncertainty.
As in 1945 and 1955, the end of war brought high unemployment, an industrial turndown and inflation, which combined in Winnipeg with the fact that workers from both the private and public sectors had been underpaid for years. The authors also show how the legal system, mainly by making picketing difficult or impossible, helped to lead working people to organize themselves, in hopes of decent wages and working conditions.
The Winnipeg strike began as a municipal labour action, but rapidly intensified as city council voted compulsory arbitration of disputes with its workers, and as federal mediation failed. Building and metal trades workers quickly grouped in union federations. By early May 1919, the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council had joined the cause and unionists from more than 50 locals voted to support the strike call. On May 15 the largest strike in Canadian history began.
The media claimed the working class citizen advocates were Bolsheviks. In indignation, 30,000 workers walked off the job, closing the city’s factories, crippling its retail trade and stopping the trains. But the causes for the strike lay deeper than the media's slavish insults.
The response of Winnipeg’s business and political élite was the creation of a capitalist political organization known as the “Citizens’ Committee of 1000.” The organization, actually numbering about 50 members, was modeled on similar political organizations in the United States. The authors amusingly show how A.J. Andrews, a prominent member of the Winnipeg legal community and founding member of the Citizens’ Committee, along with other leaders in the campaign against Winnipeg’s working-class revolt, used their influence to convince governments at all three levels that the Central Strike Committee and the Trades and Labour Council had taken over Winnipeg by late May. It was a short distance to the claim that strike leaders were guilty of sedition.
By June 9, the capitalist Citizens’ Committee had persuaded the federal government to bring in the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (the RCMP’s predecessor) and special constables. The arrest of strike leaders in early morning raids on June 17 triggered a demonstration and violent police response four days later on “Bloody Saturday” that ended with two dead, dozens of casualties and federal troops occupying city streets.
An inquiry under Mr. Justice R.A. Robson, launched by the provincial government in July 1919, recognized, backhandedly, the justice of the workers’ cause. But by then the strike was long over and the preliminary hearing and trial of those accused of inciting a riot — an illegal act under sedition law — was over. One labour leader had been deported, and several found themselves behind bars for many months.
It is a signal contribution of the book’s authors to show, using previously unknown letters exchanged between Andrews, directing the operations of the Citizens’ Committee, and acting Minister of Justice Arthur Meighen, how far the business community had co-opted the apparatus of state in 1919–1920. Equally valuable is the authors’ carefully evidenced and well-written discussion of the ethnic and race (racist) views of the elite Committee of 1000, and the administrative and judicial implementation of those views.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Elevating Water to Amenity
Considering Water As Amenity Rather Than Problem
Winnipeg's streams, where they exist, could be unburied as shown above in the view of Seoul's delightful Cheonggyecheon urban renewal, at least here and there--to provide people the stress-reduction benefits of water features, and to allow for riparian benefits: filtration, riparian animals and plants, irrigation of gardens supporting food security.
Below: A stream-side cafe in California displays one of the relaxing pleasures of unburied streams. In colder Stockholm, Sweden, moored barges serve up civilization as spring-to-fall outdoor cafe-pubs. Stockholmare, eager for the lengthening days, heap pub-provided wool blankets upon their laps while they sip beers and chat over water sparkling in the sun. You know it's true: life on water is really better.
Commerical-ag flatlands (romantically: prairies) are notoriously poor in amenities for people. It's very unfortunate that Winnipeg was not sited 2 hours east, where the geography is beautiful and engaging; but as the city is where it is, it needs to claim and build up something natural as a fundamental public amenity to bring some reliable, ambient cheer to residents. (The Jets are not natural and they are not enough.) The rivers are pretty much what we've got to work with.
Winnipeg needs a campaign to build attractive pedestrian/bike bridges (The one in La Barriere Park is a good, basic example.), and a big, bold plan for water quality, access, and navigability remediation for residents' leisure and transport. The rivers should be navigable for small, non-motorized boats (as are Stockholm's and Minneapolis' waterways).
Winnipeg needs public water access--more river bank public land, and realistic, above-water bank-side pedestrian and bicycling trails. The City of Winnipeg should conduct a Legacy public-good will-bequeathing campaign (carrots) with the assistance of the Winnipeg Foundation, as well as use eminent domain (sticks), to launch a long-term program to reclaim riverbank land in the city limits for public walkways, bike paths and gardens, and for recreational swimming and nonmotorized boat access. Public-spirited benefactors can be commemorated on riverside public park benches. Minneapolis is a model here. Wealthy residents' homes and commercial buildings are situated across public parks and their big front lawns from the water. They still have the best views and access that they feel their wealth entitles them to, but they don't have a petty-spirited private monopoly on nature.
As well, Winnipeg needs continuing emphasis on facilitating ice skating on the rivers (a la Ottawa) and sledding on the river banks (a la Whittier Park in St. Boniface).
Winnipeg needs public water access--more river bank public land, and realistic, above-water bank-side pedestrian and bicycling trails. The City of Winnipeg should conduct a Legacy public-good will-bequeathing campaign (carrots) with the assistance of the Winnipeg Foundation, as well as use eminent domain (sticks), to launch a long-term program to reclaim riverbank land in the city limits for public walkways, bike paths and gardens, and for recreational swimming and nonmotorized boat access. Public-spirited benefactors can be commemorated on riverside public park benches. Minneapolis is a model here. Wealthy residents' homes and commercial buildings are situated across public parks and their big front lawns from the water. They still have the best views and access that they feel their wealth entitles them to, but they don't have a petty-spirited private monopoly on nature.
As well, Winnipeg needs continuing emphasis on facilitating ice skating on the rivers (a la Ottawa) and sledding on the river banks (a la Whittier Park in St. Boniface).
Urban water systems, mosquito control, and insectivores
Wherever there's water (everywhere), mosquitoes and other bugs are a problem in the flat, wintery, inland north. (Let's face it, in the spring and even summer, you can see from the air that Manitoba is one gigantic swamp.) How can we have the ambient water we need to grow food, increase security, and improve quality of life? Consider that the ecological steps taken through the Winnipeg dragonfly program (so far combined with other, more-toxic measures) are fairly successful and can be improved.
One thing that's instantly noticeable to a new Winnipeg resident is that there's an obvious dearth of bats in the summer evening sky. Can insectivore bats be bred for colder weather? Can government invest in insulated hibernation enclaves that would permit bats to live this far north in more significant numbers? Bats are fun to watch in the evening, and it's comforting to know they're gobbling up bazillions of mosquitoes overhead. They could be part of a better, more ecological approach to insect control. If so, perhaps the city and province could provide winter hibernation enclaves for bats, swallow houses along waterways, and education and incentives encouraging people to hang up summer bat houses to combat the mosquito and fly populations.
