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Hudson’s Bay Co., Portage Ave. store, July 29, 1929

This Was Winnipeg points out cool history facts every day, and one today is this:

November 18, 1926 – The Portage and Memorial Bay store opens for business at 9:00 am. The ceremony includes George Galt, HBC Board Member, using a golden key to unlock the Portage Avenue doors.

This I have spent a lot of time in this the Bay* downtown over the years, largely because I’ve passed through it on my way home for, oh, eight years or so.

In a post earlier this month, Emma at Winnipeg O’ My Heart mentioned the Bay in a post about Downtown Issues. She writes:

To me, the epitome of this is The Bay. Have you been to The Bay downtown? Structurally, it’s amazing. Stately pillars. Mile-high ceilings. Hardwood floors. The ladies’ bathroom is a snapshot in time: there are banks of little vanities where you can actually sit down on a chair, place your purse on the counter, and fix your hair or lipstick. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a film set, not in modern day. It’s wonderful. And yet, the store is run down. There seems to be no sense of pride in the gem we have on our hands. (And I was really surprised to see it made the Sun’s list of 100 reasons to love Winnipeg.) This Bay doesn’t seem to be given as much attention as the ones in the malls.

I agree with her take. The Bay Downtown is simultaneously amazing and depressing, especially if you venture beyond the first floor (which is dominated by shiny cosmetics counters staffed by smiling, impeccably-coiffed women). I usually only visit the third floor (women’s wear) and the basement (where there’s a quaint, outdated, but quite serviceable and affordable grocery store, as well as a bizarre assortment of clearance goods).

Bay Basement Grocery photo by Jason Penner (check out his Flickr stream for more great shots from the Bay Basement)

As a shopper and a style-hound, the Bay’s women’s clothing department is an essential stop for me, especially because I don’t have a car and can’t get out to the suburbs’ big box stores very often. Great deals on designer and designer-quality garments can be found there, more often than not in chaotic clearance racks. The deals are easier to find than the staff people. Getting service in the Bay — anywhere in the Bay — is really difficult. I don’t know if it has to do with my age or what.

My friend Cynara is the one who showed me how to shop effectively at the Bay. She was the one who cracked the code for me on the strange layout of the women’s department, pointing out where the plus-size racks were and where extra plus-size garments were seeded elsewhere on the floor. (She taught me a lot about shopping, actually — things like, always try it on, make your decisions on a per-garment basis, not on a brand or store-of-origin basis.)

Cynara in one of her amazing outfits (skirt and shoes sourced at the Bay)

A fun thing about shopping at the Bay is that often the item price when they ring it up will be less than marked, due to a constantly rotating schedule of sales and, I think, the fact that they just don’t get around to updating the tags.

Anyway, when I’m at the Bay, I usually feel like I’m shopping there in spite of the store’s best efforts to turn me off from the whole thing. The thing is, as a car-free urban resident, I rely on the Bay for a lot of my needs, and the case is the same for a wide variety of downtown residents. It’s almost as though the store coasts on the patronage of existing downtown denizens and has given up entirely on drawing clientele from elsewhere in the city.

Back to Cynara — she moved to Vancouver for grad school this fall, and told me that she visited the Bay there, and found it lacking the “charm” of ours. Apparently the plus size and maternity sections were ghettoized in a separate land from the rest of women’s wear (hideous fatties and pregnant ladies must be kept away from the sensitive buying public, I guess), and the selection wasn’t as inspiring. (Then again, Cynara now lives in the same city as Jane Bon Bon, so I think she’ll get over this quickly.)

Photo by Bryan Scott of Winnipeg: Love & Hate

There are always rumours about the University of Winnipeg continuing its colonization of downtown by moving into this majestic building. And, of course, there’s always plenty of doom and gloom about downtown, matched only by boosterism of questionable efficacy.

*For non-Canadians, “the Bay” is short for “the Hudson’s Bay Company,” the oldest commercial corporation in North America (incorporated 1670). It began as a fur trader and now is a general retail conglomerate.

"Freedom" by ahmetorhan

For a long time, I’ve struggled to find a way to think about Remembrance Day. There are so many contradictions at play. At the same time as I have deep respect to those people who commit their lives to military service, I’m critical of a military culture that creates a breeding ground for misogyny and rape. While I believe that instability and tyranny in many Middle East countries was created by the interference of foreign governments, I can’t support the notion that a wholesale withdrawal of foreign troops from those countries is going to make anyone — in those countries or in the rest of the world — safer.

Our modern wars, fought so far away yet transmitted back to us on our tiny TV and computer screens, seem so disconnected from the white-haired veterans who stand at attention next to the cenotaph on November 11. Remembrance Day is part childhood nostalgia — folding your felt poppy in half to make comical fake lips; listening to sermons given by your teachers about honour and sacrifice; attending all-school assemblies with at trumpeter playing Reveille. It’s part brutal reality — the sick feeling in your stomach when you think about Colin Powell arguing that there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, because he, himself, did believe it; the pain in your chest when you read about African children abducted and pressed into guerilla military service in wars that started long before they were born; the tightness in your throat when you hear about a kid gunned down in your city, a refugee from a war-torn home who escaped only to be pulled into the street-level wars perpetuated by gangs in your so-called “first world” country.

For me, Remembrance Day isn’t as much about remembering the past as it is about remembering the present. That there are 30-odd active “conflicts” on this planet right now.

My forebears were refugees during World War II. My great-grandfathers were conscripted into military service; one died in a POW camp. My great-grandmother was raped by Russian soliders. My grandmother, grandfather and their siblings were malnourished and terrorized by living through war, and all of these facts, these events from the long past, have ramifications for my family even today.

For my family, these horrors are our history. For millions and millions of humans living today, it’s their present. That’s what I think about on Remembrance Day. Women who struggle to keep track of their children in the chaos of war (my grandmother and her brother were once separated from their mother on a train journey west). Women who struggle to keep their children fed when food supply is anything but secure (my great-grandfather sold his wool coat to buy butter). Men who rot in cells as prisoners-of-war, losing hope of ever seeing their families again (my grandfather gave his fellow prisoner his blanket and wedding ring when he knew he was losing his battle with dysentery).

Remembrance Day is a day of from work, a blip in my comfortable Canadian life. But on this day, the least I can do is think of my fellow humans who aren’t so blessed by history, work harder to never forget them.