Here’s a very interesting find among what was likely Winnipeg’s first fire insurance maps, published in 1880, which can be viewed on the
Library and Archives of Canada site.
Though not quite as descriptive or artfully rendered as later fire insurance maps, these present a fascinating view of the fledgling city of Winnipeg as it existed before the arrival of the CPR, the real estate boom of 1881-’82, and the great building boom of 1903-1913 which created the city we are well familiar with.
These maps show the early pattern of urbanism: tiny commercial buildings oriented almost exclusively to Main Street, industrial and warehouse buildings along the Red, streets in between lined by a scattering of houses, and lots and lots of outbuildings.
Especially interesting is this sheet, which shows the built environment at the SW corner of Portage and Main. Here we can see:
- Long-lost Pelly Street, which was surveyed by the HBC in the 1870s in a plan that did not include Portage Avenue. Under this plan, Pelly Street would be another east-west street equidistant from and parallel to Graham and Ellice Avenues. Yet despite this survey, buildings lined Main Street where Pelly was supposed to intersect. Portage Avenue, of course, survived, and Pelly Street did not.
- Buildings in the Portage Avenue right-of-way between Main and Notre Dame. These buildings stood on land owned by a William Drever in 1863, who began building here not only before Portage Avenue was officially surveyed, but before the point where the Portage trail met the Garry trail (Main St.) became fixed. Depending on the season, the trails would intersect at different points. Sometimes further north (where Portage and Main intersect today), sometimes a little further south. Drever’s building upset Henry McKenney, who in 1862 built at what he felt was the NW corner of the two trails, only to find out that Drever thought he owned this land. The matter went to the Assiniboia Council in 1864, and the Council ruled that this portion of Portage Avenue between Main and Notre Dame (Drever’s disputed property) shall be narrowed to 66’ feet and buildings lawfully exist for a period of 18 years -- until 1882. This narrow stretch of Portage Avenue was finally cleared and widened to 132’ in 1883, when the owner sold the land to the City for $35,000. (This is little story about Council’s land use decisions ending in compromise and the City paying more for it in the end, shows how little has changed in Winnipeg in the last 155 years.)
- The ‘St. N[icholas] Hotel’, formerly the Red Saloon, which was built on Drever’s old property in 1868, and until its demise in 1883 was well known as being one of the more notorious of Winnipeg’s hotels.
- The St. Nicholas and other buildings are not oriented to Main or Portage, and instead are situated at the same angle as Notre Dame, which was the boundary line between the HBC land to the south, and the old river farm lot to the north. Totally pre-dates the established urban street pattern.
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