Winnipeg | Osborne Village & Corydon area

[MG922]

To make it clear, I do wish the City had kept much more of the riverfront property as city owned property. A continuous network of paths for cycling, walking, and just enjoying the water would be fantastic.

[Tacheguy]

Originally Posted by MG922

To make it clear, I do wish the City had kept much more of the riverfront property as city owned property. A continuous network of paths for cycling, walking, and just enjoying the water would be fantastic.

this is the greatest historical mistake Winnipeg ever made. it is do difficult to get that land back in the public domain. imagine what this place would be like if we had riverwalks and parkways like Ottawa for example.

[esquire]

Doesn't the city restrict development close to riverbanks? I seem to vaguely recall some policy introduced years ago that intended to one day lead to city controlled banks that would eventually have public paths throughout.

[Tacheguy]

Originally Posted by esquire

Doesn't the city restrict development close to riverbanks? I seem to vaguely recall some policy introduced years ago that intended to one day lead to city controlled banks that would eventually have public paths throughout.

Might help. I just wish we had more Lyndale Drives in Winnipeg. Imagine if Wellington Crescent, to take only one example, had all of the houses and mansions on the south side of the street, leaving the whole north side from the Village to the park as public greenspace with the usual amenities. This can never happen now. We get little bits here and there with a few monkey trails..

[buzzg]

We can't change what's already there along the river, lots of that was decided 100 years ago. The city can though, start implementing better design requirements that have further setbacks to the river for existing developed or privately owned parcels that require a) more room for public along the river; and b) better interaction with the linear parkway or at least not giant parking lots or parkade walls.

The good thing is there's still quite a bit of public space along the rivers in all directions – we need to do a better job activating and maintaining them. D Condo is/was supposed to have a direct connection to the walkway, which is good. Heritage Landing is exactly what we should be working to avoid with the huge parkade wall along the river walk.

[WolselyMan]

Of course Fort Rouge Park will still be there. But I'm not arguing that we just keep the village green space we already have. I'm talking about increasing the neighborhoods amount, drastically.

I need to be really blunt here, but there is NO SUCH THING as too much green space in my book. It is criminally underappreciated by urbanists and city planners as an essential amenity of city living, especially when you're talking about high density areas. People need to have some exposure to nature in order to stay emotionally happy; this has been shown over and over again in study after study of urban residents. More green space in an area is strongly correlated with lower rates of stress, depression and anxiety. Dramatically increasing the amount of Green space along the Assiniboine in the Village and Bro-Ass. will seriously increase the potential livability of those neighborhoods, and could help make the inner city an actually competitive choice for suburban residents. If your going to reply to me saying that bonnycastle, Fort garry, fort rouge, the forks and everything else is "more than enough green space" then my reply would be "for what?" To keep residents from going insane? Certainly we have enough for that. Enough for YUPPIES who could really only care about good nightlife and really couldn't care less about some pretty lawn of green grass to meditate on? Sure, (if only we had the nightclubs,lol) Enough for young aspiring homeowners to put up with the area until they can save up to buy a house in Waverly West?

OR how about enough so that young couples might no longer consider moving to the suburbs the minute their first child reaches toddler age? Enough that Downtown Winnipeg starts to gain a reputation as one of the most livable high density neighborhoods in the country? How about enough so that suburbanites might actually start considering moving downtown and the surrounding inner cities?

Or, how about enough that Winnipeg becomes globally famous for it's plentiful quantity and quality of public parks? Is that even possible at this point? The only way I see that happening is if we all collectively recognize green space as one of the most, if not THE MOST important single amenity to invest in, and only if we start right now.

And no. No other city has gotten around to putting such urgent emphasis on parkland. Winnipeg's whole inner city, including Osborne village, however, is unlike most other Canadian cities in that it is still a very blank slate. This means that if we really do want to substantially expand our park system then we have to act right away, before this blank slate state is lost forever.

[borkborkbork]

Originally Posted by WolselyMan

I need to be really blunt here, but there is NO SUCH THING as too much green space in my book.

Good urban space enhances the use of parks. That sometimes means that more green space is a liability, not a benefit.

Consider the Alexander Docks. If that space got filled with cafes, a market, etc., it would enhance the park space that surrounds it. The park would be better used, more lively, and more interesting.

