The rise and fall of the Royal Alexandra Hotel, in pictures

All images are from Peel's Prairie Provinces, the Winnipeg Tribune, the Provincial Archives of Manitoba, and the Winnipeg Building Index. Newspaper quotations from Manitobia.

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A NEW MAMMOTH RAILWAY HOTEL

The Canadian Pacific Railway Will Build a Hostelery Commensuraate With the Import of the Road and the Dignity of Winnipeg

Mr. Whyte, in answer to inquiries, said the hotel would be of modern design and of suitable size, handsomely and comfortably finished, and fitted with every convenience." - Winnipeg Telegram, May 26, 1899

Looking west from the platform of the C.P.R. station (centre background), circa 1899. Point Douglas Avenue is on the right, and several of the hotels and "Hebrew shops" that the Royal Alexandra Hotel replaced, are in the left background. (WT)

The Main Street subway, showing the C.P.R. station on the right. The old station was demolished in 1905 in preparation for the Royal Alex. (Peel)

"The hotel that many Winnipeggers had imagined would stand just east of that much talked subway, is, therefore, still a thing of the dim and distant future as is also the new stations plans for which have been patiently watched for by the Winnipeg public." - Winnipeg Telegram, May 8, 1902

Conceptual drawing of the new Canadian Pacific station and hotel, c. 1905. (Peel)

The Royal Alex under construction, beginning to dwarf the small hotels across Main St. (Peel)

"The matter of the building of... hotel by the C.P.R. has engaged the attention of the people of Winnipeg for some years. Proposal after proposal has been considered, only to be rejected on some ground or other. In fact, the building of the proposed station and hotel has been for several seasons a standard joke with all the minstrel shows and comedians appearing on the stage in this city."
- Winnipeg Telegram, September 2, 1903

Construction site seen from the north, at the southwest corner of Main and Sutherland Avenue. (Peel)

The Main Street subway after completion of the hotel. (Peel)

The Royal Alex from Higgins Avenue, with the C.P. station on the right, c.1915. (Peel)

Looking from the north. (Peel)

An artist's rendition of the Royal Alex, based on a photograph, c. 1915. (Peel)

From Higgins Avenue, c.1930 (Peel)

The hotel's kitchen, c. 1940. (Peel)

The hotel from Main Street, c. 1950. (Peel)

Princess Elizabeth arrives at the hotel's Higgins Avenue entrance, 1951. (Peel)

A close-up view of northeast corner, c. 1962. (WBI)

The great hotel looms above an alleyway between Henry and Higgins Avenue, c. 1962. (WBI)

Entering the Higgins Avenue vestibule, c.1965. (PAM)


"Winnipeg bustled and bubbled with gaiety New Year's Eve as thousands cast aside their cares and welcomed 1944 with a whistle and a shout. At the Royal Alexandra hotel, 2,500 dancers attended the Puffin Ski club's dance, two other ballrooms were jammed and 400 attended the supper dance." - Winnipeg Tribune, January 1, 1944

Mr. and Mrs. R. J. Linton, leaving the hotel on its last day of operation, December 30, 1967. (WT)

"The Royal Alexandra Hotel, a landmark in north Winnipeg, will close its doors Dec. 31 after 61 years of service." - Winnipeg Tribune, December, 1967

The empty hotel, seen from Main Street, circa 1970. (WBI)

A security guard makes his rounds, c. 1971. (WT)

"Some furniture from public rooms and suites has already been removed for use in other CP hotels; the remainder will be offered for sale to the public by Atlas Wrecking." - Winnipeg Tribune, March 18, 1971

Deconstruction site, demolition crews at work, October, 1971. (WT)

"Construction on the new Canadian Pacific hotel, so well named "The Royal Alexandra," is now far advanced. Anyone who can elude the vigilance of the guards and get a glance at the interior will see that Winnipeg is going to have a magnificant hotel which will, indeed be an ornament to the city...

