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.

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.

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!

Public Good Award

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

Provencher Bridge.

Local Beer

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

Frontier Town

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

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

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

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

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

Wolseley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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