Wherever there's water (everywhere), mosquitoes and other bugs are a problem in the flat, wintery, inland north. (Let's face it, in the spring and even summer, you can see from the air that Manitoba is one gigantic swamp.) How can we have the ambient water we need to grow food, increase security, and improve quality of life? Consider that the ecological steps taken through the Winnipeg dragonfly program (so far combined with other, more-toxic measures) are fairly successful and can be improved.
One thing that's instantly noticeable to a new Winnipeg resident is that there's an obvious dearth of bats in the summer evening sky. Can insectivore bats be bred for colder weather? Can government invest in insulated hibernation enclaves that would permit bats to live this far north in more significant numbers? Bats are fun to watch in the evening, and it's comforting to know they're gobbling up bazillions of mosquitoes overhead. They could be part of a better, more ecological approach to insect control. If so, perhaps the city and province could provide winter hibernation enclaves for bats, swallow houses along waterways, and education and incentives encouraging people to hang up summer bat houses to combat the mosquito and fly populations.
Winnipeg is at the northern boundary of bats' ranges; perhaps insectivore bats cannot be a significant part of the Winnipeg ecology. But since we are biotic, it's important to investigate modifications that would allow us to build up more robust (risk reducing), less toxic, higher carrying capacity ecosystems in the urban and suburban landscape.
Dam the Assiniboine
A major engineering and construction project to enhance water-based quality of life would be to build filtering dam on the Assiniboine at the entry/west side of Winnipeg (west of the Perimeter). The dam would control the mud-fest flooding, clean the river of its poisonous agricultural effluent, create a recreational lake out past the Perimeter, and turn the Assiniboine River east of the dam into a clean, pretty, recreational waterway, thereby vastly improving quality of life in Winnipeg.
Southwest Manitoba has always flooded in the spring, traditionally carrying prairie mud eastward to Lake Winnipeg, and in the modern era spreading industrial ag effluent with it. But now in the Global Warming era, Southwest Manitoba is one big welling, weeping sore (And perhaps there too flood prone for the profitable continuance of 20th century commercial export agriculture). A west-of-Winnipeg dam would block that toxic ag runoff, and, along with programs to reduce cottager lake pollution, ease the woes of the pollution-devastated east side of Lake Winnipeg, restoring fishing and improving recreation. The feds, the province and the city should thus fund this.
For a model of clean urban water, refer to the expertise of Stockholm, Sweden.
There are some places where dams are environmentally destructive, such as in the North American Pacific Northwest, where dams destroy wild salmon ecology. By contrast, what is destructive to rivers and lakes in Manitoba is commercial agriculture and the runoff of its poisons. Waterways in monocrop export ag country, such as in the central North American flatlands, need chemical clean up.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Salvage Home
I visited the charming Ray Chan and Mandy at Woodanchor, a mile past the perimeter south on Waverley, next to the landfill. Woodanchor's reclaimed wood flooring and furniture is a little dear; but the flooring they mill out of local-salvaged elms is lovely, and they have some spruce beams that would be impressive in a house or porch.
Sometimes they have Salvage Yard offerings, but their website isn't always kept up to date on that.
I recommend putting on some sturdy shoes and visiting Ray and Mandy at Woodanchor. The story behind the business is cool. The owner is a local woodworker who went to the city landfill on a dare and told them he could recycle the city's Dutch Elm-disease-ridden and felled elms, and market the products as green. The city let him; he milled the elms into value-added, saleable flooring; and now he's got the contract with the city.
Such a great business model for this town. Perhaps because it exists simply to manage the flow of wheat and hydroelectricity out into other cities, but Winnipeg is behind every place in the world, in terms of innovative, local-resources, Imperial Downslope technology development.
If they had any big-picture business sense, the local and regional governments should be paying the universities to systematically replicate German cold-weather green products and technologies, and then dispersing the technologies to community economic development co-ops to produce and market here.
For example, why not use UM materials scientists (at the Home Ec school) to develop street and sidewalk paving that can better adjust to the expansions and contractions attendant extreme temperatures and/or floodplain substrate--instead of keeping the local concrete companies on the constant teat of public pavement patching? (Concrete production is an environmental nightmare.)
If they had any big-picture business sense, the local and regional governments should be paying the universities to systematically replicate German cold-weather green products and technologies, and then dispersing the technologies to community economic development co-ops to produce and market here.
For example, why not use UM materials scientists (at the Home Ec school) to develop street and sidewalk paving that can better adjust to the expansions and contractions attendant extreme temperatures and/or floodplain substrate--instead of keeping the local concrete companies on the constant teat of public pavement patching? (Concrete production is an environmental nightmare.)
Ray Chan at Woodanchor is a photographer, designer and website developer for hire as well.
Other salvaged-home resources in Winnipeg include:
The Old House Revival Company, 324 Young St. N. Old lead-painted doors in various odd sizes, and antique furniture and household doo-dads. A bit dear.
The Salvage Supermarket at 1042 Oxford Street West.
Habitat for Humanity's ReStore at 60 Archibald Street. Big picture windows and a whole lotta slum-living junk.
and...at 305 McKay Ave., Northern Lights cedar hot tubs. Uh, they are also wood, they are also in Winnipeg, and I'd like a cedar hot tub. Because Winnipeg has some shitty, shitty weather. (But not the summer 2011 - winter 2012, when the weather was great, and the carnivorous bug biomass mysteriously and thankfully absent! ...Good weather, one out of every three years. Can humans recuperate on that?)
Saturday, November 20, 2010
The Stockholm Barge Bar
Finally! I found a photo of a Stockholm barge bar! I am so happy. These are sheer awesomeness. They open as soon as the water's open--They supply customers with warm blankets and those gas tower heaters to keep them warm in the fall and spring. They are always packed--especially after work and on weekends. People love them.
Barge Bar!
Winnipeg MUST IMPLEMENT THE BARGE BAR. Granted, Winnipeg's rivers are hideous during the day, unlike the beautiful, clean, blue Stockholm waterways. But people love water and sunshine anyway, and consider: night covers all ugliness crimes. This is the perfect way to allow Winnipeggers to get something out of living at the crossroads of two flood-prone rivers.
Just park a couple of decommissioned barges by the Leg, the Norwood Bridge Underpass Walkway in St. Boniface, the Maryland Bridge, etc., stick in some floating docks connecting high ground and the barges, hire waitstaff, and stock the barges with wine and Half Pints beer, good sandwiches, heaters and blankets, and voila! It is a delight, and the city (or the MLCC) could make some good income.
Downtown pubs: Yellow Dog & the LO
The Yellow Dog Tavern at 386 Donald Street (behind the Burton Cummings Theater & near Giant Tiger) is at the edge of downtown and the Exchange. It's intimate, it's got high ceilings and worn wooden floors--good atmosphere for Winnipeg. It's got good beer, including Half Pints, and is conveniently located. The Yellow Dog has a bar and a restaurant.