If you converted the docks simply into an extension of the park, I would imagine it would do very little to enhance the area, keep people from fleeing to the burbs, feel like an important amenity, etc.

Quantity of parks is, to me, a secondary issue to the *quality* of parks, and how those parks interact with the urban spaces that surround them.

[LilZebra]

Originally Posted by esquire

Doesn't the city restrict development close to riverbanks? I seem to vaguely recall some policy introduced years ago that intended to one day lead to city controlled banks that would eventually have public paths throughout.

Yes, there was an agreement, signed in 1983...Agreement for Recreation and Conservation (ARC). WFP article from Sept. 24, 1983.

WFP
Sep. 24, 1983
By: Val Werier

A Riverbank Park Rises in the City's Heart




It was a "tri-lateral" agreement...City (Norrie), Province ( and Axworthy (Fed.). "Tri-lateral" was based on Core Area Init. (1981) and North Portage Development Corp. (1983-84).

A year prior there was talk of combining authority over riverbank land into one agency. I can't access the PDF from the Freep, but the details of the article are...

Newspaper: Winnipeg Free Press
Date: Fri. April 4, 1986
Page: 3 / 6

You'll have to use the WPL's newspaper archive database thingy to pull up the article, by David O'Brien.

Headline is...

[OTA in Winnipeg]

Originally Posted by borkborkbork

Good urban space enhances the use of parks. That sometimes means that more green space is a liability, not a benefit.

Consider the Alexander Docks. If that space got filled with cafes, a market, etc., it would enhance the park space that surrounds it. The park would be better used, more lively, and more interesting.

If you converted the docks simply into an extension of the park, I would imagine it would do very little to enhance the area, keep people from fleeing to the burbs, feel like an important amenity, etc.

Quantity of parks is, to me, a secondary issue to the *quality* of parks, and how those parks interact with the urban spaces that surround them.

That park is used pretty well I think. With all the new housing and the Mere Hotel and Cibo in the immediate area. Every time I drive around that area there are always a number of people milling about the park area.

[WolselyMan]

Originally Posted by borkborkbork

Good urban space enhances the use of parks. That sometimes means that more green space is a liability, not a benefit.

Consider the Alexander Docks. If that space got filled with cafes, a market, etc., it would enhance the park space that surrounds it. The park would be better used, more lively, and more interesting.

If you converted the docks simply into an extension of the park, I would imagine it would do very little to enhance the area, keep people from fleeing to the burbs, feel like an important amenity, etc.

Quantity of parks is, to me, a secondary issue to the *quality* of parks, and how those parks interact with the urban spaces that surround them.

A few thoughts.

First off, you're absolutely right that quality of a park is just as important as their quantity. That includes their distribution and their location within the surrounding urban fabric. This is why I'm putting great emphasis on locating them on the riverbank, where their impact will be greatest. I've kinda grown out of randomly assigning surface lots downtown to be reserved for either a park or new development. There's a word I learned a while ago that everyone in charge of Winnipeg would do good to hear for the first time - It's called "Concinnity" which according to google search means "the skillful and harmonious arrangement or fitting together of the different parts of something." You can't just plop a park down anywhere. It has to fit in and have an appropriate transition between the two environments. Kind of like how it's essential for giant parkade to be squeezed right next to a bunch of restaurant patios on the same street. (a joke)

Secondly, when you're talking an area like the Alexander docks, the biggest issue with turning it into any sort of a naturalized area is the squished nature of it's location, and lack of available room for any worthwhile amount of vegetation to be planted there. This mostly because of how close waterfront drive starts to hug the riverbank at that point. You could still do it, but it would never really reach it's full potential as a natural riparian forest area. But what it can reach it's full as is if it was rather a more heavily landscaped plaza area, pretty much just like the forks market river plaza.

Basically, if there's no way that you could turn a piece of riverbank into a pristine lush natural oasis, then you might as well go the opposite direction and turn it into a buzzling urban plaza, similar to what London and Paris have had their riverbanks turned into. Practically every cubic foot of soil has been paved over with concrete walkways, plazas, and stairways along the Thames & the Seine river (not our seine river you dumass!)