The site of the Royal Alex, as it looks today, minus the landscaping and lack of litter and intoxicated persons, c.1975. (WT)

"...A section of the city which is rapidly improving and is fast losing its old character is the north end of Main street between the city hall and the C.P.R." - Telegram, April 28, 1906

Robert Macdonald

Robert Macdonald (1829-1913)

Neil Macdonald was born in 1794, on the island of Islay off the west coast of Scotland. In 1813, he arrived at Red River in the employment of the Hudson's Bay Company, two years before Fort Douglas was built on the south banks of Point Douglas, and three before Governor Semple and twenty men from the Selkirk settlement were killed at Seven Oaks.

After several years with the Company, the young Neil Macdonald moved back to Scotland, and later, in 1825, sailed aboard an expedition to the Canadian Arctic led by the fated Sir John Franklin. Two years later, he returned to Red River and lived there until his death in 1871. At Red River, he married Ann Logan, a daughter of Robert Logan and Mary Sauteuse (?-1838), a Saulteaux Indian. The Macdonald's farmed twenty acres on Point Douglas, a short distance to the northeast of Robert Logan's farm house and mill that stood on the site of Fort Douglas.

Robert Logan (1773 - 1866), grandfather of Robert Macdonald and early Point Douglas settler. Credit

Robert Logan was by 1827 a respected member of Red River society, having been the interim governor of the Selkirk settlement in the 1810s, and in '25 had purchased from the Lord Selkirk estate Fort Douglas, its buildings and wind mill, where he established his homestead. (The wooden fort was destroyed in the great flood of 1826, but the windmill was repaired and used successfully by Logan until the early 1860s.) The son of Robert Logan sr., a Jamaican plantation owner, and Anne Stitcher, a "free mulato," Robert was was of mixed ancestry, and was fluent in both French and English.

Advertisement in The Nor'wester for assorted bolts and screws from Robert Logan's old mill. Credit

The eldest son of Neil and Ann was Robert Macdonald, born in 1829. He was educated at St. John's Parish School, which was where St. John's Park is today, and worked on the family farm on Point Douglas. He later completed his studies in divinity at St. John's Collegiate under The Bishop Anderson.

Robert Macdonald moved to the north from Red River to be a missionary for the Anglican Church, first to communities on the Winnipeg River, then far into the northwest, along what is now the Alaska-Northwest Territory border, among the Gwitch'in people. He would remain there for more than forty years.

He was considered one of the more effective Anglican missionaries in the Canadian North, owing to his genuine respect of the Aboriginal people he worked and lived with, and his long-serving tenure. He created a written alphabet for the Gwitch'in language, and translating the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and many hymns. Macdonald also researched Gwitch'in spiritual concepts, to make Anglican Christianity more easy to conceptualize for the Gwitch'in people. Unlike most other Christian missions in the north, the Gwitch'in people that Macdonald lived among were able to conduct their own services in their languages. As a result of Macdonald's work, there has historically been a higher than average level of literacy among the Gwich'in people, and the modern written language of the Gwitch'ins, called Tukudh, or Takudh, is still based on the translating work Macdonald did in the 19th century.

While in the Northwest, Macdonald married a Gwitch'in woman named Julia Kutug, and together they had nine children.

In spite of Macdonald's many years of work for the Church, Macdonald lived in relative poverty and hardship, even into his old age. Considered a "native" minister, Macdonald, like most aboriginal ministers, was paid between a third to half what a British Anglican minister would earn, and was not paid directly, but through credit to the accounts of English ministers. This existed in spite of the petitions of The Bishop of Rupertland, Robert Machray, to reform this unfair system. Even after rising to the position of Archdeacon, Macdonald continued to be paid the same salary, and throughout his life in the north, his family needed to supplement their income with subsistence hunting.