Closer to the University of Winnipeg downtown, at 330 Kennedy, on the corner of Ellice and Kennedy, the LO is a pub and a restaurant attached to an international hostel. The mostly veggie food at the LO is really good, and comes in huge portions. I recommend the mole' tofu. The beer selection includes good local brews, like Half Pints.
The LO pub has an older, local(-ish. I heard a lot of British expat accents inside the pub) clientele. It is popular, and it doesn't have enough tables or waitstaff. (I think the waitstaff are mostly just hostel employees.) So though it has a fireplace, which is nice, only a couple small tables can enjoy the cozy fire--though there's room for more. It has one cool feature--a 1970s ceiling over the bar/cleanup/pay area; and it has a few pieces of good local art on the walls.
The LO pub isn't my cup of tea, aesthetically. It's a typical drunks' bar--No windows, so you can hide your shameful, shameful drinking of beer (boo! hiss!) from the public. Low ceiling. Dark wood trim. Cheap, ugly chairs. Ugly, elderly, stained carpeting. For locals, however, the LO is a delightful improvement on the shady, super-addicts' bar that was there before.
Closer to the University of Winnipeg downtown, at 330 Kennedy, on the corner of Ellice and Kennedy, the LO is a pub and a restaurant attached to an international hostel. The mostly veggie food at the LO is really good, and comes in huge portions. I recommend the mole' tofu. The beer selection includes good local brews, like Half Pints.
The LO pub has an older, local(-ish. I heard a lot of British expat accents inside the pub) clientele. It is popular, and it doesn't have enough tables or waitstaff. (I think the waitstaff are mostly just hostel employees.) So though it has a fireplace, which is nice, only a couple small tables can enjoy the cozy fire--though there's room for more. It has one cool feature--a 1970s ceiling over the bar/cleanup/pay area; and it has a few pieces of good local art on the walls.
The LO pub isn't my cup of tea, aesthetically. It's a typical drunks' bar--No windows, so you can hide your shameful, shameful drinking of beer (boo! hiss!) from the public. Low ceiling. Dark wood trim. Cheap, ugly chairs. Ugly, elderly, stained carpeting. For locals, however, the LO is a delightful improvement on the shady, super-addicts' bar that was there before.
The LO pub
No one was in the LO restaurant while I was there. That's too bad because it has a very nice view of the downtown street, nice candle lighting (although just passable overhead electric lighting), a fireplace, comfortable bench seating, and good, minimalist, modern decor.
A problem with the LO restaurant is the horrible ceiling, which really detracts from what could be a good, sub-Stockholmesque atmosphere (that I would prefer to the pub). (I suspect that the lack of a "real" waitstaff may also undercut the restaurant's seductive power; but that's a chicken-or-egg issue.) The hostel should fix the crappy ceiling (get rid of the decaying 1970s "asbestos" ceiling panels--although I recognize they have to protect any sleeping hostel clients upstairs), invite in someone with a turntable and good musical taste (It shouldn't be a booming party. They can play electronica, etc. that won't drown out conversation or shake down hostel guests.), and hold a weekly artists-&-service industry night to attract a hipster base. With a little good music, hipsters, should they exist in the Peg, would find the LO restaurant attractive.
And I really like their idea of having one dark room (the pub) for older expats and office workers, and one airier, sleeker room (the restaurant) for a younger, hip crowd. If they both work out, it will be a cool, interesting combination, and perfect for a hostel.
The LO/hostel from the street (Ellice).
In the deepest, darkest of winter, the first-story corner windows allow you to watch over the downtown lights and traffic from within the cozy, modern LO restaurant.
Tip for us foreigners: The street "Ellice" is pronounced "Ellis" (not "Elise") in Winnipeg, as "Portage" is anglicized, with the accent on the first syllable.
Here are a couple swanky aspirational models for the restaurant portion of the LO, from affluent Portland, Oregon, The Doug Fir Lounge, and from affluent Minneapolis, MN, Stella's Fish Cafe.
The Doug Fir, Portland
Stella's Fish Cafe, Minneapolis
The Doug Fir targets and obtains a huge young hipster clientele. (It also has an attached basic motel, and an attached music venue.) Stella's Fish Cafe packs in a broader clientele, including on its 3-season outdoor rooftop. I know the Stella's Fish Cafe owners are very wealthy 50-year-old restaurant entrepreneurs. Obviously, the young Doug Fir owners are either steeped in wealth or debt or both. Winnipeg's the LO is not going to have access to investment money. But it looks like folks at the Winnipeg hostel have tried to create a very basic version of this cozy/casual-modern atmosphere. Good for them.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Winnipeg Cycling Hall of Shame
The Winnipeg Cycling Hall of Shame website features photographs of and commentary on anti-bicycling infrastructure in Winnipeg. Great website. Document a human-powered transportation travesty near you!
Saturday, June 26, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Food Security: Where to Buy Produce & Groceries
Inshallah, Manitobans will erect greenhouses in all neighborhoods, hook them up to renewable energy sources (geothermal, solar, wind, below-market hydro), and secure healthy, delicious, local food year-round. Until then, here's to a healthier summer lifestyle!
The season is approximately June through October.
- Le Marche, St. Norbert Farmers' Market , Wednesdays (1-7 pm) and Saturdays (8am-3pm), 3514 Pembina Hwy.
- Osborne Village Market, 4-8 pm, Thursdays at Osborne & River.
- Fort Whyte Alive, 12-6 pm, Tuesdays and Thursdays.
- Urban Market at the Riverview Community Centre, 90 Ashland Ave.
Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs)
- South Osborne Urban Community Cooperative
- Harvest Moon in Clearwater
- Nature's Farm in Steinbeck
- Fort Whyte Farms CSA
- Hwy 59 road trip
Groceries are not the greatest in Winnipeg. I hear it's much, much worse in northern Manitoba, though. Ladies and gentlemen, we are far, far away from a real growing season.
- Vita Health, for example in Osborne Village, sells some products (eg. kefir, Thayer's witch hazel face lotion, elk smokies) that are difficult to find elsewhere in this town.
- Vic's (A-1038 Pembina Highway, 475-833), sells expensive, fresh produce, meats, cheeses, as well as crackers and Indian packeted dishes.
- In summer only, Crampton's Farm Produce Market (1765 Waverley at Bishop Grandin, 204-269-3355) sells high quality local produce, affordable baked goods, and meat.
- Mondragon Cafe (91 Albert St. in the Exchange) has a tiny grocery section, Sacco & Vanzetti's, from which they sell produce, and some canned, boxed and refrigerated foods.
