Quiet end to Bay store’s long decline

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/10/2020 (1548 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s 10 minutes past noon, and the downtown Bay has just opened for the day, though that fact isn’t immediately evident inside the store.

The aisles are silent, the air static. On the ground floor, a guest meanders through warrens of sale racks and discounted dresses, socially distanced to the point of being utterly alone.

At a cash register around the corner, a worker rings through a couple of hurried customers.

Employees have already been told the iconic Portage Avenue store will be closing in February; if they are grieving. they give no outward sign. There are no tears glistening above face masks, no eyes stricken by shock or confusion.

The news can’t have come as a surprise to them. It didn’t come as a surprise to anyone who heard it, when the Free Press broke the news Friday afternoon. The writing has been on these handsome old walls for a long time, every decade adding a new stanza, a new bittersweet poetry of ways the retail hub was in terminal decline.

It’s sad, yes. It has been sad for ages.

The store was a place of ghosts long before it was further emptied by the COVID-19 pandemic — a place where one could squint and almost see the phantasmic forms of the women who used to fill it, resplendent in fur coats and neatly sewn dresses, elbows laden with bags of holiday shopping.

The building still clings to memories of that era, when it was where all of Winnipeg came to shop, to dine or to dream.

It sits wrapped in the remains of its finery, like the last living member of some deposed aristocracy: the tile mosaics in the bathrooms, the brass fixtures, the stately Tyndall stone facade quarried in Manitoba.

It was a glory once, to a growing Prairie city. On the day it opened, in the winter of 1926, tens of thousands of people crowded into its staggering 650,000 square feet of space, attended by more than 2,000 employees, marvelling at all that was for sale. A testament to the wealth being amassed in this colonized land, and all the nice things it could buy.

On the day it confirmed its impending closure, only a handful of workers were standing by, tending a couple of floors still packed with merchandise but largely empty of people. This is how it ends: not with a bang, but with a sigh so faint, it can barely even be considered a whimper.

There is no way around this. The building was not meant for the realities of modern retail business. Its foundation was dug with horse-drawn tools; it closes at a time when you can order items from the other side of the continent, guaranteed a next-day arrival. It is an impossible building. Too big, too costly, too proud.

Yet, it is sad to see it go, in the way so many old things are sad when they leave. There are a multitude of memories tied up in the downtown Bay store: of shopping trips with parents (back when such a thing was still exciting), of meals at the Paddlewheel and holiday events in aisles decked with decorations.

It was a living place, when we lived it.

So when the news broke, Winnipeggers near and far were saddened, if not surprised. On Twitter, they shared the memories of the place they held in their youth, or ones told to them by their parents. Above all, most agreed, they hoped there would be some way to save the building, to make it beautiful again without all the sad.

It’s not clear now what that could look like. The building was granted heritage status in 2019, so it cannot be demolished, and certain of its historic features must stay. However, finding another use will be a daunting effort. Consider that it has already been a subject of open discussion for years, without much success.

For awhile, at least, it seemed okay to leave that question unanswered. The first few floors were still occupied by the Bay, so it was, despite its visible decline, a utilized space. Come February, that won’t be the case anymore.

So how long will it sit empty before a developer is found who is willing to take on its size and costs?

If one says “a few years,” that seems an optimistic guess. This chapter won’t find its ending for quite awhile.

Yet, we have to go through this part, to get to the next.

It is a beautiful building. It still belongs to the city’s heart. The years have not been kind to the business that built it and filled it with life, but that ship has sailed and will not return.

There may be another life to come fill it, but to get there will take a little luck, and a whole lot of work.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca