No laser pyramid, but giant orbs and sky gardens: Why Winnipeg is floating wacky designs for Portage and Main

In 2014, 16 years after her departure from city hall, former mayor Susan Thompson floated some ideas for making Winnipeg a little more like Paris, Las Vegas or Dubai.

The Manitoba capital would be more exciting, she said, if there were hot tubs at Portage and Main, illuminated evergreens along Route 90 and a laser pyramid above the city, allowing Winnipeg to be visible from space.

"Why do people go to Paris? What does the Eiffel Tower do for you?" Thompson told a Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce audience during her 2014 speech. 

"It is a tool in which to attract people to come to the city to spend money and attract more population."

A semblance of this philosophy made its way this week into conceptual designs for a reimagined Portage and Main.

As part of a city effort to gauge what Winnipeggers want to see when the intersection is redeveloped, the city published a series of concepts for Portage and Main that range from "quite bold to a little more conventional," in the words of Curtis Kowalke, the city's principal planner.

The conventional ideas include a simple replacement of the crumbling concrete barricades that currently line the corners of Portage and Main with ordinary bollards, as well as plans to place new lights and trees around the edges of the intersection, which would remain closed to pedestrians.

The bold concepts are a lot more aspirational.

There's one with an oversized metal orb intended to signify what a monumental work of public art would look like at Portage and Main. That drawing inspired Twitter memes involving palantirs — the seeing stones the Dark Lord Sauron used to spy on the people of Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings.

There are other drawings featuring a quartet of lookout towers standing at each corner of Portage and Main, a circular "sky garden" hanging above the intersection, and a very expensive-looking conception of an above-ground pedestrian crossing to match the underground pedestrian circus.

Testing the waters

It's important to note these are not actual options. The city simply wants to see what would fly with a portion of the public before a consulting firm figures out what can actually be designed and built within Winnipeg's budget.

"Obviously, we have a wide set of ideas that are currently being explored. Once that's narrowed down to comprehensive design recommendations, they will be costing that out and presenting it to council," Kowalke said outside city hall earlier this week.

A cynic might suggest the city trotted out the more flamboyant ideas for Portage and Main simply to make a simple repaving and beautification option more palatable.

The city has no choice but to remove the barricades, as they're connected to the underground infrastructure that must be ripped up and replaced. The cost for that was estimated in 2019 at $15 million to $20 million.

Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham would not dismiss the idea the city is floating expensive-looking designs to make more humdrum plans appear acceptable.

"It's good to have a … range of options and a range of use because I think it encourages creativity and imagination and gets a discussion going," Gillingham said Tuesday.

Pedestrian debate

At the same time, both the mayor and Winnipeg's principal planner say Portage and Main deserves some form of special design consideration, given its geographical and historical prominence.

It also serves as a metaphor for a Winnipeg nobody wants: It's something ugly in the literal centre of the city. It's inhospitable to people. And it inspires seemingly endless and intractable debate.

"We all want to be proud of our city and I think right now what we've got, no one's proud of. No one's happy with this at all," said Adam Dooley, who campaigned for the unsuccessful yes side in the 2018 Portage and Main reopening plebiscite.

"You know the old saw about Winnipeg reaching for mediocrity and falling short? Let's reach for something a little bit better than that and and really have an intersection at the centre of our city that we can all be proud of."

Dooley, along with city councillors such as Sherri Rollins (Fort Rouge-East Fort Garry) and Cindy Gilroy (Daniel McIntyre), would prefer to simply open the intersection to pedestrians.

Coun. Jeff Browaty (North Kildonan), who campaigned for the no side in 2018, now supports the idea of reopening the intersection to pedestrians, albeit only during the overnight hours when the underground walkway is closed.

Coun. Russ Wyatt (Transcona) wants another plebiscite before the city considers reopening Portage and Main, while the mayor and the incoming planning director are among public figures who don't appear all that interested in regurgitating this debate.

Nor are officials at the City of Winnipeg, it appears. By floating fantastical designs for Portage and Main, it's almost as if they want to redirect public attention — and no small degree of scorn — from the pedestrian question.

When we're making fun of massive orbs or snickering about sky gardens, we're talking about the design of the intersection, not whether people can cross it on foot.

It's unlikely anyone at the city is Machiavellian enough to perpetrate such sophisticated misdirection on purpose. But for at least the next 10 milliseconds, there's a laser focus on what Portage and Main might look like in the coming years.