Slurpees & Murder

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The following series of events is likely still fresh in your mind, having only just finished playing out last month. We originally found out five years ago that a new airport terminal would be coming, we waited half a decade while the new airport terminal was built, we made preparations to move everything into the new airport terminal for its grand opening, and then finally — with a week or two left before the new terminal opened — we started freaking out about what to do with the old airport terminal.
   
What do you mean, it’ll just end up being demolished? What do you mean, nobody can think of any feasible new uses for it? What do you mean, any viable plan to preserve it needed to have started years ago? Blasphemy! Sacrilege! Why, I never!
   
Let me ask you, honestly, now: do you think that we, as a city, learned anything at all about our approach to preservation from that escapade? Perhaps you are an optimistic sort and you believe we did; perhaps you would even be inclined to suggest we should address such matters more proactively in the future. I’m glad to hear it. Because we have a similar problem approaching on the horizon and the sooner we all start thinking it over, the better.
   
The city’s current Public Safety Building, looming menacingly over William Avenue between Princess and King, was built in 1966 by the LM Architectural Group for $4.8 million. The Winnipeg Police Service is scheduled to abandon the crumbling structure two years from now, in 2013, and move into the newly refurbished former Canada Post complex on Graham Avenue. And what happens to the old headquarters after that? Well, you tell me. But if there is to be a movement to preserve it, said movement has its fair share of obstacles to overcome — and these obstacles will not be overcome merely by complaining in the two weeks before the building is vacated.
   
The Public Safety Building, all historical and architectural significance aside, is not a tremendously attractive beast; even at its prettiest, back before the exterior limestone began randomly falling off the walls, it looked like a giant, novelty sculpture of an unfinished harmonica. Architects actually, legitimately, unsmilingly refer to its style as "Brutalist," and I think we can all agree that it’s one of the Brutalist landmarks in town.
   
The Public Safety Building is also, despite its name, not tremendously safe; the complex had to be evacuated twice last year because of hazardously poor air quality, and had to be evacuated once last year because its parking garage abruptly caught fire. (Mind you, garages mysteriously catching fire are not an entirely uncommon hazard in Winnipeg.) I also need to mention again that the walls are literally falling off the place, because that kind of bears repeating.
   
The prospective costs of fixing the facade — safetying the thing, basically — were last pegged at $65 million in 2009, although part of that cost was chalked up to temporarily moving workers elsewhere. If we generously cleave that figure by more than half and say it’d take $30 million to fix it up, that’s still an awful lot of start-up cost for turning the building into… well, into anything, really.
   
Maybe we end up knocking it down after all; maybe we bulldoze it for some parking space, or we purposefully ignore it until it finally falls down on its own. (Not that either of those outcomes would ever be allowed to happen in our much-vaunted Exchange District, but humour me here.) But if somebody out there does believe in saving the building, if somebody is genuinely interested in doing something — anything — with it, my advice is to start making noise about it now. Get a move on, Brutalists!
   
James Hope Howard never quite learned how to play the harmonica properly.
   
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