- Organza at Confusion Corner and Organic Planet Worker Co-op grocery (877 Westminister Avenue in Wolseley; phone 204-772-8771) both have delis that sell juice and coffee. Organza sells simple, nontoxic, bulk household cleaning products, such as baking soda, and a small amount of bulk ingredients. Along with the Vita Health chain (local to Manitoba), both stores sell expensive organic home & body-care products. These small groceries also sell a nominal amount of very expensive, low-quality organic produce. For example, one (1) petite head of organic purple cabbage and one (1) chocolate bar together cost me over $10 (2010) at Organic Planet (I have no idea how this business model can possibly survive, unless there are thousands of masochistic experimenters like myself; but the stores look lonely).
- This is not to say that there aren't standard supermarkets in Winnipeg. There are plenty of tiresome, fluorescent-lit supermarkets to stagger through in Winnipeg; unfortunately, food is only somewhat-less horrifyingly expensive here than the small specialty groceries, relative to grocery stores in agricultural regions that can competitively grow produce (eg. Oregon). Winnipeg's supermarkets sell plenty of standardized mass food from far away that English people like (Who knew that Tetley black teas could take up an entire supermarket aisle?), as well as things made out of canola (You will never see such gigantic, useless margarine sections in a grocery store any place else on Earth, gracias a dios). On the upside, the supermarkets sell fair trade coffee. Its fair trade culture is a point in Winnipeg's favor.
- 100 Mile Manitoba
- Fair Trade Manitoba
- Food Matters Manitoba / Manitoba Food Security Network
- Ethical Food Market
- MAFRI's Buy Manitoba
- Bison meat in MB (MAFRI)
U-pick Produce
- Prairie Fruit Growers Association U-pick search engine.
- Call Marg's Strawberry Patch & Organics Plus farm (702 Dawson Rd., Lorette, MB; phone 204-878-4353) for a U-pick appointment. Pick strawberries, and/or buy vegetables, rhubarb and honey.
- MAFRI's (Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives) on-line U-Pick search engine.
Food Security & Gardening
Winnipeg gardening resources
During the summer, Sage Garden Herbs nursery (3410 St. Mary's Rd.) hosts affordable classes on indoor & outdoor gardening. They sell Eco Tea fertilizer and Eco-lawn grass seed. It's a pleasant, small, organic nursery to visit. They don't sell trees.
During the summer, Sage Garden Herbs nursery (3410 St. Mary's Rd.) hosts affordable classes on indoor & outdoor gardening. They sell Eco Tea fertilizer and Eco-lawn grass seed. It's a pleasant, small, organic nursery to visit. They don't sell trees.
Urban Eatin' Gardeners' Co-op (phone 204-770-2204) can provide gardening assistance or full gardening service--planning, constructing, gardening.
Red Wriggler Haven (204-275-0253) provides vermicomposting (indoor worm composting) expertise. The proprietors, Marilyn & Bruce, suggest that for cold climates, vermicomposting is the most appropriate approach to household waste reduction. In April, they offer a class at Sage Garden Herbs as well.
MAFRI's vegetable availability chart.
For information on how to complement your garden with plants that involve Manitoba nature (including benefical insects) see the book Naturescape Manitoba (available at McNally Robinson) by the Manitoba Naturalist Society.
See also the city's Living Prairie Museum, 2795 Ness Ave., free, open 10am - 5 pm in the summer.
MAFRI's vegetable availability chart.
For information on how to complement your garden with plants that involve Manitoba nature (including benefical insects) see the book Naturescape Manitoba (available at McNally Robinson) by the Manitoba Naturalist Society.
See also the city's Living Prairie Museum, 2795 Ness Ave., free, open 10am - 5 pm in the summer.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Hwy 59 Food Road Trip
Dish, the magazine they give away at the MLCC liquor mart, delivered a Highway 59 food-based road trip itinerary in its spring 2010 edition.
Dish is actually a more alluring magazine than most of this region's "lifestyle" magazines, and here I'm counting the insular, dull GLove, and those horrible, Ontario-based, one-trick-pony home decor magazines--Decor mantra of each and every month?: "Slap a coat of white paint on it, especially if it's wood." Time for a new editor. (However, there was in summer 2009 a fascinating edition of the Manitoba Historical Society's Manitoba History magazine, on the Winnipeg General Strike.)
The downside to Dish is that it has a cutesy but absolutely infuriating, retrograde archiving method on its website. So, assuming you don't have an hour or two to spend on disinterring a fuzzy, eyeball-seizure-inducing, one-page article, I'll spare you the hassle and just transcribe (ow! my eyeball!) the Hwy 59 itinerary here:
Dish is actually a more alluring magazine than most of this region's "lifestyle" magazines, and here I'm counting the insular, dull GLove, and those horrible, Ontario-based, one-trick-pony home decor magazines--Decor mantra of each and every month?: "Slap a coat of white paint on it, especially if it's wood." Time for a new editor. (However, there was in summer 2009 a fascinating edition of the Manitoba Historical Society's Manitoba History magazine, on the Winnipeg General Strike.)
The downside to Dish is that it has a cutesy but absolutely infuriating, retrograde archiving method on its website. So, assuming you don't have an hour or two to spend on disinterring a fuzzy, eyeball-seizure-inducing, one-page article, I'll spare you the hassle and just transcribe (ow! my eyeball!) the Hwy 59 itinerary here:
Foodie Road Trip
Southern Manitoba Hwy 59
Prairie Farms
1) Fruit: Two white BC fruit trucks are parked off Hwy 59: near Spring Hill and in the parking lot of the Fifty-Niner Motel close to Birds Hill Park.
2) Vegetables: Windmill Potatoes & Vegetables, near the Hwy 4 turnoff. Windmill is operated by Cliff & Liz Waytiuk, selling organic vegetables from a store adjacent to their home, 29048 Road 79N. 204-482-5302.
3) Vegetables: Chorney’s Vegetables & Fruit, corner of Hwy 59 and Road 80, near the Hwy 4 turnoff. Doug Chorney offers vegetables, berries, painted Easter eggs, perogies, and garden flower bouquets. 204-482-8538.
4) Honey: The Honey House, operated by Bob & Lorraine Check out of their house at the junction of 508. 204-482-5198.
5) U-pick Raspberries: Devil’s Creek Herb and Berry Farm, 12 km north of Selkirk. Besides U-pick raspberries, Robert & Wendy Shearer sell vegetables and raspberry leaf herbal tea. 204-766-2669.
Boreal Forest
6) Berries and shrooms: Wooded areas produce wild blueberries (often on top of granite hills), strawberries, Saskatoon berries and raspberries. Gathering adventures are fun and delicious. (I need to spend the upcoming years locating chantrelle and morel stashes. But when I do, I’ll never write about it, of course.)
7) Pie: Idle Thyme Restaurant, at Traverse Bay Corner, corner of Hwy 59 and Hwy 11. See also: the Plum Creek Gift Shop.
8) Smoked pickerel: Near Traverse Bay Road, local fishermen put out signs and sell smoked walleye.
9) Coffee & take-out picnic sandwiches: Saffie’s Store in Albert Beach.
10) Vegetables: Greg’s Organic Produce, truck parked between Albert and Victoria Beaches.
