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Winnipeg - Ugliest City in Manitoba?  A rant by: Anonymous The other day I read somewhere that Winnipeg was the prettiest city in Canada. Having been to quite a few cities and towns, I thought about it. For about 3 seconds. Then laughed my butt off. The prettiest city in Canada? It doesn't rate as the prettiest city in Manitoba? There are more blights in this city than on a leper with measles. Yes, there are beautiful spots, but to get there you have to go through some of the ugliest, most poorly designed areas I've ever seen! First, what the hell is with all the back lanes? You want to make a place look like a slum? Give it a back lane! When I first moved here I thought maybe it was some old building tradition, but they're STILL BUILDING THEM!!! People, they look like something out of a ghetto! More often than not they're populated with an overflowing dumpster, with your falling apart couch, 2 kitchen chairs and an old console TV that may or may not still have the picture tube. I guarantee there isn't a house with a back lane in this city where the property value isn't at least 20% lower because of it. Second, the drive the airport and a 15 minute radius. It's got all the charm of Auschwitz, the road condition of a shelled street in Beirut and the commercial appeal of 1970s communist Poland. I've had to take many taxi rides from the airport to downtown and I hated everyone of them. Urban slum comes to mind. Third - and last only because I could otherwise go on for another hour, the North End. That is 10 emails in and of itself, so I'll focus on the inviting stretch of Main Street from Higgins to City Hall. Did I move? Did I move to the reserve? What started with some promise, that new Native Canadian building (Thunderbird? Thunderhouse?) at Higgins & Main has now become a magnet for every drunken native that can crawl there, and on a warm summer day believe me that can be quite a few. Talk about the proud Native! Every day on the bus I can see him laying on the grass in a stoned and/or drunken stupor, surrounded by abandoned buildings. Buildings which at one time thrived until swallowed up by poverty. Some beautiful buildings actually, or at least they had been. Prettiest city in Canada? Someone needs to get out of this city and see what real beauty is. Yes, every place has a right to have its slums, its poor area, its ugly architecture. But Winnipeg seems to abuse that right!!! << Back Add a Comment Comments ( Add a Comment ) Anonymous says: 2006-06-03 18:07:58 yea man, winnipeg is junk...... vancouver, now that's a pretty city.... no junk/trash or a spec of dust on the streets and all you see are bimmers and benzes. 30something says: 2006-06-04 19:44:25 I have to agree with you. Although I think Winnipeg has some very pretty areas, and lots of potential. The roads are bad, the litter is bad, and the drunken natives on Main are bad too. jammin says: 2006-06-05 13:14:47 I am sick of the racist venom being poured out on this site. There are posters here who's lives are apparently so miserable that the only way they can feel good about themselves is to put down someone else, and natives seem to be an easy target. In this case, we see complaining about the drunken natives of Main Street, but we don't hear any mention of the drunken white men, the drunken asians, etc that also populate this area. Yes one ethic group may outnumber another in the geographical area, but these posters seem to delight in making special mention of the native people. To these posters, you are to be pitied. As to the orginal rant, it lost any credibility when it degenerated into an attack on a people group as opposed to a city's architecture and layout. JetPilot says: 2006-06-05 16:46:07 Sometimes the truth hurts. But I do agree with you that there are other members of our society and not only the natives that cause these problems. But....the "natives" do cause at least the majority of the problems. So lets just spend trillions and trillions of dollars on education. Right? oh yeah, that is really going to work. scrumtrulescent says: 2006-06-05 17:50:49 Getting a bit off topic from the original rant, but nonetheless….JetPilot: it's true that native people are arrested more, but studies have shown that they are over-represented in our correctional facilities. Cops crack-down more in the neighbourhoods that have more natives, and as a result we have a disproportinately high rate of native offenders. This is especially true in Winnipeg where we have a large native population. If society labels people as trouble-makers, whether they be members of a certain ethnic group or of a certain social stutus, they will usually live up to that label. Unfortunately, I think far too many people have resorted to derogatoraly labeling a whole group of people rather than looking to see what the real problem is. I suggest reading the article "The Saint and the Roughnecks" to get perspective on the issue (http://cooley.libarts.wsu.edu/soc3611/Documents/The_Saints_and_the_Roughnecks.pdf). I know most people on this site seem to think we should just forget about the past and no do anyone any favours…but the fact of the matter is that we quite literally ‘royally’ screwed the First Nations when we hopped over to this side of the pond. And just ignoring that all this happened will not solve anything. If someone did the same to you (stole your land, inflicted disease on your nation, took your children away and forbade them to speak your langauge….), how quick would you be to forget? I can understand why a large percentage of First Nations people are reluctant to go along with a society that has never acted in their best interest. We’ve never expected anything more. THETRUTH says: 2007-01-14 01:21:56 Yeah i hate being downtown. It sucks and I avoid the s*** out of there. One time I was on the bus and this dude egts up off this seat and there was s*** on the bus seat and another dude almost sat in it stuckhere says: 2007-06-25 02:55:46 i agree leave the natives out of this they are just a reflection on the uglieness of the city if the city was pretty they would be pretty. or shipped of to brandon stuckhere says: 2007-06-25 03:05:40 but i always thought the lanes were cool the problem with winnipeg is it was built by people who made it into a prison its pointless to make the city pretty they just tear it down 20 years later how many houses in in this city are built to last more them 100 years limitng the hight of buildings and allowing churches to own the view is a good reason that money has not been put into this city |
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hahahaha! "Prettiest city in Canada"? Man that's priceless... Winnipeg isn't even the prettiest city in southern Manitoba!