In the winter of 1900, the 69 year-old Macdonald noted in his journal that his wife Julia went on a rabbit-snaring trip, "but to no purpose I fear... Opened a bag of flour, another besides remaining. Our stock of provisions runs low. Only two meals a day." Trading with the Gwitch'ins to survive raised the ire of the H.B.Co., eager to protect their monopoly on trade in the north.

Advertisement in The Nor'wester listing the Macdonald farm on Point Douglas. It is likely that W.G. Fonseca, who built his estate in the vicinity in the early 1860s, purchased the farm

Fire Insurance Map from 1905 showing 57 Macdonald, the residence of Robert Macdonald from 1904 until his death in 1913

Robert retired from his work in the north in 1904, and with Julia and their children, moved to Winnipeg. They resided at 57 Macdonald Avenue, on what was the Macdonald farm he grew up on in the 1830s and '40s, and now was at the centre of a rapidly-growing city. Three of the Macdonald children died in those first years in Winnipeg, and Robert himself died in 1913.

The house in which Macdonald lived his last days, on the street that bears his family name, is buried under the Disraeli freeway.

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The article Archdeacon Robert McDonald and Gwich'in Literacy, by Patrick Moore (published in Anthropological Linguistics (2007, vol. 49, no1, pp. 27-53) provided much of the information for this post

The Juke Box Murder

The elder statesman of Winnipeg journalism is a North End boy named Val Werier, who continues to write very occasional opinion columns for the Free Press. Werier has written columns on city affairs for some 45 years, first in the Tribune, then the FP), a tireless, often lone voice against the rising misanthropic destruction of the city's natural and built environment. Like Lewis Mumford, Werier wrote that cities exist first as a place for people, not cars or the egos of planners. Decades before Bar Italia, Werier advocated for sidewalk cafes as a way to add some life to Winnipeg streets.

But Werier's career in journalism goes back further: an incredible 72 years, to 1938, when Val Werier first began submitting news items to the Tribune. He worked as a reporter for the paper until 1942, when he served with the R.C.A.F. for the remainder of the war in Europe. A testament to his love for the city's public realm, Werier made a name for himself early on by being out and about and happening to come across the news in progress.

Val Werier on the job, c.1945. Credit

One such story was the Juke Box Murder that occurred in the summer of 1941, a story that Werier got wind of while walking down the street from the city's police station on Rupert Avenue East just as the police van pulled up with the two murder suspects. The scoop was his, and the Tribune gave him the front page and the byline (a rare honor for reporters in those days).

The body is carried out of the Row Bow Coney Island, 196 Smith St. Credit

The murder of a railway porter named Victor H. Bolden, Werier crafted into a gritty, low-class film noir. "While the crazy ragtime tunes pounded out of a juke box in a Smith st. snack shop Tuesday evening," Werier's lead began, "Victor H. Bolden, a colored railway porter, was stabbed to death through the chest with a knife as he was eating a steak."

The shop, the Rain-Bow Coney Island, was a small enterprise a couple doors south of St. Mary Avenue, owned by Fred Ball. Bolden, who worked for the CNR and lived a few blocks away on Main near Graham Avenue, was 48.

Victor H. Bolden: stabbed in the heart with a steak knife. Credit

Bolden's death occurred around 7:30 p.m. Bolden came in to the restaurant a half hour before with a male and female companion who he had been drinking with earlier that evening.

According to Mrs. Ball, wife of the shop's proprietor who saw it happen, "Bolden ordered a steak. The woman with him in the booth asked the Negro for a part of his steak. Then she called to Mrs. ball: 'Bring me a steak knife, will you please.'" She didn't, so the young woman came in an grabbed one herself. One waitress told police that if there was an argument, she could not hear it over the jukebox playing. She called the police, having to reach over the body of Victor Bolden, to the shop's telephone located in the booth where the man's body sat slumped over. Shaking she dropped four nickels before successfully entering one in the phone and reaching the police.

Bolden's companions, who fled the Rain Bow immediately after the murder, were Roger Lepine and Alice Dufault. Both were apprehended that night, and appeared in police court the next morning. Dufault was found in her room at 213 Donald; Lepine, between two houses near the Rain Bow.

