Winnipeg history among ruins of Air Canada Window Park demolition, say heritage advocates

Winnipeg history buffs and heritage organizations are shocked and angered to find pieces of the city's past left in ruins during the demolition of the downtown Air Canada Window Park.

"I just am very upset that they didn't reach out to us and give us an opportunity to have a conversation about [saving them]. They have to be accountable for this," said Cindy Tugwell, executive director of Heritage Winnipeg.

"We're getting a lot of emails on this. I think a lot of Winnipeggers are upset that they were smashed."

Local historian Christian Cassidy, who writes a blog called West End Dumplings, discovered the ruins on Sunday.

He has been documenting the site at the corner of Portage Avenue and Carlton Street since the city announced plans in 2022 to remake the space into something that better celebrates Indigenous culture.

The shape of the new park will be a turtle, with the main gathering place on an area resembling the shell, a performance space near the tail and a storytelling area closer to the head where gatherings with water and fire can be held.

When it was first built in 1985, the park incorporated remnants from now-demolished buildings in the city, including two stone columns from the Northern Crown Bank, which once stood at Portage Avenue and Maryland Street, and stone balustrades from Devon Court Apartments that once stood on Broadway.

"The most prominent structure in the park was probably the silver cast-iron column from the McIntyre Block, which stood on Main Street from 1899 to 1979. That was the decorative column that was right in the middle of the fountain [in the park's centre]," Cassidy said.

When Cassidy stopped by the park on Sunday, those columns and balustrades lay in rubble.

"You can clearly see damaged fragments of all those different things laying around the demolition site. It's just really disappointing to see that," he said. "They're important because they're part of our heritage and once they're gone, they're gone, like the buildings they came from.

"And they knew that this was coming. It wasn't like a building that the foundation failed or caught fire and had to be torn down right away. I mean, this has been a process, so they would have had time [to remove and save them]."

In an email to CBC News, City of Winnipeg spokesperson Kalen Qually said many community partners collaborated on the redesign project to determine key elements and community needs, and it was decided that Greek columns and the colonial-era style of the items didn't belong in an Indigenous setting.

While it is the preference of the city to preserve historical assets wherever possible, "the shards themselves did not hold any official heritage status under the Historical Resources Bylaw and the decision was made by those consulting on the design that it wasn't possible to preserve during the park's demolition," Qually wrote.

Cassidy doesn't buy the explanation the columns weren't historically significant.