Niigaan Sinclair is an Anishinaabe writer (St. Peter’s/Little Peguis) and a professor at the University of Manitoba.
This weekend, for the first time in 46 years, the iconic Portage Avenue and Main Street intersection in Winnipeg’s downtown is reopening to pedestrian traffic.
In 1979, the city closed Portage and Main to foot traffic, forcing the possibility and promise of its centre literally and figuratively underground.
On this weekend that leads up to Canada Day – with the barriers removed and life returning in this Prairie city – most throughout the country will be focused on the country’s birth. In Winnipeg, though, the reopening of Portage and Main means reconciling with its complex history and revisiting its complicated centre.
It is the crossroads of Canada.
The corner of Portage Avenue and Main Street in Winnipeg in 1872, ten years after two businessmen started construction on a general store, spawning a boom of development in the area.Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons/British Library
On June 2, 1862, businessmen Henry McKenney and John Christian Schultz paid £110 for a small plot of land where the north-south and east-west oxcart paths crossed, 500 metres west of the Red River.
The two men started construction on a general store. At the time, their fellow settlers called the entrepreneurs insane for moving so far away from the river, where more goods and people were arriving every day.
McKenney and Schultz were determined and innovative though, even placing their storefront facing the southeastern direction, with a view of Upper Fort Garry. Their persistence proved profitable.
Over the next six years, 50 homes, hotels, saloons, and offices opened around them, raising the property value from $1.87 to $1,250 an acre.
With new development came conflict, competitiveness and endless battles over the area’s most controversial issues: road size and blocked thoroughfares.
Finally, the governor and council of Assiniboia declared that by 1882 “the main line of the road to the Assiniboine River at Fort Garry be marked out so as to run clear of all buildings” and “a full two chain (132 foot) road crossing [local trader William] Drever’s lot leading to the Assiniboine Settlements” be cleared of all obstructions.
The roads were organized parallel to the river and not at right angles, following the original alignment of the McKenney and Schultz store (a feature that continues today).
Portage and Main was birthed.
Upper Fort Garry, pictured here in a drawing by W.H.E. Napier, is situated at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers and was a Hudson's Bay Company post. The area is now called 'The Forks.'
Sort of.
Portage and Main wasn’t always an intersection but a stopping place along a vast north-south Cree trading route along what is now the Red River to the Assiniboine River.
Here was the northwestern section of a permanent Indigenous city called Nestawaya – “Three Points” – where Cree and Lakota peoples were seasonally joined by Anishinaabe and Dakota traders, and a community of over 14,000 lived together in what is now called “The Forks,” a national historical site.
How are you celebrating Canada Day this year? Share your story with The Globe
Here, the meeting of rivers in the east created intersecting trails coming from three directions; the north (Cree), the west (Lakota and Dakota), and south (Anishinaabe).
For centuries, Nestawaya was a critical epicentre for North America, where for example an international Indigenous peace treaty was forged in 1285 during a continent-wide super drought.
The city was one of Turtle Island’s central meeting places until being abandoned due to a devastating smallpox epidemic introduced by Hudson’s Bay Company traders in the 1780s.
French and English fur traders and settlers didn’t invent trading routes but followed well-travelled Indigenous ones. Evidence shows that the routes connecting virtually all fur trading forts – and in particular Upper Fort Garry and Lower Fort Garry – followed the same paths to and from Nestawaya.
These were also the paths used by Métis leaders like Cuthbert Grant during the Pemmican Wars and, later, Louis Riel during the Red River Resistance. Riel’s childhood home, in fact, is at the end of a path that begins at the northwestern mouth of Nestawaya – what is now called Portage and Main.
McKenney and Schultz might get the credit for the location and direction of Portage and Main but the intersection is, and always has been, an Indigenous invention.
