No laser pyramid, but giant orbs and sky gardens: Why Winnipeg is floating wacky designs for Portage and Main

In 2014, 16 years after her departure from city hall, former mayor Susan Thompson floated some ideas for making Winnipeg a little more like Paris, Las Vegas or Dubai.

The Manitoba capital would be more exciting, she said, if there were hot tubs at Portage and Main, illuminated evergreens along Route 90 and a laser pyramid above the city, allowing Winnipeg to be visible from space.

"Why do people go to Paris? What does the Eiffel Tower do for you?" Thompson told a Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce audience during her 2014 speech. 

"It is a tool in which to attract people to come to the city to spend money and attract more population."

A semblance of this philosophy made its way this week into conceptual designs for a reimagined Portage and Main.

As part of a city effort to gauge what Winnipeggers want to see when the intersection is redeveloped, the city published a series of concepts for Portage and Main that range from "quite bold to a little more conventional," in the words of Curtis Kowalke, the city's principal planner.

The conventional ideas include a simple replacement of the crumbling concrete barricades that currently line the corners of Portage and Main with ordinary bollards, as well as plans to place new lights and trees around the edges of the intersection, which would remain closed to pedestrians.

The bold concepts are a lot more aspirational.

There's one with an oversized metal orb intended to signify what a monumental work of public art would look like at Portage and Main. That drawing inspired Twitter memes involving palantirs — the seeing stones the Dark Lord Sauron used to spy on the people of Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings.

There are other drawings featuring a quartet of lookout towers standing at each corner of Portage and Main, a circular "sky garden" hanging above the intersection, and a very expensive-looking conception of an above-ground pedestrian crossing to match the underground pedestrian circus.

It's important to note these are not actual options. The city simply wants to see what would fly with a portion of the public before a consulting firm figures out what can actually be designed and built within Winnipeg's budget.

"Obviously, we have a wide set of ideas that are currently being explored. Once that's narrowed down to comprehensive design recommendations, they will be costing that out and presenting it to council," Kowalke said outside city hall earlier this week.

A cynic might suggest the city trotted out the more flamboyant ideas for Portage and Main simply to make a simple repaving and beautification option more palatable.

The city has no choice but to remove the barricades, as they're connected to the underground infrastructure that must be ripped up and replaced. The cost for that was estimated in 2019 at $15 million to $20 million.