Canada's insider blog

When Canadians think of Winnipeg’s famous downtown corner of Portage and Main it is usually to remark on the infamous winter weather.

But standing here on a warm afternoon, it’s the infamy of the city’s earliest citizens at issue as we wander The Exchange District, a 30-block national historic site of more than 100 turn-of-the-20^th-century buildings.

The grand facades of these former banks and insurance companies speak of a time when Winnipeg was known as the “Chicago of the North,” a hub where grain and money and goods of all kinds were exchanged. And if the walls could talk, the tales would be rich, raucous and riveting, like the ones tour guide Erica Lasker has dug out of her local history files for our Death and Debauchery walking tour.

“Winnipeg had the reputation as the ‘Wickedest City in the Dominion’,” she says, pausing in Old Market Square to describe the city’s first mayor, arrested for public drunkenness in 1873.

“He was also the chief magistrate, and sentenced himself to a $3.50 fine and seven days in jail,” she explains with a smile, “then threw out the sentence due to previous good behaviour.”

Stories about the characters who populated this frontier metropolis offer an insight into life in the Manitoba capital during the last century. And vaudeville stars Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin played the Pantages Theatre here, a cosmopolitan city where growth and prosperity shared the stage with prostitution, pork barreling and misappropriated public funds.

Today Winnipeg’s Exchange District is a showpiece of urban renewal. Popular restaurants and clubs, arts organizations, dance studios, galleries and loft apartments fill the repurposed spaces, keeping the city’s historic heart alive.