11) Bakery: Enfield’s Bakery, on Birch Avenue in Victoria Beach. The bakery is a short walk from the community parking lot.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
South Osborne
Here's a lively little cafe at 725 South Osborne Street, 7 1/4; it has a great atmosphere and meh food.
Enterprising folks in South Osborne are starting a food security co-op, The South Osborne Urban Community Cooperative, based out of the Riverview Community Centre, at 90 Ashland Ave. The Coop has contracted with Harvest Moon and will supply co-op members with high-quality animal food products, and when they get sufficient membership, vegetables and fruit as well.
Enterprising folks in South Osborne are starting a food security co-op, The South Osborne Urban Community Cooperative, based out of the Riverview Community Centre, at 90 Ashland Ave. The Coop has contracted with Harvest Moon and will supply co-op members with high-quality animal food products, and when they get sufficient membership, vegetables and fruit as well.
St. Boniface
St. Boniface has done a much better job with its Red River frontage than the rest of Winnipeg, including reserving public park space along the river. St. Boniface has a nice park and trail system along the Red River and the Seine Creek, with Fort Gibralter, toboggan slides, and some of the biggest trees I've seen in Manitoba. They've even tried to rehabilitate part of the Seine from industrial waste. (They should look to Minnehaha Creek Park as an exquisite urban creek and recreation model.)
I've even seen mildly-rolling...not hills...but...little lumps in St. Boniface residential neighborhoods. I get very excited about elevation. St. Boniface has a couple adorable mini-neighborhoods with the streets in the back and lawns and sidewalks in the front: Perfect for families with kids, though the housing stock is lower-end.
There's an intimate pub cafe with music at 166 Provencher Blvd, Le Garage.
The old-school Belgian Club looks like a VFW or Lions Club; but serves a wide variety of delicious, high-quality imported belgian beer, as you might hope.
Unfortunately, the east side of St. Boniface has some issues with ambient death smell. On the eastern side of St. Boniface there are "abbotoirs," as a friend said politely. Slaughtering houses.
I've even seen mildly-rolling...not hills...but...little lumps in St. Boniface residential neighborhoods. I get very excited about elevation. St. Boniface has a couple adorable mini-neighborhoods with the streets in the back and lawns and sidewalks in the front: Perfect for families with kids, though the housing stock is lower-end.
There's an intimate pub cafe with music at 166 Provencher Blvd, Le Garage.
The old-school Belgian Club looks like a VFW or Lions Club; but serves a wide variety of delicious, high-quality imported belgian beer, as you might hope.
Unfortunately, the east side of St. Boniface has some issues with ambient death smell. On the eastern side of St. Boniface there are "abbotoirs," as a friend said politely. Slaughtering houses.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Winnipeg Food Security & Urban Development
Export-oriented agriculture in the north and food insecurity
Food is very expensive in Winnipeg (though it's worse in Northern Manitoba). The region is more or less, for most of the year, a big, flat, low-lying ice shelf. Otherwise, it's a swamp. Food for such a big, not-so-affluent population comes from a long way away, for the most part. Some would call that kind of food insecurity inherently unsustainable (in other words, risky), given the size of the population.
In the summer through fall (July-September), you can shop for local foods around Winnipeg. But, from a regional food security vantage point, too much of the agricultural land around Winnipeg is dedicated to massive-scale, commercial, export-oriented staple crops that make money for chemical, genetic, and commodities trading firms, by which it contributes to GDP, and a very few farming families (and okay, there are multiplier effects. There always are, which is my point).
Environmental scientists and militaries around the world are planning for global warming and the demise of oil (the backbone of the "green revolution") to produce food security crises. How can we get a foreward-thinking, democratic jump on what so many leaders plan on letting devolve into a traumatic, reactionary conflagration (and then exploiting for despotic purposes)? How can we create an infrastructure that reduces food security risks and democracy, rather than undermining it?
Changing the urban infrastructure to enhance food culture and food security I:
Finding arable space in gardens, roads & parking garages
To improve food security, you need to improve food culture and food culture supports. Some researchers are finding out that where we thought urban people had broken relationships to nature, in secret there is (at least in the warmer US) a widespread below-the-radar urban subsista-culture. There's a lot more that public policy and the food movement could do to nurture those urban subsista-culture relationships, starting with combatting toxic chemical applications and dumping in the city.
People--perhaps especially policy makers--can stand to better understand land as arable, even in the Great White. For example, land could be reclaimed from residential streets and on school land for food production. Urban farming would involve neighborhoods agreeing to narrow non-artery residential streets by building large planters along them, or replacing front streets with common gardens, bike paths, and unburied streams and their riparian services.
For many neighborhoods, this infrastructural improvement would require provincial and federal grants to neighborhoods so that they could provide parking garages for apartment and condo dwellers (a subsidy to landlords and condo flippers). Such parking garages need to be built behind buildings to facilitate walkability, and with living (vertical garden) walls in order to preserve or improve air quality and reduce noise. If pavement is reclaimed for cultivation, we recongize that Winnipeg's apartment-dwellers will need parking because Winnipeg is an unremittingly sprawly city that does not currently have infrastructure or a culture for adequate, ecologically-superior public transit. Winter is far too cold and icy for far too long for people to be able to bicycle during the six months after October and before May--although the human-powered recreation & transit advocacy organization Bike to the Future, and Natural Cycle Courier Co-op are sagely pushing the envelope there. Still, even though the town has one big natural asset for mass bike transit--X-treme flatness, Winnipeg's equally X-treme weather makes it more dependent on motorized vehicles--and thus motorized vehicle infrastructure--than most other cities. But having a long, harsh winter doesn't mean Winnipeg needs to be anywhere near as dependent on cars as it is, especially since dwindling oil supplies, pollution, and the health effects of pollution--eg. asthma, diabetes, even obesity, are major emergent economic, social and environmental problems. Winnipeg needs a long-term campaign championing a solidaristic, universalistic, Scandinavian-style affordable (state subsidized) transit-upgrade.
Food is very expensive in Winnipeg (though it's worse in Northern Manitoba). The region is more or less, for most of the year, a big, flat, low-lying ice shelf. Otherwise, it's a swamp. Food for such a big, not-so-affluent population comes from a long way away, for the most part. Some would call that kind of food insecurity inherently unsustainable (in other words, risky), given the size of the population.
In the summer through fall (July-September), you can shop for local foods around Winnipeg. But, from a regional food security vantage point, too much of the agricultural land around Winnipeg is dedicated to massive-scale, commercial, export-oriented staple crops that make money for chemical, genetic, and commodities trading firms, by which it contributes to GDP, and a very few farming families (and okay, there are multiplier effects. There always are, which is my point).
"If you control the oil, you control the country. If you
control the food, you control the population" Henry Kissinger (seated left).
