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Pitter-patter, pedestrians, it’s time to get at ’er
Nearly five decades after forcing people underground, crosswalk traffic is about to return to Portage and Main
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/arts/2025/06/2...
SINCE immigrating to Canada two weeks ago from Romania, Andrew Vlad and Vanessa Chira have been impressed by their newly adopted home of Winnipeg. But on Wednesday afternoon, the engaged tech workers stood at one corner of the city’s most famous intersection, attempting for the first time to solve the riddle of crossing Portage Avenue and Main Street.
Vlad shook his head, overwhelmed in confusion: he could see from 201 Portage Ave. at the northwest corner his ultimate destination — the CIBC branch on the other side of the street — but for a building so close, it was still so far out of reach. The pair of new Winnipeggers were experiencing a rite of circuitous passage that will soon be eliminated for all downtown pedestrians.
The following morning, Mayor Scott Gillingham announced pedestrians will be able to legally traverse Portage and Main in all directions at controlled, street-level crosswalks in a matter of days.
For the first time in 46 years, a pedestrian won’t need to play chicken to cross at the juncture of this city’s most iconic roads.
“June 27,” Gillingham told CBC during his monthly radio interview. “There will be a media event, but as I’ve said all along: Portage and Main, it’s important to Winnipeg’s history, it’s important to our future, but as I’ve said all along, at the end of the day, it’s just an intersection.”
In a literal sense, the mayor is correct, but that simple intersection — below grade, on the sidewalk and in downtown boardrooms with an eagle-eyed view of the thrum below — has been the source of intense multi-generational debate, taking on an almost mythic stature at the heart of city life while defining the tenor of civic conversation.
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AS early as 1971, Jack Willis, the chairman of Metro Winnipeg, was advocating for the closure of the intersection to pedestrians, should the city begin construction on an underground walkway. Eight years before the intersection’s eventual closure, legendary Winnipeg Tribune columnist Val Werier was already sounding the alarm — or honking the horn — considering the idea of barring pedestrians as a harbinger of a car-centric city to come.
“I have no quarrel with Mr. Willis’ proposal that an underground connection is required, for it is the busiest corner in Winnipeg and traffic will be more hectic with new buildings planned. In addition, pedestrians need some protection for the weather,” wrote Werier, who died in 2014 after 70 years covering the city for the Tribune and Free Press.
“However, I would like to make a plea that instead of banning pedestrians, we ban the cars,” he continued. “Instead of designing a city based on the needs of the car, we should think of people. Unless some dramatic action is taken in these terms, Winnipeg will be like other large centres where the car determines the downtown character.
“If anything is to be banned, it should be the cars,” he concluded. “After all, people are far more interesting.”
The decision to shut down sidewalk traffic was preceded by a protracted debate, with the city council’s executive policy committee submitting a proposal for the total ban in September 1975, nearly four years before the underground circular concourse (officially called the Portage and Main Circus) opened in February 1979. While the change was considered a concession to the growing needs of vehicular traffic, it wasn’t met with unanimous support.
Among the loudest — and boldest — detractors were the participants of the burgeoning disability rights movement, who argued the erection of concrete barriers and the funnelling of pedestrians into underground channels were violations of their rights to an accessible downtown. In the winter of 1979, wheelchair users and their allies breached the barricades to bring traffic to a standstill in protest.
“Portage and Main is an iconic, symbolic place,” the late disability rights advocate Jim Derksen told this reporter in 2018, when the re-opening of the intersection was considered by plebiscite on the day of the civic election. “If we don’t take measures to update it according to our new values, in a sense we are recommitting the errors of the past,” added Derksen, a multiple barricade-skirting scofflaw.
Former mayor Brian Bowman, who supported the idea of re-establishing pedestrian traffic at Portage and Main, vowed to honour the results of the plebiscite, which ultimately ended with a two-thirds majority opposing the reopening despite a vocal “Vote Open” movement. (Analysis showed the bulk of that majority were commuters who didn’t reside in the city’s core).
However, a city report soon found that the cost of repairing the underground’s leaky membrane could cost $73 million and result in four to five years of traffic delays. Those anticipated costs were ultimately enough to tip Gillingham, who did not support opening the intersection in 2018 as a councillor, toward crossing the political aisle when it came to Portage and Main.
It’s a decision that will not only help to improve the city’s image, but one which will encourage the development of a more accessible, welcoming downtown, says Melissa Graham, the executive director of the Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities.
“It changes who that space is for,” Graham says. “It won’t just be for people who use cars. It will be for everybody.”
“This is good for pedestrians, it’s good for businesses and it’s good for the entire city,” says Kirby Cote, the executive director of Accessible Sport Connection Manitoba.
“As a city we should be celebrating our ability to be welcomed,” adds Cote, who is vision impaired and cycles through the area daily. “We designed a downtown to move cars through it as fast as possible and that’s not the reality of how it’s used.”
WINDOW cleaning supervisor Don MacKinnon has for 15 years enjoyed an unparalleled vantage point of the intersection. At the end of their shift, cleaners often give in to the temptation to snap photographs from their platform outside the highest floors of the Richardson Building, which anchors the intersection’s northeast corner at 1 Lombard Place.
“I never thought in my lifetime they’d open it up again,” says the 53-year-old swing stage supervisor, who was too young to remember crossing at the time of the closure. A longtime Jets fan, MacKinnon says he eagerly anticipates a Stanley Cup celebration at Portage and Main next season.
For some downtown workers, the reopening is something they’ve been looking forward to for years. On her lunch break at her usual spot outside the Fairmont Hotel, just a stone’s throw away from the intersection, Joanna Oznowicz reflected on how much better the downtown looked without the barricades. But she also thinks the reopening will make life safer for pedestrians, so long as drivers give them proper attention.
“I see people walking in the middle of the street before and I think, you’re going to get killed,” says Oznowicz, 60. “So I hope there will be caution on both sides as we get used to it.”
PARALEGAL Cheri Harasym is less optimistic. “Horrible idea,” she says. “Too busy. There’s a reason they’ve been closed for 46 years. The drivers are already looking for too many things, and that’s just more distractions. (Around the office) we think people will end up getting hit, that there will be too many accidents.”
Harasym also expressed concern about the status of the underground circus, which she says downtown workers rely on for relief from the harsh winter weather when going from corner to corner.
“The long-term future of the concourse has not yet been determined,” says Julie Dooley, the city’s acting manager of corporate communications. “We have hired a consultant to assess any requirements of potentially decommissioning it.”
For businesses operating in and around the underground concourse, there’s been very little clarity as to when such a change might occur.
“The unknown is tough,” says Donavan Robinson, a co-owner of Pop CoLab, a corporate creative workshop business that opened two years ago in Lombard Place. “I don’t know that anyone really has an answer.”
Still, Robinson says crossing at street level will help businesses such as his because pedestrians will have an easier time accessing the Portage and Main nexus as a whole. “Right now people just get confused,” he adds.
Outside the former Bank of Montreal building, now owned by the Manitoba Métis Federation, road crews were putting the finishing touches on the pedestrian island at the midway point of Main Street.
Standing next to them, a young woman stared across to the southwest corner. Seeing no northbound traffic, she ran to the median and, a few moments later, arrived at the opposing corner.
“I had to run my errands,” reasoned Elsie Isiche.
It was thrilling to watch. Come next Friday, it’s an experience every pedestrian can legally enjoy for the first time since 1979.
ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.commailto:ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com