Light posts a triumph of utility over beauty

Winnipeg is a flat city built along two muddy rivers. We don’t have hills or valleys, a mountain backdrop or an oceanfront harbour. Ours is not a naturally beautiful city. Whatever beauty there is, we have had to work to create it.

Since the pandemic, downtown Winnipeg in particular has struggled to be a beautiful place. Broken glass on empty storefronts or graffiti on abandoned buildings, small issues have begun to snowball into bigger ones. In a city where beauty requires effort, even the smallest details matter.

This is why it has been disappointing to watch Manitoba Hydro remove the unique character streetlights that have come to define certain areas of downtown Winnipeg.

The beautiful, five-globe lights that have uniquely identified the Exchange District National Historic Site for the last 50 years have recently been replaced with the standard “character” light post found in every park and along every pathway in the city. The sense of place and cohesion created by a distinct collection of lights that lined the streets of the district for decades has been lost to the convenience of uniformity.

Crews have now moved on to the job of removing the beautiful historic lights along Portage Avenue and Main Street, replacing them with soulless galvanized metal streetlights akin to highway infrastructure. The tall, elegant lights being removed have contributed to the beauty of downtown Winnipeg’s streetscape since it was a bustling pioneer city on the western frontier. Designed by craftsmen more than a century ago, they include a secondary pair of lower lights to illuminate the pedestrian sidewalk, creating layers of light in the city. They are adorned with lace metalwork and ornate detail that connects to the human scale, with many incorporating decorative flowerpots to enhance the beauty of the street.

Unlike their characterless, engineered replacements, they were crafted with care and reverence, urban sculptures that communicate something timeless and meaningful.

The story they tell is of a place that took pride in itself, competing in lockstep with the greatest cities on the continent, a city that was a pioneer in many things, including streetlighting. In 1872, Robert Davis would set up a light in front of his Main Street hotel, making it the first recorded use of electric light in the country. A few years later, his city would become the first in Canada and among the first in North America to install electric streetlights, with four locations along Main Street and a gristmill near the Forks to supply them with electricity.

The historic lights along Portage Avenue and Main Street connect us to this legacy, standing as a repository of our city’s collective memory. First installed 115 years ago, the familiar lights stood until the early 1970s when in the name of engineering progress, just as today, they were replaced with standard issue streetlights.

About 20 years later, the original historic moulds were discovered and the mistake was rectified. The lights were recast and reinstalled, re-establishing historical continuity and reinjecting lost beauty into our cityscape.

Historic photos often show these elegant lights standing in front of dusty old frontier buildings. Their refined elegance looking starkly out of place, they were built with the optimism that a beautiful city would grow around them in time. This ideal stands in stark contrast to today where instead of investing in reconfiguring the old to achieve modern standards, our only aspirations are for uniformity and lower maintenance cost — a triumph of utility over beauty and efficiency over quality of place.

Valuing beauty in our pragmatic modern cities is often dismissed as superficial or indulgent; a philosophical concept borrowed from a simpler time. Beauty is not, however, a luxury to be added on as an afterthought. It is a fundamental human need essential to our well-being. Beautiful cities inspire us and create a sense of belonging. They nurture our spirit, cultivate emotional connection and social cohesion, and they bring joy to our daily lives. When the details of a city are built with an inherent preciousness, they create a city that is itself precious and worthy of care.

A beautiful city is a livable city. It’s a prosperous city. Early Winnipeggers understood that craft and beauty was a path to prosperity, creating a competitive city that attracted people and growth. A beautiful city is one that people can fall in love with, inspiring visitors to visit, investors to invest and young people to build their lives in a place that they love.

Beauty is not just esthetics; it’s the ability to hold meaning and connection to stories that create a collective sense of place.

The lights of Portage Avenue tell a story that belongs uniquely and exclusively to us. When they are lost, a piece of our collective story will fade. Their replacements will tell the story of a city that didn’t value itself enough to care about beauty and meaning.

Many people will read this and think they are just streetlights; they don’t really matter.

Their loss, however, speaks to a larger conversation about the value of beauty and quality of place that we demand for our city.

The citizens of early Winnipeg were thinking about the next generations when they lined their streets with elm trees, constructed powerful and timeless buildings and crafted beautiful lights for their main streets.

We are fortunate to have received this legacy from them.

We might ask ourselves; do we want to pass to our children a city that has been built on the priorities of soulless utility and placeless sterility or one that strives for beauty, spirit, and connection to past generations that allows them to build a prosperous future on those inherited foundations?

Brent Bellamy is creative director for Number Ten Architectural Group.