Environmental scientists and militaries around the world are planning for global warming and the demise of oil (the backbone of the "green revolution") to produce food security crises. How can we get a foreward-thinking, democratic jump on what so many leaders plan on letting devolve into a traumatic, reactionary conflagration (and then exploiting for despotic purposes)? How can we create an infrastructure that reduces food security risks and democracy, rather than undermining it?
Changing the urban infrastructure to enhance food culture and food security I:
Finding arable space in gardens, roads & parking garages
To improve food security, you need to improve food culture and food culture supports. Some researchers are finding out that where we thought urban people had broken relationships to nature, in secret there is (at least in the warmer US) a widespread below-the-radar urban subsista-culture. There's a lot more that public policy and the food movement could do to nurture those urban subsista-culture relationships, starting with combatting toxic chemical applications and dumping in the city.
People--perhaps especially policy makers--can stand to better understand land as arable, even in the Great White. For example, land could be reclaimed from residential streets and on school land for food production. Urban farming would involve neighborhoods agreeing to narrow non-artery residential streets by building large planters along them, or replacing front streets with common gardens, bike paths, and unburied streams and their riparian services.
Check out the Landless Farmer's Collective of Winnipeg, Incredible, Edible Todmorden England), Food Not Bombs and Wolseley neighborhood boulevards (shown below) for inspiration.
For many neighborhoods, this infrastructural improvement would require provincial and federal grants to neighborhoods so that they could provide parking garages for apartment and condo dwellers (a subsidy to landlords and condo flippers). Such parking garages need to be built behind buildings to facilitate walkability, and with living (vertical garden) walls in order to preserve or improve air quality and reduce noise. If pavement is reclaimed for cultivation, we recongize that Winnipeg's apartment-dwellers will need parking because Winnipeg is an unremittingly sprawly city that does not currently have infrastructure or a culture for adequate, ecologically-superior public transit. Winter is far too cold and icy for far too long for people to be able to bicycle during the six months after October and before May--although the human-powered recreation & transit advocacy organization Bike to the Future, and Natural Cycle Courier Co-op are sagely pushing the envelope there. Still, even though the town has one big natural asset for mass bike transit--X-treme flatness, Winnipeg's equally X-treme weather makes it more dependent on motorized vehicles--and thus motorized vehicle infrastructure--than most other cities. But having a long, harsh winter doesn't mean Winnipeg needs to be anywhere near as dependent on cars as it is, especially since dwindling oil supplies, pollution, and the health effects of pollution--eg. asthma, diabetes, even obesity, are major emergent economic, social and environmental problems. Winnipeg needs a long-term campaign championing a solidaristic, universalistic, Scandinavian-style affordable (state subsidized) transit-upgrade.
Arable land consumed for transportation: Cars v. buses v. bicycles
Reclaiming Urban Space for Food Production and Security II:
Passive solar greenhouses, urban homesteading, and border farms
Another long-term solution to food security for Winnipeg is for governments to allocate incentives for people to start building greenhouses onto their houses, or collective greenhouses in their neighborhoods. Passive solar, wind generators, and geothermal energy on residential and neighborhood scales could alleviate some of the energy costs that would have to go into such local-scale, urban food production.
Municipal laws for a food-secure Winnipeg have to facilitate urban homesteading; and for efficiency's sake, incentives should be developed to encourage neighborhood collective homesteading and social enterprise networks. The town should be zoned so that households could keep small farm animals; and municipal zoning rules should encourage citizens to plant edibles during the very short growing season, in boulevards, the sprawling front yards, and in public spaces, whether for personal or neighborhood use, or for local market sale. There are important opportunities here for social enterprises, co-operatives and other Community Economic Development initiatives.
Applying government facilitation, not just to reclaiming urban land pockets for food security, but to cultivating local-needs-serving perimeter border farm land (eg. around La Barriere Park and Trappistes, and the overly-private Fort Whyte) could be better used to incorporate and expand area expertise and region-appropriate food production.
The city could work with organic ag scientists at UM and MB farms, such as Harvest Moon in Clearwater, who have been pioneering the development of appropriate, local, short-growing-season, lower-fossil fuel energy-consuming food production technologies, crops, animals, and human-environment relations and infrastructure.
We can use a city-border farmland development campaign to supplant parasitic, city-damaging post-perimeter residential sprawl (although here's a growth machine-compromise, combining sprawl with local food security).
Since the conservatives are killing off the Wheat Board, that should put the smaller wheat export farms in Manitoba out of business. (It's very likely as well that we will see the rich farmers rake in the surplus profits in the good-weather years, and, once a bad-weather year or two hits, be forced to sell off their lands to Monsanto and devolve into Monsanto's unholy army of tenant farmhands. Happened in Iowa. Will probably happen here. But I guess they're betting that they'll end up like the North Dakota Norwegian businessgentry farmers instead, living half the year in their Cayman Islands estates. We'll see. If the death of the Wheat Board results in Monsanto feudalism, it will be very difficult for the province to negotiate with the powerful multinational for the province's economic, social and environmental well-being.)
With innovation subsidies and partnership with Danish wind energy companies, the province could help the smaller farms near Winnipeg and along major transport routes proactively transform into producing healthy foods for the local market, as well as farming wind.
A key to making small farms and family farming viable in North America is to provide incentives for their geographic restructuring. The homesteading model was sociologically damaging, structuring farming family isolation, and sacrificing healthy agriculture practices so that First Nations people could be most efficiently deposed from the land. Such isolated colonial farm habitation practices are obsolete and, with the rise of motorized vehicles, more unhealthy than ever. Viable, healthy family farming is created by structuring farmlands in a divided-pie shape, so that families' farm houses form a neighborhood at the center of the pie, and the farms span out in wedges behind the houses. This was the historic pattern in Sweden, for example. Farm home centralization enables farmers to have more efficient, accessible communication, and community and social services, as well as better cultural and work sharing opportunities, and, with reduced dependence on motor vehicles in home life, improved physical activity and health.
We need to remember, farming healthily over time is not compatible with capitalism, an alienation and exploitation system that both induces value creation and draws wealth (control over value) up into a ruling financial-military elite. (There's a theoretical claim that pricing, which allows capitalists to have control over and allocate all of society's resources, will automatically satsify everyone's needs; but that claim is a lot more marketing than reality. Think about it this way: The market responds to effective demand. Monopoly capitalism is about concentrating wealth. Therefore, the market (and then politics and ideology) can only respond to the needs of the 1%--not the health needs of the 99% and our environment, which has no market demand.) If we want healthy food, healthy farm families, healthy land, water and air, then we have to recognize that these values exist within the "core" economy that is prior to (and exploited by) the dependent profit-driven market, and we have to do some hard work to recognize and support that essential core against predatory capitalist incentives.
