Cumberland Corridor (City of Winnipeg Aerial Maps)
This is a two part series. This first part looks at how the corridor came to be created 50 years ago. Part two is about the campaign to save and relocate one of the apartment blocks that was to be demolished to make way for the corridor.
Cumberland Avenue at Carlton Street, ca. 1910
Established around 1882, Cumberland Avenue was a short street that only ran from Donald Street to Kennedy Street and made up the northern boundary of Central Park. It was an idyllic, dead end street lined with trees and upper middle class houses.
Winnipeg was faced with the same problem as many other North American cities after the Second World War in that people were moving to suburban communities in droves and new ways of getting their vehicles into and out of the city's core were desperately needed.
Sep. 29, 1948, Winnipeg Tribune
In 1947, the city's traffic engineers presented a report to council that outlined a number of new traffic arteries that could be created from existing streets to ease congestion on major routes like Portage, Main and Notre Dame. One recommendation was to extend Cumberland Avenue from Kennedy Street through to Balmoral Street.
Balmoral was already an important north - south arterial route. At its southern end was downtown and to the north it became Isabel Street at Notre Dame* which, in turn, lead to the foot of the Salter Street Bridge and into the North End.
*Most inner city streets change names crossing Notre Dame, something that dates back to the 1870s and 80s. They change again when they cross the CP Rail yards and enter the North End. An attempt in 1891 to merge the names together into a numbered street system failed. Some streets eventually were merged, such as Arlington/Brown/Brant into the singular Arlington Street around 1912 and Sherbrooke/Nena to Sherbrook Street likely in the 1930s.)
The Cumberland extension project included the demolition of two houses, one on Kennedy and one on Balmoral, as well as the widening of the pavement along Kennedy and Balmoral leading up to it. The plan was approved by council in 1948 and $66,160 was set aside in the following year's streets budget to do the work.
The new intersection
As the years passed, traffic congestion in the downtown only became worse and new arterial road plans appeared in the late 1950s and 1960s. One of them recommended a further extension of Cumberland Avenue to Notre Dame Avenue with a junction at Maryland Street. Both Notre Dame and Cumberland would then be made into one-ways in opposite directions between the new intersection and the downtown.
One of the earliest newspaper mentions of this new extension came in March 1963 when it and its estimated $890,000 price tag was dropped from the proposed streets budget of Metro Winnipeg, the second tier of city council in charge of regional planning for the thirteen municipalities that made up Greater Winnipeg. There were simply too many competing roadworks projects on the books. It suffered the same fate in 1965.
The Spence Cutoff
Phase I of the Cumberland extension, from Balmoral Street to Spence Street, was finally approved in 1967. Though only a block long, it was key to creating a new route into the downtown.
Starting at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, November 9, 1967, motorists heading downtown on Notre Dame were invited to cross over to the Cumberland extension using the "Spence cutoff". While Cumberland was a one way route into downtown, Notre Dame would remain two way until trolley bus service, which was being phased out across the city, ended. This saved having to install trolley bus hardware along Cumberland.
Sep. 30, 1970, Winnipeg Free Press
The remainder of the Cumberland extension had to wait until 1970. The delay allowed Metro additional time to expropriate the properties necessary to cut a swath through the northern edge of the West End residential neighbourhood that began developing in 1905. It appears that a total of nineteen properties and eighteen buildings had to be amassed.
In expropriation terms, this was a small project considering that entire square blocks were being demolished in neighbourhoods like Point Douglas for the Disraeli Freeway and Dufferin for the Jarvis slums clearance / Lord Selkirk Park public housing development.
Metro's tender for the mass demolition of the buildings in the spring of 1970 drew the attention of the People's Committee for a Better Neighbourhood. Based in a neighborhood further north, they convinced Metro to delay the demolition of houses to see if any could be moved and repurposed. In the end, the Sherwell Apartments at 728 Sherbrook was moved to Ross Avenue. (More about this at part two.)
October 15, 1970, Winnipeg Free Press
Work continued on the extension through the summer and there appear to have been no major setbacks or overruns to the $971,000 budget.
The final and most complicated part of the project was creating the three-way intersection at Notre Dame, Cumberland and Maryland. Work began on October 12 and was expected to take three weeks. Once completed, the Spence cutoff woule be removed.
The Cumberland Corridor went into service sometime in early November 1970 with little or no fanfare.
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