Marketing for the future, burying the recent past

When it's time to apply an image makeover to an unwanted parcel of land, one easy way to do it in Winnipeg is to call it a market.

A decade ago, when the city wanted to sell the former Canada Packers site along Marion Street, property officials knew they needed a sexier name for an old industrial meat-packing facility in need of a cleanup.

So they dug into the archives and unearthed the namePublic Markets,a monikerattached to the site shortly before the First World War.

It was the actual name for the stockyards and livestock-processing plants that once made the former City ofSt. Boniface the final destination for millions of pigs and cows raised across the Canadian Prairies.

But in an era when"eat local" is a mantra, "Public Markets"has a way better ring than "former Canada Packers site." The Canad Inns corporation bought the land as part of a failed effort to win the right to build a new stadium for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

Marketing the market name

This week, the city rolled out a similar renaming effort, this time involving the reuse of the vacant Public Safety Building and the adjacent Civic Centre Parkade.

The parkade has sat vacant and derelict on Princess Street since 2012, when it was shuttered suddenly due to structural concerns. The Public Safety Building has only been empty since June, when the Winnipeg Police Service moved into their new headquarterson Graham Avenue.

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The city is now starting to ask for public input about what ought to replace these buildings.

"This area represents a tremendous opportunity to further refine and renew the Exchange District," Mayor Brian Bowman said on Tuesday, committing the minor geographical sin of mistaking the Civic Centre neighbourhood for the district located to the immediate south.

CentreVenture, the city's downtown development agency,is trying to find out what Winnipeggers would like to see in place of the old cop shop and the parkade. But in doing so, the agency is erasing the civic history of the 2.4-acre site in favour of a much cuddlier moniker.

They're callingthe site the Market Lands, which is ahistorically accurate nameif you go back 90 years to the time when a covered market stood in the area.

There's nothing nefarious about the city's decision to highlight the history of the land below the Public Safety Building, which was soldto city in 1875 on the condition it would forever have some form of public use.

But in shining a spotlight on the distant past, the city runs the risk of paving over more recent memories of municipal incompetence.

A new HQ dooms an old one

The only reason the Public Safety Building and Civic Centre Parkade are vacant and derelict is senior city officials chose to build a new police headquarters elsewhere, with financially disastrous results for the public purse.

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In 2009, a city-commissioned study by the consulting firm Hanscomb looked at four replacement options for the Public Safety Building, whose Tyndall-stone facade was in need of replacement.

One option involved knocking down the parkade, renovating the PSB and then expanding the cop shop over the police headquarters. The second option was to knock down the PSB and rebuildit in the same place. Option number 3 was building a brand-new police headquarters.

The fourth option, which the city pursued, was to buy the former Canada Post complex downtown and convert it into a new police headquarters.

In 2009, the cost of that option was pegged at $179.5 million, while the cost of renovating and expanding the Public Safety Building was estimated at $184 million.

For reasons no one at city hall has ever explained, city council was never informed about the latter option and was instead advised to pursue the Canada Post option, at a lowballed project estimate of $135 million.

Something to remember

In the end, the Canada Post option wound up costing$214 million, including the price tag forprotective bollardsthat have yet to be placed around the building. The construction project remains the subject of an RCMPfraud and secret-commission investigation.

The Canada Postoption also saddled the city with a mostly empty Canada Post tower that loses money every day the city operates it. It will soon require the city to demolish the Public Safety Building, a Brutalist structure with unique architectural value.

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The demolition of the adjacent parkadewas already a foregone conclusion, as repairs to that structure were put off by the previous administration, which allowed it to fall into disrepair.

But the demolition costs for both buildings are going to wipe out part of proceeds from the inevitable sale of the parkade land, which isn't subject to the same public-use caveat that curtails the potential reuse of the old cop shop.

Together, the construction of thenewpolice HQ, the acquisition ofthe mostly vacant tower on Graham Avenue and thedecommissioning of the old PSBcomplex represent one of the greatest blunders in the city's history.

Bowman has repeatedly stated he ismore angered by this filethan any other he inherited when he became mayor.But he also appears eager to move on, at least when it comes to the PSB.

"Downtown Winnipeg is on the move!" he tweeted in April, after council voted to demolish the Public Safety Building.

Whatever rises on the site, Winnipeggers would do well to remember not just the market that originally stood on the grounds, but the buildings that once served as part of the Civic Centre complex and the reasons they were abandoned.