My latest column in the Free Press Community Review looks at Winnipeg's failed numbered street system of the 1890s.
Henry Ruttan, Winnipeg's first city engineer, was a former railway engineer and wanted to bring the same perfect order found in railway-planned towns to the city's haphazard street system.
The system was too far along to impose a grid system, but he did have blocks uniformly numbered and decreed that east/west streets be called 'avenues' and north/south ones be called ‘streets’.
Those changes stood the test of time, but his dream of replacing the city's street names with numbers lasted just a couple of years.
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