More on Winnipeg's failed numbered street system of the 1890s

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.