Why is Winnipeg interesting?

On Neil Young, Into the Music, and Inuit art

David Michon (DM) writes FOR SCALE. He recently did a wonderful MMD here.

David here. “It's no Eden that you would see, Yet it's home sweet home to me.”  A quote I should think resonates with the many of us who grew up in the outer reaches of the cultural solar system. In my case, Winnipeg – the Canadian prairie city in which I was raised, and which I left in 2008. 

And, a city that seemingly always needs defending. But what does it say about it that all Winnipeggers will, in fact, always, always step up to the challenge?

It needs defending, I suppose, because it’s not an Obvious City, not an immediate sell. It’s a place that requires you to be curious about it, shelve some expectations, and appreciate it only for what it is. And this essay is really an ode to all those folkloric, dimensional places that are Not Obvious, in general, and to Winnipeg in particular.

First, some context:

A city of 830,000, it feels pretty much a lot smaller than that, socially. And yet, so much bigger in every other respect. Its streetscapes are dotted with architectural gems (its train station, for example, was designed by the same architects who designed New York’s Grand Central Station: Warren and Wetmore); there is an abundance of midcentury architecture and cultural venues thanks to big investments for the city’s centennial; it's dripping with storied music venues, an extremely good arthouse/repertory cinema (in its Cinematheque), and some truly exceptional cuisine (a function of its demographic diversity) with Ukrainian pierogis of particular note (try the cash-only Luda’s Deli).

Luda’s Deli

Winnipeg’s Union Station by Warren and Wetmore, 1911, who were building Grand Central Station in New York at the very same time.

I’d also like to note three major cultural figures as a means of demonstrating the range of talent and cultural impact the city has had: Neil Young is from Winnipeg (and attended my high school), and Winnie the Pooh takes his “Winnie” from Winnipeg. Isabella Rossellini once told me that she believed the city was “strange”, a comment intended as a high praise (she’d spent time there filming “The Saddest Music in the World”).

It is a city whose forever-purpose was as a place of trade, essentially since the dawn of humanity, sited on the confluence of two major rivers and then as an east-west centerpoint for the railway. But, that was all dashed by the opening of the Panama Canal and so its historic district is frozen in time in the 1920s (and so serves often, in film, as New York or Chicago – places that had the economic means to grow up and move on, architecturally). 

In my youth, a wander down Albert Street in the historic Exchange District, would give you access to a radical vegan bookshop and café, some truly top-tier vintage furniture, and the city’s premier punk music venue (The Albert). 

And, today, Albert Street and its surrounds are still home to much of the city’s special energy, usually in the form of something dusty, warren, and timeless. Here are two key examples: 

1. Into the Music, a divine record shop

2. Red River Books, an absolute chaotic pile of used printed material

Red River Books at its most organized; Into The Music 

Ok, onward: 

That opening quote I used is, in fact, from one of the greatest odes to my hometown, the 2007 film “My Winnipeg”, by our most prominent film director, Guy Maddin (who also did “The Saddest Music In The World”). A film beloved by Roger Ebert and A.O. Scott, it became, satisfyingly, an instant cult classic, and tells the story of this Canadian prairie capital by weaving together the most outrageous and unbelievable nuggets of its history with some other totally made-up ones. Things like, a mock Nazi invasion called “If Day”, a stampede of horses, escaping fires, that became frozen into the river, or that the city’s founders used to sponsor an annual treasure hunt in which people competed for a one-way ticket out of town.

Upon watching “My Winnipeg,” A.O. Scott considered fact-checking it, but opted not to. Did he really want to know? Did it matter to know? Why not let Winnipeg be that blurry myth Maddin so easily showed the world it is?

A scene from “My Winnipeg”, or an image from the city’s archives? 

Day-to-day, however, Winnipeg’s highs are often also its lows, as in, they can be one and the same thing. For example: Winnipeg’s most important hill is called Garbage Hill because that’s what it’s made from (covered, now, in grass). It dons a sign, like the Hollywood sign, that reads “GARBAGE HILL”, of which Winnipeg’s mayor said: “I know many have said that Hollywood is built on filth. Well, Garbage hill is literally built on garbage,” adding “The Hollywood sign is a sham.” 

Winnipeg is nothing if not deeply proud of its shittiness. As defensive as we are, we don’t try and dispel “shitty,” we try to explain how magical it can be to revel in it, like a pig in its sty.

Some cities in which I’ve lived are “sure things”: London, Los Angeles, Istanbul. They contain multitudes, they are complex, and they take years to fully grasp, but ultimately you can fall in love with them on the taxi ride from the airport into town. With Winnipeg, that’s not the case. Winnipeg is hard work. And, perhaps in contrast to those cities, it looks its best the closer you get to it. (Los Angeles, for example, is a Distance city – a place of vistas, not streetscapes.)

Winnipeg has a lot, though: the world’s largest collection of Inuit art, a grand museum of Human Rights, and an astonishingly bad public transit system. It also has the world’s longest skating rink in the form of its winter-frozen rivers that are plowed and smoothed, and dotted by very stylish warming huts designed by some of the city’s and world’s most skilled young architects. Here is a selection, from over the years:

Some more effective for warming than others.

It’s a river my father would use for his wintertime commute.

But perhaps what keeps Winnipeg so consistently itself is that it’s cheap. You can survive as an artist or musician without a “day job”, and there are many artists and musicians. You can be lazy. You don’t fear failure, because failure is all around you. Yet, there sits in our DNA the knowledge that Winnipeg could have lived a very different life – without that Panama Canal – where it remained grand. And, so we all find some small ways to dignify that past.  

For all its problems – of which there are many; what city has none? – it’s easy enough to be proud of Winnipeg, and yet impossible to be snobby about it. (DM)