15-storey health-care tower with primary-care clinic, new Pan Am clinic slated for Portage Place

A 15-storey health-care tower with a primary-care clinic, an after-hours walk-in clinic and a satellite facility for the Pan Am Clinic are part of a roughly $550-million plan to redevelop downtown Winnipeg's Portage Place mall.

True North Real Estate Development — which has an option to purchase the mall, the parkade below it and rights to build two new high-rise towers above it — is planning a radical makeover for the 36-year-old megaproject that would transform it into a downtown community campus.

"We can drill down to the kinds of programming we think makes sense for this city and for Portage Place, which never will be a retail mall again in its life. It can not be. It's outlived that purpose," True North Real Estate Development president Jim Ludlow said Thursday in a presentation where he outlined his firm's plans for the mall.

Those plans involve adding 12 storeys to the east side of the mall to create a new health-care tower, replacing the glass-enclosed atrium at Edmonton Street with a new open-air connection to Central Park and adding 13 storeys to the west side of the mall to create a 16-storey residential building.

The middle of the mall will be converted into community centres and offices for community organizations, with a nominal amount of retail space and some food services, according to the plans.

A full-service grocery store would occupy 19,000 square feet on the main floor of the residential tower, according to the plans. The YMCA, which has renovation plans of its own, would remain in place at the northwest corner of the project.

Prairie Theatre Exchange would also continue to occupy its existing third-floor space in the centre of the mall, but may end up with a main-floor entrance as well, Ludlow said.

True North also has plans to carve out two circular spaces alongside Portage Avenue to eliminate the monolithic look of the existing Portage Place edifice.

"From an architectural point of view, it's a massive building, so what we wanted to do was break down the scale, create outdoor environments and relationships for people, outside as well as inside," said Scott Stirton, president and CEO of Winnipeg's Arhcitecture49, which is working on the Portage Place plans for True North.

Those plans also include revitalizing The Promenade on the north side of the mall into something closer to its intended initial use as a pedestrian-friendly walkway and replacing portions of the third floor the mall with gardens.

Ludlow and Stirton said the goal is to reuse as much of the original mall as possible instead of flattening the structure and building new, the way the City of Hamilton did when it decided to demolish its own struggling downtown mall.

"This isn't a wholesale redo. We want to keep as much of the existing building," Stirton said. "Probably the most sustainable thing to do is renewal and this project is considering it at large."

Ludlow said while he has encountered some skepticism about the scale of the proposed Portage Place makeover, allowing more than a million square feet of retail space to sit empty along a main thoroughfare in downtown Winnipeg was not an option.

The mall's current owner, Vancouver's Peterson Group, conceded it could no longer make the investments required to revitalize the building, Ludlow said.