The neighbourhood that never was: How Winnipeg's Assiniboine Forest was almost a paved-over paradise

White-tailed deer leap into cover of thick prairie grass and owls take flight from branches in the groves of aspen and oak — many felled by beavers and offering shelter to rabbits — while turtles poke their heads up from the wetlands.

Winnipeg's Assiniboine Forest can sometime feel like a Disney scene.

It is the largest urban forest in Canada, at 285 hectares, and home to a variety of wildlife, dozens of songbirds and hundreds of plants, some rare.

But it might have ended up looking like any other suburban area in the city, if not for the stock market crash in 1929.

Many of the 18 kilometres of trails — bordered today by Roblin and Shaftesbury boulevards, Wilkes Avenue and Chalfont Road — follow the old road cuts from a neighbourhood once cleared but never developed.

"I refer to them as scars," Evan Duncan, city councillor for the Charleswood-Tuxedo-Westwood area, said of the road cuts.

"It should serve as a reminder of what could have been. Some people might look at it as, 'Wow, I would love to live in such a prime area of the city,' and others look at it as, 'Wow, did we ever dodge a bullet.'

"You can't get back what you cut down and destroy and set up for development. I'm happy with the way that things played out."

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, Frederick William Heubach began buying farmland, raw prairie and forest west of Winnipeg. 

In 1905 and 1906, his Tuxedo Park Company (named after a New York suburb) acquired 3,000 acres (about 1,200 hectares) of land from one family for $540,000, according to the Manitoba Historical Society.

Move the slider on the images below to see what Assiniboine Forest looks like now, versus the original plan:

Heubach contracted Montreal landscape architect Rickson Outhet to plan out his suburb. Outhet had trained with Frederick Olmsted, the designer of New York's Central Park and Montreal's Mount Royal Park.

But in 1910, Heubach had increased his land holdings to 4,500 hectares and created the South Winnipeg Company, replacing Tuxedo Park. He needed a new plan and hired Olmsted's sons.

Around the same time, the University of Manitoba was outgrowing its downtown Winnipeg site on Broadway and was looking for a new campus location.