The testimony of Mrs. Ball and a waitress named Mary McKay led to the murder charge being dropped against Lepine, while "Big Alice" Dufault (AKA: Alice Dillen, Alice Ducharme) was sentenced to ten years in prison for manslaughter.

"Big Alice" Dufault: Bolden's killer. Credit

In 1946, the Rain Bow operated as Hudson's Cafe. In 1951, the year Dufault was scheduled to be released from prison, it was called the New Bowes. The original South End, the neighborhood south of Portage Avenue was built up in the 1880s and '90s as a more fashionable residential alternative to Point Douglas and central Winnipeg. But it was clear that by the mid-20th century, the district, particularly north of Broadway, had fallen quite out of vogue. Mostly a dense residential neighborhood, with a number of small businesses like the Rain Bow, in the postwar years this character was almost entirely obliterated as roads were widened, and new developments such as residential high-rises, the Canada Post headquarters, Convention Centre, and the Centennial Library were built, and surface parking lots abounded.

The back of 196 Smith Street in its last days, circa 1966, surveying the neighborhood's destiny of parking lots and mega-scaled development. Credit

In 1970, the block where poor Victor H. Bolden met his end in the Rain Bow Coney Island, became the site of the Place Louis Riel, a highrise hotel. A small grocery store operates in the hotel's ground floor on the corner of Smith and St. Mary Avenue today.

Moses and Manly Finkelstein

Moses Finkelstein c.1906. Credit

When he was a boy, Moses Finkelstein arrived in Winnipeg of 1882 with his family. Moses went into business, and at 32, became the city's first Jewish aldermen. In 1911, Moses lived at number 111 Henry Avenue, in the Fonseca Terrace built by early Point Douglas investor, William G. Fonseca. Residing there were his wife Sarah's parents, Isaac and Dora Rosen, and Moses and Sarah's five children: Edyth, Manly, Kenneth, Noel, and Pearl. As well, a 65-year old domestic, Mary Prutzecha, lived with the family.

Fonseca Terrace. The Finkelstein's lived at number 111, the door on right

Moses' son Manly Finkelstein was born in 1898, and became a physician and Captain of the Canadian Medical Corps during World War II. He married Freda Rosner, a sister of Saidye Rosner, who married a man named Samuel Bronfman, who managed the Bell Hotel.

In 1949, Manly died while in Montreal for the wedding of his niece, Saidye and Samuel's daughter Phyllis, who was marrying the French Baron Jean Lambert. Though the marriage would last only four years, Phyllis kept the name Lambert, and become a leading figure in Canadian architecture and heritage preservation. In the 1950s she was involved in building a landmark of Modern Architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, located in Midtown Manhattan.

Phyllis Lambert, niece of Manly and Freda Finkelstein, c.1960s

The Seagram Building, Park Ave., Manhattan

The sky-scraper

In the summer of 1907, the excitement surrounding the growth of the city of Winnipeg was heightened by news that local developer A.M. Fraser would construct a 14-storey office building on the east side of Main Street, between McDermot and Bannatyne. Designed by a 37 year-old Chicago-schooler, John D. Atchison, the new building would exceed the Union Bank tower by about 50 feet. It would be the "largest and finest" building in the city, and "in fact one of the very finest on the continent."

Architectural rendering of a new office tower to be built on the east side of Main St. between McDermot and Bannatyne. Credit

Little is known about A.M. Fraser, except that in 1906 he had built a five-story office building at the northeast corner of Logan and Main, originally called the Concordia, and later the Bon-Accord Block. A substantial structure relative to the older, smaller buildings around it, the Bon-Accord, along with the Royal Alexandra Hotel two blocks north, represented what many citizens hoped would be a physical improvement on north Main. Like other office buildings in the neighborhood, the Bon-Accord struggled to find office tenants in the '10s and '20s, and converted some units to residential. A fire in 1945 led the owners to dismantle all but the ground floor. Today, this remaining portion of the Bon-Accord is the home of a popular and long-time Main Street enterprise, Mitchell's Fabrics.

The Concordia/Bon-Accord Block, nearing completion in 1906. Credit

East side of Main St., c.1918, showing the Bon-Accord Block on the right

Fraser seems to have owned land behind the Bon-Accord on Logan Avenue in preparation for his building, since in January of '06, the Telegram reported that he had donated this "valuable site," which measured 50' x 99' to the Men's Own of Winnipeg, a social agency aimed at the care and conversion of impoverished men of the city, of which Fraser was a board member. On this site the Men's Own would construct a five-story mission in 1908. The mission was demolished in the early 1990s.

When Fraser approached the City of Winnipeg about constructing a 14-storey office further south on Main, the City's Board of Control opposed the construction, saying that it was too tall--in spite of the building's approval by the City's Water, Fire and Light Committee. A testament to the high property values on that portion of Main at the time, Fraser told the Telegram that "it would not pay him to erect a smaller building."

A Winnipeg by-law created mandated that any building exceeding 120' would need to be approved by the City. Since Fraser's planned building surpassed this height by about 80, he went to City Hall for approval.

The development was "heartily endorsed" by the Winnipeg Real Estate Exchange, who also opposed the height restriction by-law in general, "provided that proper fire extinguishing apparatus and water service is installed throughout the buildings."

Mayor J.H. Ashdown, who had since 1868 watched the city go from a few small wood building dotting Main, seemed to feel that the business district should grow upward no further: "My own opinion has been that the Merchants [sic] bank is the utmost height that should be allowed," he said. "There is plenty of land and no occasion for such high buildings." The Merchant's Bank that Ashdown referred to, at the corner of Main and Lombard, was only 110' tall.

View of Main Street, c.1913, showing where A.M. Fraser's proposed building would have been built, and how tall it would have been relative to surrounding buidlings. Credit

The Winnipeg Telegram printed an editorial in favor of the new building, and skyscrapers in general, suggesting that the the Board of Control was senselessly meddling in the path of the city's progress:

"Cities of consequence on this continent have buildings in their business centres that are termed in the humorously descriptive phraseology of the people, "sky-scrapers."

[...]

"The Board of Control of Winnipeg in reporting against the granting of a permit for a sky-scraper is flying against the spirit of the business world of modern cities, which rightly or wrongly have a tendency to concentration. It is opposed to an enterprise which is an inspiration of the economic idea of the age.

[...]

"In an intelligent community the solution of the question of the height of a building might generally be left to the people who building them, and the people who will seek to occupy them.

"It is unreasonable to believe that a capitalist, who will erect an expensive building of a class that is loosely accused of being insanitary, dangerous and with social disadvantages repugnant to the popular taste, does not know the reasonableness of his investment.

"The stream does not rise higher than its source, and a sky-scraper will not rise one storey higher than the tastes, desires and demands of the people of an intelligent and progressive city."

A permit was eventually issued to Fraser, and in mid-July, the Telegram reported that the work was set to begin in two weeks.

Canadian Wheat Pool Building, now the Canadian Wheat Board headquarters, built in 1928. Credit

In the end, for reasons unknown at this time, Fraser never did construct the building, and the old frame buildings on the site stood for some years more, until they were torn down and in 1928 replaced by the Wheat Pool built, an eight-storey Deco-inspired edifice. By then, economic conditions on Main Street had changed considerably: the Wheat Pool was one of the few new tall office buildings constructed in Winnipeg between 1917 and 1965. Had Fraser's skyscraper been built, it would have been Winnipeg's tallest downtown office building from its completion until the Royal Bank building was built at the corner of Portage and Fort St in the mid-'60s.