![Chief Henry Prince, Councillors and interpreter, St. Peters [St. Peter's], Manitoba, 1880. In 1871, Henry Prince, son of Chief Peguis, had signed Treaty 1 on behalf of the St. Peter's Band, (later the Peguis First Nation). Credit: Robert Bell / Library and Archives Canada
NB: St. Peter’s was a community of Cree and Saulteaux peoples in the Red River Valley, in what is today southern Manitoba. A band of Swampy Crees, led by Chief Peguis, and Saulteaux peoples established the community as an agricultural settlement in the early nineteenth century. The missionary John Cockran set up an Anglican parish and church, called St. Peter’s, for Peguis’s band in the 1830s, and it is from here that the community got its name. St. Peter’s parish and its associated mission village has often been used interchangeably to describe the larger Indigenous community along this stretch of the Red River. As white settlement continued to grow in the Red River valley, and with the 1869-70 conflict over territory between Métis and the Dominion Government, the Cree and Saulteaux sought a formal treaty with the Canadian Government. The government agreed to do so in 1871. With Treaty 1 the government recognized what was then mostly Saulteaux and Swampy Cree territory in the Red River Valley as an Indian Reserve and promised to protect it. St. Peter’s became a thriving agricultural settlement with its Indigenous inhabitants cultivating over 2,000 acres of land by the late 1870s. Despite this agricultural success, the government and white settlers accused St. Peter’s Indigenous farmers as being insufficiently productive and in 1908 the Department of Indian Affairs closed the St. Peter’s Reserve. Most of its inhabitants were compelled to leave the region and move north to establish a new reserve on the Fisher River, as the Peguis First Nation.](https://asset-boost.pro/resizer/v2/MSIID4L5FVEOLKZZAMXZABMNDY.JPG?auth=65270f13291fc97e2754387d60cc182b22588ac792da6d51f4a6cc7896144b3b&width=600&height=400&quality=80&smart=true)
In 1871, Saulteaux Chief Henry Prince, son of Chief Peguis, signed Treaty 1 on behalf of the St. Peter's Band, later the Peguis First Nation, the first treaty of the modern era.Robert Bell/Library and Archives Canada
Manitoba was the first footstep of a young Canada. This is the place of the first Canadian province post-Confederation and its first treaty of the modern era. This is the birthplace of the Red River Métis. This land has always been a place where people from multiple cultures, directions, ideas, and geographies come together to live, work, and build a home with one another.
The economic and spiritual heart of Manitoba is Winnipeg, and everything in this city begins at Portage and Main. The city has literally grown up around the intersection. At the time of the city’s incorporation in 1873, the five-kilometre wide city of almost 2,000 was wrapped around Portage and Main.
City hall meetings were held nearby, and in 1882 the Winnipeg Street Railway Company began service from the intersection, converting to electric cars a decade later.
A Winnipeg Street Railway Company horse-drawn streetcar in 1890 at Portage and Main.Cartwright and Lucas, Winnipeg, 1923
The arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1878 meant Winnipeg became Canada’s economic gateway, resulting in the construction of nearby Union Station in 1911. During this period, an economic boom transformed the area around Portage and Main, with the opening of the T. Eaton Department Store in 1905 and the Hudson’s Bay Company Building in 1926.
Opinion: What everyone gets wrong about Winnipeg, except Winnipeggers
Portage and Main became the economic heart of not just of the city but Canada itself, with the Bank of Montreal building in the southeast corner (built in 1913), the 34-storey Richardson building in the northeast (1969), the Commodity Exchange Tower in the northwest (1979) and the five-storey Scotiabank building in the southwest (1979).
This also meant Winnipeg’s downtown became more a place for the wealthy than marginalized groups like immigrants and Métis, who were increasingly ostracized and mistreated by police and other city services. Meanwhile, First Nations peoples – once the sole inhabitants of Portage and Main – were suffering under brutal, draconian laws that resulted in their forbiddance from their homelands, and resources like water from the nearby Shoal Lake 40 reserve were stolen to quench the city’s thirst.
The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 is one of the many historical events that took place at the intersection.City of Winnipeg Archives
As Portage and Main grew in complicated ways, so did Winnipeg. Virtually nothing in the city could happen outside of the intersection. There was the celebration of Armistice Day in 1918 to Bloody Saturday during the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike to the 1939 Royal procession of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Streetcar companies and lines started and ended here, until the final streetcar ended its line at Portage and Main in 1955. The intersection was the subject of an eight-cent stamp by Canada Post in 1974, a CBC special by Burton Cummings, and the 1992 song Prairie Town by Randy Bachman and Neil Young. It’s a property one can buy in the Canadian version of Monopoly.
