I've updated my Main Street shot even more. Any smugness one might feel about Winnipeg's preservation of its historical buildings is kind of deflated by this. I remember when they demolished that entire block of Main Street south of Portage all at once, to be replaced with nothing. Not to say that it looked that great by the 70s, but if you could imagine it restored in the way that Princess Street has been restored, the city would have an amenity worth a lot more than a crappy looking office tower (and a whole block's worth of ventilation shafts and emergency exits from the underground mall). Also, this pic makes the demolition of the TD-Childs-Nanton corner appear to verge on the criminal. The irony is that most of that office space wasn't really needed anyway. TD was gone from the city within a few years.
I think the lesson is that when you build a few buildings that are totally out of scale with the rest of the city, you can end up making the whole look smaller rather than larger.
Large
Huge
I still have a way to go with this, and am not sure about everything yet.
Here is Main Street south from Portage in 1900. By comparison with the above picture, you can see that by 1928 only the first few buildings south of Portage have been replaced with much larger ones. The pressure to build bigger buildings quickly dissipated and this block remained much the same for decades.
