Quote:
Originally Posted by CoryB
Most of those downtowns continue to have active retail well beyond a single location. The hard fact is retail in downtown Winnipeg died with the crash in the 80s and is never coming back. The ghost of the Hudsons Bay store will continue to haunt Portage and Vaughan until something meaningful takes over the space but it will never be a full, main line store in the chain again.
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Truviking is too young to remember, but once Unicity Mall (opened in 1975) St. Vital Centre (opened in 1979), the death knell for the downtown Hudsons Bay store began.
I remember our family going to the downtown Bay in the 1970s. If it were or weren't a doctor's trip, he'd drive us to The Bay parkade, walk down those stairs and cross the street to the Winnipeg Clinic. When I was about 10 or 11 or 12 my parents left me and my sister to the toy department all alone. We'd agree to meet inside the store by the parking kiosk where we came in. As GenXers there weren't as many kids like there are now. Those were the days!
But once the availability of suburban malls and "free parking" came to be, the people of the Greatest Generation (early 1900s), Silent Generation (1930s), Baby Boomers (1940s-1950s) didn't want to go downtown like they did prior to the mid-1970s here. Downtown became a place to go if you worked there or lived there. Not so much a place to shop. That's why the Boomers of the time thought of the failed Portage Place. They knew the ... was in.
Back then you could pay for your parking in the store or at the bottom of the ramp. The in-store kiosk parking thingy has be closed for decades now.
HBC (and Eaton's) used to have its own delivery trucks with its own staff. Now I guess HBC contracts out.
Things change. Accept change TV. The days of the downtown HBC store are numbered.
But now that suburban department stores are disappearing from the 'burbs, maybe 100 years from now we'll see a resurgence of the department store. Maybe in the 2110s the Eaton's and The Bay, or maybe something else, but the same concept of a multi-storey department store will come to be in downtown Winnipeg. I guess by then Winnipeg will have its very first subwway trains underneath Portage Ave. Better plan now for that TV.