Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - July 21, 2013, Winnipeg, Manitoba winnipegfreepress. com THIS CITY . OUR WEEKLY LOOK AT THE PULSE OF THE CITY A8 SUNDAY, JULY 21, 2013 OUR WINNIPEG BARTLEY KIVES bartley. kives@ freepress. mb. ca Y OU could blindfold me, drive me across town and spin me around 16 times but I'd know at first whiff I was standing inside the Ukrainian National Federation hall. It's not a traditionally desirable aroma - not like turkey dinner roasting in the oven, or popcorn or freshbaked bread, though sometimes when the breeze is blowing in the right direction you can smell City Bread from the front steps. It's a smell that's quite hard to describe, but definitely includes hints of dampness, dust, sweaty leather shoes, and notes of spilled beer, oldness, and some industrialstrength cleaning product. Maybe it doesn't sound so appealing, but it smells familiar, and it feels good. I can't say how many hours I've spent under the roof of the Ukrainian National Federation hall at 935 Main Street, though generally speaking " lots" would sum it up. The place was built in 1948, and both my great- grandfather and my great- great- grandfather had a hand in the construction and the funding of the building. The hall would be a cultural haven for the many Ukrainians that populated what is now the Point Douglas area. The building housed a Ukrainian school, a choir, a museum that is now Oseredok on Alexander Avenue, a dance school, numerous organizations including the Ukrainian war veterans, and banquets every Saturday night, complete with lights from the disco ball that still hangs from the ceiling. My great- grandfather spent most of his days at the UNF hall and my grandmother has been involved with organizations at the hall all her life. She sewed costumes for the students of the dance school for years. My mom and aunt danced at the UNF hall, and my mom and her friend - who would later become my brother's godfather - became the assistant directors of the dance school. Naturally, I was brought to the UNF hall for Ukrainian dance classes as soon as I could walk. There was a fire evacuation at my first- ever dance concert and I never wanted to go onstage again. I definitely contracted my first cooties at the UNF hall, when I was made to hold hands with boys when I was only in Grade 2. My partner was especially repulsive because he licked the bottoms of his slippers. Some of our group members got a bit too cool for dancing, but most of our parents made us go back every year, until eventually we thought it was fun, and later still we realized we were entertaining an audience and expressing our culture, and we loved it. I danced with the UNF School of Dance for 15 years, with the kids whose parents my mom used to dance with. