Ringleaders for 99 years

Through much of the 20th century, Euclid Avenue has operated as something of a minor neighborhood main street. As many as 20 small businesses operated on Euclid at mid-century, with a number of others on other nearby streets. This concentration of local commerce began to fade in the 1950s as neighborhood de-population and automobile ownership and use began to rise, most dramatically between 1965 and '75, when the number of stores on Euclid shrank from 13 to six, and between '85 and '95, when it went from five to one. That one remaining store, Metro Meats at 121 Euclid Avenue at the corner of Grove St., has its beginnings in 1911--a year when streetcar tracks ran down a Euclid Avenue paved in gravel and lined with wood plank sidewalks. It began business before the Fort Garry Hotel was built on Broadway, World War I broke out, before Al Jolson exploded onto the American music charts, and before the General Strike brutally riveted the suddenly no longer young city of Winnipeg.

Simon Matas was born in 1881 and came to Canada around 1905. In 1907, he worked as a butcher at Sam Denaburg's Grocery and Butcher shop, in a building at 80 Euclid at the corner of Argyle St. Simon, along with Denaburg's family, lived upstairs. In 1908 or '09, Simon and his brother Matthew operated a grocery and butcher store in the space at 80 Euclid, and in 1911 the brothers constructed an addition to a large house at 121 Euclid Avenue (built in the 1890s), and relocated their business there.

121 Euclid Avenue, 1905, showing the house prior to the Matas brothers' commercial addition

121 Euclid Ave. circa 1955

The Henderson Directory for 1916 notes that the Matas' operated a grocery store and pool room at 121 Euclid, as well as rented space to a barber named Skovoda--something hard to imagine for any shopper that has navigated the small space in the present store. By 1925, the business was purely meat and groceries. Matthew Matas would eventually leave Winnipeg, but Simon would own and operate the business for more than 40 years. During that time, Simon and his wife Annie raised six children in the house: John, Harry, Roy, Max, Edna and Mary. Harry who became a physician, and Roy would be called to the bar in 1946, and would later serve as a judge.

By 1956, Annie Matas had passed away, and Simon retired from the store. Simon moved in with Harry and his family (which included a son named David, who was studying law at the U of M) at 560 Waterloo St. in River Heights. Simon's son Max operated a wholesale meat warehouse in St. Boniface. In 1968, Simon was living in the Sharon Home at 146 Magnus Ave., not far from the street where he first lived and went into business more than 60 years earlier. By 1975, he had passed away.

The Hon. Roy Matas (centre) with his wife Ruth (far right), and Israel and Barbara Asper, 1973, the year Roy was appointed to the Court of Appeal

After the Matas' sold the business at 121 Euclid, it was operated under the name Euclid Meat Market, and in 1961, the name was changed to Metro Meats, under the proprietorship of William Stolar, who lived with his wife Johanna and their son Edgar at 121 until the early 1980s, when Metro Meats was purchased by its current owner, Janina Sklczypiec.

Metro Meats, as it looked in 1978. Credit

In 2010, after 99 years as the site of a grocery and butcher store, and only owned by three different families over that period, Metro Meats serves the neighborhood as a grocery store, and the wider region as one of the city's underrated old country butcher shop. Visiting the small store, one will often wait in line behind both an elderly suburbanite buying rings of genuine Winnipeg-style kulbassa to be packaged and sent to their children in Vancouver or the U.S., and young neighborhood kids buying five cent candies. Long may the "ringleaders of Kulbassa" continue to operate this important neighborhood institution at 121 Euclid.