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Originally Posted by DavefromSt.Vital
Seriously though, I wouldn't be overly romantic about remembering the buildings on the blocks along the north side of Portage. It was not the greatest area. Now whether a large shopping mall was a great idea to replace them, that is another question.
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It's not so much a question of whether the older buildings were all that great as it is one of whether it was wise to spend nearly $300 million in mostly public dollars, mid 1980s dollars to boot, when $300 million was huge money for a construction project, (Cadillac Fairview contributed a trivial amount to the whole thing, something on the order of $12 or $15 million) in demolishing them and building a complex that barely a decade after it opened, hardly anyone had any use for.
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To me, all the earlier "mega projects" (as they used to be called), were promoted as saviours far too much for their own good. To use a baseball analogy, you don't need to hit a grand slam homerun to start a rally. You just need to get on base. Fill an empty storefront. Rent out that vacant second floor. Repurpose a building that has outlived its original purpose. Build a money-making but medium-size building to replace that parking lot.
True North Square is not intended as a grand slam home run. However, with just the first two towers it is at least a solid double. The momentum is there and ongoing. I gave a tour of downtown to my in-laws from Toronto a couple of years ago. They had never been to Winnipeg and were a little surprised when I told them about how negative some people are about downtown. This and many other projects have started construction since they were there. They would be impressed.
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I think there was a strong tendency to over-sell megaprojects mainly because there was often a major public contribution to them... politicians had to try to convince the public that it was going to be worth it. With private sector projects there's nothing to sell... Chipman's bean counters told him the numbers added up, they lined up the tenants, and away we go with construction... no one needs to be persuaded as to the benefits of TNS.
Any downtown project is a piece of a larger puzzle... the downside of those 60s, 70s and 80s megaprojects is that they promised the moon, and when they inevitably failed to deliver that on their own it soured the public on any kind of public investment downtown.
Even if the Concert Hall or MTS Centre didn't turn around downtown all on their own, they are important civic amenities and downtown is better for having them.
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