Three years ago today it was announced that the empty Bell Hotel on Main Street would undergo a $6m renovation.
Built in 1906,
it was spared during a purge of many Main Street's single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels in the late 1990s
which saw places like the Leland, Brunswick,and Savoy closed and torn
down. The belief was that if you simply removed the number of bars and
undesirable residents then the area would rejuvenate. That, of course,
did not happen.
Cities like New York, L.A. and Vancouver have been taking different routes
in dealing with SROs. Realizing that they were an important part of the
housing market, they worked with non-profit organizations to renovate
them into assisted housing and in place of the hotel bar offer social or
community services. (For more on this read my 2008 post The Winnipeg SRO Hotel.)
Despite
the fact that in 2005 there were about 1,000 people living in Winnipeg
SROs, many of them by choice, we've been late to catch on to this ...
until the Bell.
Maybe we're catching on that there's a better way of dealing with our SROs.
Related:
A history of the Bell Hotel Winnipeg Downtown Places
The Winnipeg SRO Hotel West End Dumplings
4 comments:
Hi West End Dumplings!
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I really had to look around to figure out what SRO means!
One of the worst things Winnipeg has done was destroy Main Street. A place where people lived and had fun. Lots of problems of poverty and addiction, to be sure, but the solution was not tearing down the buildings! Skid rows, or whatever you want to call them, play an important role in every major city. Like Portage Place in the 1980s, a sad example of narrow suburban thinking invading the city. Good work as ever Chris!
Sorry, anon, I thought I had written it out before using the initials.
Thanks Xtoval. I agree that "skid rows" tell as much about a city, and have as much right to exist, as a Corydon Avenue. Recently the infamous Bowery in NYC became a national historic site ! http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/nyregion/on-the-bowery-vestiges-of-a-seedy-past-seep-through.html?_r=2&
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