Reforming and building Policy infrastructure: One key to Smart Development
Smart development often requires simultaneous efforts to reform and build the local or regional policy infrastructure. Check out Portland, Oregon or Malmo, Sverige or Curitiba, Brasil for advanced, ecological, democratic and city development models. Additional ideas and models can be found at the the Ritchie-based genius of the IATP (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, in Minneapolis).
Passive solar greenhouses, urban homesteading, and border farms
Another long-term solution to food security for Winnipeg is for governments to allocate incentives for people to start building greenhouses onto their houses, or collective greenhouses in their neighborhoods. Passive solar, wind generators, and geothermal energy on residential and neighborhood scales could alleviate some of the energy costs that would have to go into such local-scale, urban food production.
Municipal laws for a food-secure Winnipeg have to facilitate urban homesteading; and for efficiency's sake, incentives should be developed to encourage neighborhood collective homesteading and social enterprise networks. The town should be zoned so that households could keep small farm animals; and municipal zoning rules should encourage citizens to plant edibles during the very short growing season, in boulevards, the sprawling front yards, and in public spaces, whether for personal or neighborhood use, or for local market sale. There are important opportunities here for social enterprises, co-operatives and other Community Economic Development initiatives.
Applying government facilitation, not just to reclaiming urban land pockets for food security, but to cultivating local-needs-serving perimeter border farm land (eg. around La Barriere Park and Trappistes, and the overly-private Fort Whyte) could be better used to incorporate and expand area expertise and region-appropriate food production.
The city could work with organic ag scientists at UM and MB farms, such as Harvest Moon in Clearwater, who have been pioneering the development of appropriate, local, short-growing-season, lower-fossil fuel energy-consuming food production technologies, crops, animals, and human-environment relations and infrastructure.
We can use a city-border farmland development campaign to supplant parasitic, city-damaging post-perimeter residential sprawl (although here's a growth machine-compromise, combining sprawl with local food security).
Since the conservatives are killing off the Wheat Board, that should put the smaller wheat export farms in Manitoba out of business. (It's very likely as well that we will see the rich farmers rake in the surplus profits in the good-weather years, and, once a bad-weather year or two hits, be forced to sell off their lands to Monsanto and devolve into Monsanto's unholy army of tenant farmhands. Happened in Iowa. Will probably happen here. But I guess they're betting that they'll end up like the North Dakota Norwegian businessgentry farmers instead, living half the year in their Cayman Islands estates. We'll see. If the death of the Wheat Board results in Monsanto feudalism, it will be very difficult for the province to negotiate with the powerful multinational for the province's economic, social and environmental well-being.)
With innovation subsidies and partnership with Danish wind energy companies, the province could help the smaller farms near Winnipeg and along major transport routes proactively transform into producing healthy foods for the local market, as well as farming wind.
A key to making small farms and family farming viable in North America is to provide incentives for their geographic restructuring. The homesteading model was sociologically damaging, structuring farming family isolation, and sacrificing healthy agriculture practices so that First Nations people could be most efficiently deposed from the land. Such isolated colonial farm habitation practices are obsolete and, with the rise of motorized vehicles, more unhealthy than ever. Viable, healthy family farming is created by structuring farmlands in a divided-pie shape, so that families' farm houses form a neighborhood at the center of the pie, and the farms span out in wedges behind the houses. This was the historic pattern in Sweden, for example. Farm home centralization enables farmers to have more efficient, accessible communication, and community and social services, as well as better cultural and work sharing opportunities, and, with reduced dependence on motor vehicles in home life, improved physical activity and health.
~ An illustration of a Swedish farm village ~
Oh okay, it reduces farmers' privacy to run a S&M gimp chamber in the basement. On the upside, it reduces farmers' privacy to run a S&M gimp chamber in the basement.
Oh okay, it reduces farmers' privacy to run a S&M gimp chamber in the basement. On the upside, it reduces farmers' privacy to run a S&M gimp chamber in the basement.
We need to remember, farming healthily over time is not compatible with capitalism, an alienation and exploitation system that both induces value creation and draws wealth (control over value) up into a ruling financial-military elite. (There's a theoretical claim that pricing, which allows capitalists to have control over and allocate all of society's resources, will automatically satsify everyone's needs; but that claim is a lot more marketing than reality. Think about it this way: The market responds to effective demand. Monopoly capitalism is about concentrating wealth. Therefore, the market (and then politics and ideology) can only respond to the needs of the 1%--not the health needs of the 99% and our environment, which has no market demand.) If we want healthy food, healthy farm families, healthy land, water and air, then we have to recognize that these values exist within the "core" economy that is prior to (and exploited by) the dependent profit-driven market, and we have to do some hard work to recognize and support that essential core against predatory capitalist incentives.
Reforming and building Policy infrastructure: One key to Smart Development
Smart development often requires simultaneous efforts to reform and build the local or regional policy infrastructure. Check out Portland, Oregon or Malmo, Sverige or Curitiba, Brasil for advanced, ecological, democratic and city development models. Additional ideas and models can be found at the the Ritchie-based genius of the IATP (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, in Minneapolis).
A vexing political obstacle to moving toward food security is that developers, like all capitalists, feel entitled to as much exclusive control over public investments (facilitating sprawl) as they can get. This is their wealth. It's a preference that should not be indulged. Developers can make an opulent living without choreographing their windfalls by micromanaging public life. That is corruption. Winnipeggers need to drastically reconsider their old-school penchant for voting the growth machine good ole boy agenda into public office.
Other policy models that could help Winnipeg transition to greater food security include democratic devolution, as pioneered in Kerala, which Indian state prioritized and honed mechanisms for weaning towns off corruption and entrenched, parasitic, clientelistic political practices and institutions, while democratizing planning and implementing democratized planning. Minneapolis and Sweden offer further examples of democratic and effective decision-making infrastructure. CEDLF (The Community Environmental Defense Fund) disseminates information on how to use Anglo-American law to enable citizenship and environmental stewardship to develop in the face of growth machine opposition.
MAFRA
Food Matters Manitoba (FMM)
NRI at U Manitoba
The University of Manitoba houses a growing number of food security experts, including at MAFRA and the NRI, and it is famous for its top-notch, innovative urban design and planning program. The University of Winnipeg and progressive Mennonite traditions are famous for their social-development expertise. Yet to a large extent the city simply wastes these superlative local resources. City planners, farmed out of the local universities, should have decent budgets, autonomy from the Mayor's office and City Council, and a high-priority mandate to work intensively with the public to develop a sociologically-sophisticated, environmental, regionally-appropriate approach to smart, food- and energy-secure southern Manitoba development. To get there, Winnipeg needs its own Jaime Lerner.