Norquay Park, 1924

Norquay Park shown on a 1964 map of Winnipeg. Credit

"but the every-day park is the small community park where the mother can send the smaller children in care of the older ones while the morning work is being attended to and in the afternoon she may join them and find real comfort and pleasure doing some useful work in a shady abor and watching the children play. This is what St. John's, Norquay, St. James [Vimy Ridge], Crescentwood and all our community parks mean to the children who cannot perhaps get to Assiniboine or Kildonan parks more than once a month and perhaps not more than once a season."

"Who has visited Weston, King Edward, Elmwood or Norquay parks on a real hot day in summer and watched the children in the wading pool but has wished that the hand of time might be turned backward that they themselves might play and splash in the water and give expression to innocent and carefree laughter such as only children can indulge in."


Text and images from A Souvenir of Winnipeg's Jubilee, 1874-1924, published by the Civic Social and Athletic Association, 1924

The Bungalow

As a new city began to grow at The Forks in the 1870s, many houses were built and converted to boarding houses for the many young men arriving from the east. One of these houses stood on the banks of the Red River at the foot of George Street. For more than a decade, the house, known as The Bungalow in the papers and the Henderson Directories, was home to a string of bachelors; mostly Anglican, Conservative newly arrived Ontario or British-born. A number of these occupants of The Bungalow would became notable figures in the city business, and it was from this house that two house-mates, cousins George and John Galt, founded the Winnipeg Rowing Club in 1881.

Fire insurance map from 1905, showing The Bungalow facing away from George Avenue, and toward the Red River

The Bungalow was built in the summer of 1875 by a 23 year-old Englishman named Arthur Eden. Arriving in Winnipeg, Eden went into the wholesale business with an early house-mate of The Bungalow, Frederick Stobart.

The Bungalow was situated on the north side of Logan's Creek, which ran from the Red River northwesterly to the Fonseca Estate. On the opposite side of the creek was the Logan house, a venerable estate in terms of the Red River settlement, the Logans had been there since 1825, when Robert Logan purchased the site of Fort Douglas from the estate of Lord Selkirk. In 1817, Chief Peguis buried the dead Selkirk Settlers after the Battle of Seven Oaks. According to some early accounts, they were buried on the banks of the creek opposite Fort Douglas, making it near the spot where Eden built his Bungalow.

Winnipeg east of Main, 1874. The Bungalow was built on the south side of George and northeast of the creek. Credit

In July, while the house was being constructed, workers digging a drain along George Avenue uncovered "a large collection of old weapons and human bones," the Nor'wester saying that they were believed to belong to "some of Governor Simple's [sic] party... killed early in this century." Remarkably, this discovery possibly related to a major event in the early settlement did not seem to attract more attention.

News item in the Nor'wester, July 19, 1875. Credit

Arthur Eden, the young bachelor who built the house in 1875, remained a resident there until 1882, when he married and moved to a house he built that year on Armstrong's Point (the house, 147 Eastgate, is still standing today). Eden and his wife moved to England in 1894.

Caricature of George Galt, 1907. Credit

In 1881, two new house-mates of The Bungalow, George and John Galt, built a rowing boat and began taking it out on the Red River. Two years later, they formally incorporated the Winnipeg Rowing Club, today one of the oldest sporting organizations in Western Canada. After incorporation in '83, The boat and club houses were built at The Forks, but the residents of The Bungalow maintained a rowing crew, competing against crews from the Hudson's Bay Co., the Monastery, Bank of Montreal.

George Galt would eventually move to Wellington Crescent, his cousin John to Roslyn Road. Another notable resident was the banker Frank L. Patton, who later lived on Wellington Crescent. The Bungalow appears to have ceased functioning as a boarding house for bachelors by 1889, and the house had been demolished by 1932. Today the site of the house is a vacant lot facing Waterfront Drive. Surrounding it, where the Logan's house, Fort Dougals, and the creek where Peguis was said to bury the dead from Seven Oaks once were, is a forgotten corner of the central city, scattered with warehouses and a few remaining residential homes.

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.