This is more interestingly, what you could do with the mentioned wellington crescent riverbank, but on a much grander scale. The chance for that strip to be turned back into a natural riparian environment has gone away a very long time ago, so why don't we instead turn what is currently it's weakness into it's strength? It'll take a lot of negotiations between the city and all the tower resident associations, but I think it could be conceivable for the podiums of all those towers to be turned into cafes, shops, and patios facing the river. All connected by a large cobble tone river walk further down near the water. It'll give all of those existing concrete foundation structures some actual purpose. Heck, it might even finally give people an incentive to start trespassing on those tower resident's beautiful parking lots!

[Tacheguy]

My mother lives in one of those condos on Wellington, and the private parking behind her building is one of the nicest views I have seen in Winnipeg. It's disgusting. (Of course I don't tell her that 😊)

[buzzg]

Winnipeg has a significant amount of urban parks and "greenspace" compared to most cities. Sure we don't have ones as big as Central Park (NYC) or High Park in Toronto, but I'd argue that having several parks in urban areas that each have a different "focus" can provide a lot more benefit, as residents can have a park a lot closer... maybe even more likely to go to a small park nearby than a big park further away in the winter.

[goldenboi]

Does anyone think we will ever see confusion corner realigned? Personally I would love to see something like this, although it might be a pipe dream:

https://www.google.ca/maps/@41.91060...7i13312!8i6656

I don't know why we need to make it so complicated. There are countless examples of simple three-street intersections...

[buzzg]

There's been talk of eventually having Pembina going underground before CC and coming back up on Donald. That's the only way you could really do something like you show, effectively – that's (Pembina–Downtown) one of the highest routes in the city.

[goldenboi]

Honestly I don't think traffic would be much worse if we just turned it into a simple 3-street intersection. The way it is now is just such a shit show. And there's so much dead space in the immediate area. No doubt that it hampers the growth of Osborne/Corydon.

[GlassCity]

It's complicated by Transit's little exchange there too though. I don't know how important it is to them, but it is a consideration.

[buzzg]

It's more the use of the private land where Burger King is that hampers the area than the design of the intersection. All of the main corners are filled in now with pretty good uses, it's that gaping parking wasteland that really hurts it.

What I'm keeping an eye on is what happens to Fort Rouge Glass once they're moved to McGillvray... We really need to start connecting through to South Osborne. This could be a major step in the right direction if a residential developer buys the property. Dealing with the McD's/Co-Op/MTS property is a bigger, more important issue mid-long term than CC itself, to me.

With Osborne Place going up, the apartments that will go up next door, new Stradbrook developments, etc., I don't doubt that the property bound by CC will become too valuable to continue in its current form for much longer.

[dennis]

Originally Posted by buzzg

Winnipeg has a significant amount of urban parks and "greenspace" compared to most cities. Sure we don't have ones as big as Central Park (NYC) or High Park in Toronto, but I'd argue that having several parks in urban areas that each have a different "focus" can provide a lot more benefit, as residents can have a park a lot closer... maybe even more likely to go to a small park nearby than a big park further away in the winter.

I would consider Assiniboine park a large park. I would even go so far as ranking it with Central Park and High Park. A quick search shows Assiniboine ( minus the forest) being larger than High Park and half of Central. With Assiniboine forest it is the largest. But that is not important. The content of the park would rank it as one of the best urban parks in North America in my opinion. The city sure punched way above its weight class when that Park was developed.

[buzzg]

^Yup completely agree. I was more saying that we don't have a big one in a dense urban area near downtown/central. And I prefer it that way.

[biguc]

Originally Posted by buzzg

We can't change what's already there along the river, lots of that was decided 100 years ago. The city can though, start implementing better design requirements that have further setbacks to the river for existing developed or privately owned parcels that require a) more room for public along the river; and b) better interaction with the linear parkway or at least not giant parking lots or parkade walls.

The good thing is there's still quite a bit of public space along the rivers in all directions – we need to do a better job activating and maintaining them. D Condo is/was supposed to have a direct connection to the walkway, which is good. Heritage Landing is exactly what we should be working to avoid with the huge parkade wall along the river walk.

One option is to require that new private developments include public greenspace along the river. This has been a vital tool in Chicago developing its excellent riverside network of walkways and terraces.