Hockey player Bobby Hull of the Winnipeg Jets waves to well-wishers during a victory parade on May 28, 1976 along Portage Avenue after the hockey team defeated the Houston Aeros to win the World Hockey Association championship.The Canadian Press
It’s the site of the city’s beloved hockey team; where the WHA’s Winnipeg Jets signed Bobby Hull to a contract in 1972, the NHL’s Jets signed Dale Hawerchuk in 1981, fans mourned the loss of the team in 1996 and celebrated the squad’s return in 2011.
Most known, however, is the reputation of Portage and Main as supposedly the coldest intersection in Canada, with high winds that bring temperatures to below 40 C, freezing everything and everyone in their tracks.
It may have been, in fact, the bitter cold that inspired the intersection’s next life – or lack thereof – as the aptly named “Circus.”
Winnipeg urban planners hoped to create a downtown economic hub, forcing foot traffic at Portage and Main underground into a commercial concourse in order to increase vehicle flow and support economic development.JOHN WOODS/The Globe and Mail
Around the 1960s, the downtown core of Winnipeg was shifting, as wealthy citizens moved to suburbs and Indigenous peoples – many now struggling after residential school and other Canadian policies and practices – began to move back to their traditional homeland.
At the same time, urban planners sought to create a downtown economic hub, based on the idea that forcing foot traffic to travel underground into a warm, enclosed commercial concourse would increase vehicle flow and support economic development.
The concept was called the “Circus,” an underground circular structure that connected all four corners of Portage and Main. Via multiple stairwells, citizens would enter a “wheel” where multiple banks, businesses, and offices would reside until finally travelling upstairs to exit. Meanwhile, cement barriers would stop pedestrian overground traffic from walking in the intersection. The Circus was approved and eventually opened by Winnipeg City Council in 1979.
In 2017 The Globe took a walk through the pedestrian underpass at Portage and Main in Winnipeg.
The Globe and Mail
Few celebrated, with many locals criticizing the Circus as inconvenient, confusing, and an eyesore; discouraging for both citizens and business. What was once a place for multiple people from multiple directions and geographies to visit, share, and build a home became a place solely for transactions.
Over the years, citizens and researchers would further identify the lack of wheelchair accessibility, safety issues, and how the space was warm for the rich and powerful and unwelcoming for anyone who did not spend money, literally freezing many citizens out.
The Circus was now a place for some, but not for those who invented it. A place that made no sense.
For years, the chaotic intersection was the subject of intense debate. Despite many referendums on revitalization, nothing ever happened.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
For decades, much debate surrounded Portage and Main. Politicians decried a decaying downtown and made many promises. Referendums promising to revitalize the intersection were held. Media reported stories and columnists proposed ideas.
Nothing ever happened, mostly due to the tens of millions of dollars necessary to rebuild and fix the many structural issues and reroute traffic away from the city’s core.
In the end, though, the Circus just became a circus itself.
In early 2024, a city report identified that infrastructure breakdowns were compromising the waterproof membrane protecting the integrity of the underground concourse.
The pink area in this digital rendering shows the span of the waterproof layer that was protecting the underground concourse at the intersection.Supplied
The cost to fix: $73-million and up to five years in traffic delays. A few weeks later, Winnipeg city council voted to open the intersection by July 1, 2025.
And open it will be. For weeks, city crews have removed the barriers, paralyzing traffic while underground businesses with long-term leases have panicked, wondering what will happen with the Circus. City officials have responded with a “design vision” that will revitalize the area.
This weekend and on Canada Day next week, Winnipeg residents will take their first steps into where this place began; a centre that has been closed, frozen, and cut off for nearly half a century.
You won’t need to be a consumer to walk across Portage and Main, and once again people from multiple directions, cultures, and geographies will come to an intersection full of possibilities and promises: a complicated, historic and inclusive place that embraces what it has been and always will be.