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Nicer weather coupled with physical distancing means how you spend time outside could look a little different. If you’re looking for some...

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With expanded restrictions starting today, let’s

With expanded restrictions starting today, let’s go back in time.

While Winnipeg might not have specific “gaybourhoods” like other cities do, we have places of significance and West Broadway is one of them!

In 1982, Giovanni’s Room (you might know it as Gio’s) opened on the second floor of 275 Sherbrook Street. Happenings Social Club moved next door to 272 Sherbrook. The building was called Sum Quod Sum (I Am What I Am).

These spaces were the beginnings of the Winnipeg Gay Centre, which would become the Winnipeg Gay and Lesbian Resource Centre, which would become @rainbowresourcecentre!

Gio’s moved to 616 Broadway in 1986 (where @artcityinc is!), eventually ending up downtown, where it closed in 2013. Club Happenings (which was now on the second floor of 272), closed in the early 2000’s.

272 Sherbrook (which is now 270 Sherbrook, not sure how that happened) has been a few different things over the more recent years (275 is a parking lot), including Creative Retirement, but the building is currently for sale.

📸 and information came from the U of M Manitoba Gay and Lesbian Archives.

Folks sleeping rough and having to use back lanes

Folks sleeping rough and having to use back lanes as toilets has become commonplace, and that’s not okay. It’s getting colder, there’s a pandemic, and we’re worried. Some members of the West Broadway business community got together and wrote a letter to our elected officials to add our voices to the choir that has been calling for meaningful policy change/creation around poverty, housing, and drug use.

This photo is like when you’ve been friends with

This photo is like when you’ve been friends with two fun and cool people from the start but they don’t know each other and you think they should, and when they finally meet and hangout they realize how awesome they both are and they do really cool things together.

Both @walltowallwpg and @pegcitycarcoop launched in West Broadway (this is the first mural that went up!), and it’s been so wonderful to see them each flourish and, more recently, collaborate.

Here’s to creative ideas and supporting the folks who make them happen.
📸: @travis_ross
#westbroadwaybeautiful
#walltowallwpg

Rounding out this year’s newbies: THINGS MY DAD

Rounding out this year’s newbies:

THINGS MY DAD TAUGHT ME
JACKIE DIVES
VANCOUVER, BC

Location: Subway, 100 Sherbrook St (south-facing wall)

In late 2017, my dad died from an accidental drug overdose. For over 20 years he had been living in the same one-bedroom apartment, but after getting evicted he ended up in an single room occupancy and died less than three months later. After his death I visited places around Vancouver that reminded me of him. I got on my bicycle and rode to building the housing co-op where I lived when I was a kid, and to the swimming pool we used to go to. I went to his old apartment and the parking garage there, which was the last place I saw him alive. Along the way I would stop to take photographs of things that resonated with me as I reflected on our relationship, my childhood, and all the things he taught me. Walking slowly through the neighbourhoods I grew up in, I found myself compelled to capture things that look overgrown, neglected, forgotten. But I saw freedom in these things, too - a lack of inhibition that my dad embodied throughout his life.
Because of his substance abuse, our relationship was complex and thus created polarizing memories that can instantly bring a smile to my face or overwhelm me with deep sadness. Losing him to a drug overdose makes me feel like my happy memories are in jeopardy and I have to protect them somehow. Because his death is entrenched in stigma that perpetuates the idea that someone who uses drugs is less worthy of life, and therefore less worthy of remembering, I have to stand up for him and explain that he was more than his drug use. I have to justify his goodness and continually go out on a controversial limb for a drug user, instead of simply mourning the loss of my father. Taking these photographs has been a way for me to reconnect with him and remember him in his complexity instead of just his faults. My dad was unique. A cat-lover, a mechanic, a carpenter, a goof, a friend, a caretaker, an alcoholic, and also a drug user.
📸: @travis_ross
#westbroadwaybeautiful
#walltowallwpg
#walltowallmb

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