In which I advocate for replacing Prohibition bureaucracy with an expanded, funded, and independent Planning Department
More educated people working in public infrastructure development, fewer people clocking in on the MLCC's (Manitoba Liquor Control Commission) byzantine, prohibitionist wedding-monitoring force. (And while we're at it, why not aim for a legislature and a judiciary that won't allow insurance companies to transfer accident costs to individual bartenders and party hosts?) Such a reorientation--not a diminishment--of the public sector would pave way for people to understand government as a democratic resource, rather than parasitism--producing a robust workforce, rather than a public sector vulnerable to conservative crisis opportunism. And if you actually want less drunk driving, then you invest in convenient, efficient public transport.
Manitoba Food Security Institutes
The State: Reduce the MLCC, Expand and Free the Planning Department
In which I advocate for replacing Prohibition bureaucracy with an expanded, funded, and independent Planning Department
More educated people working in public infrastructure development, fewer people clocking in on the MLCC's (Manitoba Liquor Control Commission) byzantine, prohibitionist wedding-monitoring force. (And while we're at it, why not aim for a legislature and a judiciary that won't allow insurance companies to transfer accident costs to individual bartenders and party hosts?) Such a reorientation--not a diminishment--of the public sector would pave way for people to understand government as a democratic resource, rather than parasitism--producing a robust workforce, rather than a public sector vulnerable to conservative crisis opportunism. And if you actually want less drunk driving, then you invest in convenient, efficient public transport.
MAFRA
Food Matters Manitoba (FMM)
NRI at U Manitoba
100 Mile Manitoba
Ethical Food Market
MB, SK Local Food Producers and Processors Directory
Fair Trade Manitoba
U-Pick, Farmers Markets, Roadside Stands Directory
Manitoba Vegetable Availability Chart
Nature Manitoba: Manitoba Naturalist Society
Food Matters Manitoba / Manitoba Food Security Network
Bison meat in MB
Buy Manitoba
Harvest Moon: Who's Your Farmer?
Hwy 59 road trip Nature's Farm in Steinbeck
Ethical Food Market
MB, SK Local Food Producers and Processors Directory
Fair Trade Manitoba
U-Pick, Farmers Markets, Roadside Stands Directory
Manitoba Vegetable Availability Chart
Nature Manitoba: Manitoba Naturalist Society
Food Matters Manitoba / Manitoba Food Security Network
Bison meat in MB
Buy Manitoba
Harvest Moon: Who's Your Farmer?
Hwy 59 road trip Nature's Farm in Steinbeck
Winnipeg's Exchange District
The Exchange District of Winnipeg is the nicest, savviest part of town and, rooted by the Mondragon cooperative cafe and bookstore at 91 Albert St., would qualify as quality in most anyone's books.
The Exchange District features curvy, close knit streets and late-19th/early-20th century medium-story buildings. Its little pocket park is the hub of the summertime Fringe play festival. On a midsummer's eve, it's great to sit at a sidewalk table at the park's side, noshing on apertifs and drinks at the French restaurant Oui. (For winter, Oui needs to put a fireplace and/or cozier lighting in its almost-atmospheric, tiny side bar. Very frustratingly, somehow, no Winnipeg pub, bar or bistro-- with the exception of South Osborne's convivial 7 1/4 --has stumbled upon the importance of a cozy atmosphere in winter.)
Mondragon cafe is a smart, sociable treasure, located upstairs from the expensive-but-righteous Natural Cycle bicycle co-op.
Cinamatheque at 100 Arthur Street shows indie films and documentaries on a tiny screen in a tiny but clean and comfortable room inside a glorious, spacious building (Artspace).
There's a nice but expensive mid-century modern used furniture (and indie clothing) store to window shop in, Hooper's, 70 Albert Street. On Main, there's a fun junk store filled with small, wall-mountable taxidermy.
On Adelaide, Canadian Footwear serves up dear, sensible, Euro footwear.
Blufish sushi restaurant offers a pleasant, modern-ish atmosphere and the decadent B.E.N.
Toad Hall Toys supplies bountiful, quality diversions to der kinder at 54 Arthur.
Public entertainment is provided by the Manitoba Museum of regional natural and cultural history (Its 1970s-era graphics are pure, undiluted, inspirational fabulousness. Preserve them, O Jebus.), and its planetarium (190 Rupert Avenue), as well as the Centennial concert hall at 555 Main Street.
The Exchange is not too far off the Red River-side strolling and bike path.
There are local art galleries, professional offices, discos for the 20-year-olds to flash-mate in, and way too many trop cher clothing, purse and haberdashery stores for discretionary-income-infused fashion victims. Some of the buildings that are really lovely have government offices filled with cardboard boxes and paperwork. Go inside and check out the architecture. It brings me no small amount of comfort to know that somewhere out there, public employees--usually relegated to demeaning, windowless cubicle caverns--have halfway conducive digs.
However, because Winnipeg's such a dirty sprawl whore, the compact Exchange is way under-utilized.
The Exchange District features curvy, close knit streets and late-19th/early-20th century medium-story buildings. Its little pocket park is the hub of the summertime Fringe play festival. On a midsummer's eve, it's great to sit at a sidewalk table at the park's side, noshing on apertifs and drinks at the French restaurant Oui. (For winter, Oui needs to put a fireplace and/or cozier lighting in its almost-atmospheric, tiny side bar. Very frustratingly, somehow, no Winnipeg pub, bar or bistro-- with the exception of South Osborne's convivial 7 1/4 --has stumbled upon the importance of a cozy atmosphere in winter.)
Mondragon cafe is a smart, sociable treasure, located upstairs from the expensive-but-righteous Natural Cycle bicycle co-op.
Cinamatheque at 100 Arthur Street shows indie films and documentaries on a tiny screen in a tiny but clean and comfortable room inside a glorious, spacious building (Artspace).
There's a nice but expensive mid-century modern used furniture (and indie clothing) store to window shop in, Hooper's, 70 Albert Street. On Main, there's a fun junk store filled with small, wall-mountable taxidermy.
On Adelaide, Canadian Footwear serves up dear, sensible, Euro footwear.
Blufish sushi restaurant offers a pleasant, modern-ish atmosphere and the decadent B.E.N.
Toad Hall Toys supplies bountiful, quality diversions to der kinder at 54 Arthur.
Public entertainment is provided by the Manitoba Museum of regional natural and cultural history (Its 1970s-era graphics are pure, undiluted, inspirational fabulousness. Preserve them, O Jebus.), and its planetarium (190 Rupert Avenue), as well as the Centennial concert hall at 555 Main Street.
The Exchange is not too far off the Red River-side strolling and bike path.
There are local art galleries, professional offices, discos for the 20-year-olds to flash-mate in, and way too many trop cher clothing, purse and haberdashery stores for discretionary-income-infused fashion victims. Some of the buildings that are really lovely have government offices filled with cardboard boxes and paperwork. Go inside and check out the architecture. It brings me no small amount of comfort to know that somewhere out there, public employees--usually relegated to demeaning, windowless cubicle caverns--have halfway conducive digs.
However, because Winnipeg's such a dirty sprawl whore, the compact Exchange is way under-utilized.
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