New development for West Broadway, and farewell to Dr. M. Ellen Douglass House

 © 2026, Christian Cassidy

130 Sherbrook Street - now and future

Big changes are likely coming to West Broadway as one of its last intact blocks of houses could see a big, new development.

The proposed seven-storey, mixed-use building would combine four lots, currently numbered 124-136 Sherbrook Street, into a single lot known as 130 Sherbrook Street. Initially, the applicant’s plans called for 102 dwelling units (38 of them affordable housing units) and seven commercial spaces on the ground floor. They had to return to the city to request a variance to reduce the number of affordable housing units down to 18. 

1911 Henderson's Winnipeg Street Directory

The "pioneer" of these four houses was 136 Sherbrook, built in the late 1890s for real estate agent Coldwell  Graham. It was the only structure on the entire block for several years.

The other three houses were built around 1905. One of the first to be completed was that of Franklin W. Henry, a real estate developer. The 1911 directory, which would have been compiled in 1910, shows all of the houses built and two of the four, 126 and 136, housed physicians.

Douglass, foreground, with reservists in 1916. (Archives of Manitoba - Foote Collection)

One of those physicians was Dr. M. Ellen Douglass of 136 Sherbrook, who both lived and practiced from here. Her classified ads read: “Formerly of New York Infirmary for Women and Children, specialist — obstetrics, diseases of women and children.”

Douglass was a strong advocate for women's health and education for disadvantaged or handicapped children, and was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Women’s Canadian Club, the University Women’s Club and the St. John’s Ambulance Association. She hosted many organizing meetings and other events for these groups at the house.

During the First World War, Douglass raised the Winnipeg Women’s Volunteer Reserve, which eventually consisted of around 600 members. They learned to shoot, practice self-defence, and do first aid, and were willing to go to the front if called upon. (Several women used the training to sign up to work in hospitals and administrative roles, but the Reserve itself was never called on.)

Douglass died at this house in July 1950. The next day, the Free Press paid tribute to her in an editorial: “There are streets in this city, not rich streets, obscure, quiet streets where the name of Ellen Douglass is held in such affection that it reaches to something like worship. With Dr. Douglass there passes from the city a flavour, a comeliness, a grace which will not come again.”

For more about the indomitable Dr. Douglass, I wrote about her in detail here.

Google Street View

Sherbrook Street's low-density residential origins have always faced the pressures of also being a major traffic route.

A streetcar line ran down Sherbrook Street between Portage to Notre Dame starting in 1900, and was the only north-south service after Main Street. This made its major intersections, Portage, Ellice, Sargent, and Notre Dame, major commercial hubs that grew over the decades and spilled into houses along the street.

Sherbrook Street was the favoured location of a new civic pool in 1931. The hospitals at each end of it, Misericordia and Health Sciences Centre, ate up dozens of houses along the street through their various expansions.

September 23, 1955, Winnipeg Free Press

For the blocks of Sherbrook Street south of Broadway, the biggest changes came starting in the 1950s as the city struggled to keep up with the increasing amount of traffic heading to and from its new suburbs every day.

In a bid to eliminate traffic jams crossing the Maryland Bridge every day, the downtown one-way street system was extended to the neighbourhood in 1956. Sherbrook and Mayland were made one-ways in opposite directions. A new, dual-span Maryland Bridge opened in 1969 and 1970, with the northbound bridge using Sherbrook Street to funnel cars and buses into the city's core. 

This made this stretch of Sherbrook was now a major thoroughfare, and many houses were bulldozed to make way for commercial buildings. For many others, they became commercial properties, sometimes extending a commercial front to them that stretched to the sidewalk. (In fact, most of the houses on this block are commercial, not residential.)

This development pressure has continued in the 2020s, and four more buildings that provided a hint about Sherbrook Street's residential past will soon be gone.