Whatever happened to…

I just burned the better part of an hour on one of my new favourite YouTube channels: Jim Jaworski’s collection of late-eighties/early-nineties clips from Winnipeg news broadcasts.

Some of you may know Jim as a regular commenter on this blog, as a co-author on the TRUWinnipeg site, or as curator of Unofficial Winnipeg Transit Online. But I really think this YouTube collection is his greatest gift to the Internet.

It comes across like a rogues’ gallery of reporters and mega-projects of the past. And as I watched, one question kept running through my head: Whatever happened to…

• That new arena proposal from 1989?
• Phase 2 of the TD Centre (now Canwest Place) project?
• The water park and condos at the Forks?
• The traffic disaster that Councillor Bill Clement claimed would be caused by the Charleswood Parkway, 15 years before he started acting like he designed and built the thing by hand?
• Mike McCourt, possibly the most pompous news anchor in Winnipeg history? (This interview just cracks me up)

And finally, perhaps the biggest question of all, whatever happened to all those shoppers that were expected at Portage Place? It was billed as “the salvation of downtown Winnipeg” on opening day, but as this 1988 CBC report shows, it was clear within a few months that things weren’t going well.