Canada Guide
Manitoba and Saskatchewan
The Exchange District
Just north of the Portage and Main intersection, the Exchange District National Historic Site is a rough rectangle of well-preserved old warehouses, former commodity exchanges and commercial buildings. Many of them were converted, from the late 1970s onwards, into art galleries, boutiques, antique shops and restaurants. The district is also one of the city's principal cultural centres, home to such buildings as the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature, the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre and the artist-run Artspace.
The effective centre of the Exchange District is the Old Market Square at King and Albert streets and Bannatyne Avenue with its weekend produce market, flea markets and buskers. This part of town was built during Winnipeg's boom, a period of frenzied real-estate speculation and construction that peaked in 1882, but lasted only until the outbreak of World War I. The standard architectural design, used for most of the office buildings and nearly all the warehouses, was simple and symmetrical, the plain brick walls topped off by decorative stone cornices. However, one or two companies financed extravagant variations, notably the Electric Railway Chambers Building at 213 Notre Dame Ave, an imaginative blend of Italian Renaissance and early twentieth-century motifs, its terracotta facade lined with some six thousand electric lights. Possibly the most gracious building in the Exchange District is the former Winnipeg Grain Exchange, opposite the Lombard Hotel on Lombard Avenue. It was built between 1906 and 1928 and was the largest building of its type in Canada; grain offices still occupy some of the floors. Other imposing buildings are the ten-storey Confederation Life Building, 457 Main St, which has a curved facade of white terracotta, and the massive Royal Bank Building at the corner of Main Street and William Avenue.