Building with deep links to Winnipeg's Black history at risk after Sutherland Hotel blaze

The Craig Block now stands alone, flanked by empty lots on Main Street, an unassuming two-storey brick building that most Winnipeggers have probably passed without noticing before.

Built in 1894, it stood in the shadow of its much larger neighbour, the 1882 Sutherland Hotel, until now. A fire turned the hotel to rubble earlier this week, exposing the Craig Block like a tooth in the smile of a jack-o'-lantern.

It has also brought into the light the modest building's major — but relatively unknown — role in the history of the city's Black community.

It was there that the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, believed by many to be the first Black union in North America, gathered on the second floor, said local historian Christian Cassidy, who has researched and written extensively about the building in a blog called Winnipeg Places, which is part of his larger blog West End Dumplings.

It's where those men voted to walk off their jobs during the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

"The Craig Block has such a wonderful history. In a single building, it tells so much," Cassidy said, while lamenting the future of the building and its stories. 

The block still stands after the Sutherland fire, but for how long?

"It was always my fear that one day it would burn to the ground, and that hasn't quite happened, but it still may end up having to come down," Cassidy said.

"I haven't heard anything about the condition, but … I mean, all the water just pounding down on that roof — to have this older building, I don't know what [the] foundation is like, if the water crept in there. There isn't a big store that owns the building or something that, with somebody saying, 'My God, I gotta save this.'

"I imagine that an insurance assessor will be visiting it pretty soon and I guess we'll find out what'll happen."

The building has no historical status protections or any signs to commemorate its history.

"We need to do a better job of telling the story of these buildings …  and we just haven't. We've sort of failed the Black community. We've failed the Craig Building," Cassidy said.

It's also the education system that has failed to tell the stories of Black people, allowing sites like the Craig Block to fly under the radar, said Nadia Thompson, chair Black History Manitoba.

"The majority of our history, which is Canadian history [too], is not taught in schools," she said. "We've had several people try to make that a historical landmark, but they were unsuccessful."

When built for merchant George Craig, the building at 795 Main St., in the Point Douglas area, was used as a rental property, the Manitoba Historical Society says. The design is simple: a street-level storefront and a second-level space for living quarters or an office.

Early occupants on the main level included a grocery store, a furniture store, a drugstore and then another grocer, followed by a series of restaurants.

The sleeping car porters' union was formed by John Ashley Robinson and others in 1917, eight years before its American counterpart, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, formed in the United States. The union moved up the stairs into the Craig Block in 1922, while the main floor still housed a grocer, Cassidy said.

The union was soon joined by the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a U.S.-based organization. The short-lived Railway Porters' Band of Winnipeg, said to be the largest "coloured band" in Western Canada, also called the building home, with the upstairs hall used as a practice space.

In 1929, the main floor became home to a number of businesses catering to the Black community, including a barber shop and the Unity Pool Hall, which had a lunch counter that sometimes went under a different name (Betty's, Carl's and the Union Lunch Bar), Cassidy wrote in his blog.

"It was just a real hub for the men, basically. These porters were all male, and this became kind of their home-away-from-home," Cassidy said in an interview with CBC News.

"It became really important not just as an office, but also a social space. They would have speakers and events."

In 1932, the Porters' Social and Charitable Association was created and took over the management of the upstairs hall. In the 1930s, it was used by Regent Lodge No. 5, a branch of Minnesota's Prince Hall Lodge, the Black division of the Masons.

The Black community's association with the building lasted more than six decades.

It was an ideal location, because the Canadian Pacific Railway station, where the porters worked, was two blocks away on Higgins Avenue, and Pilgrim Baptist Church, which continues to be Winnipeg's oldest church serving the Black community, was nearby on Maple Street.

"It was somewhere to go where you felt safe and there were more people like you, facing those same conditions and fighting for those same rights," Thompson said about the porters' union and their efforts to earn a fare wage.

The last newspaper reference Cassidy could find that referenced the Craig Block still being used by the Black community was in 1987, when the Coloured Peoples' Social and Charitable Association operated there.

He called the Craig Block "a real survivor" of an early, important era in Winnipeg.

"It helps tell that story, but it's [a story and building] that's been long, long neglected and now not very well-known," he said.

Cassidy would like to see more buildings in the city have at least a small sign — or sticker with a QR code — to explain their significance, so people appreciate them more. 

Too often, those stories are told only once the buildings are gone, he said.

"It's like getting to know someone reading their obituary. It's usually better to have known them when they were alive."

That's particularly important in neighbourhoods like the North End and Point Douglas and the West End, working-class, lower-income communities that often get overlooked, he said.

"So much of the city's real history … is tied up in these nondescript, out-of-the way buildings, where people built their lives and contributed to building the city," he said.

"But they don't get the same attention … as the old banking halls along Main Street or the Legislative Building or stately mansions on Wellington Crescent that often have heritage protection and lots written about them."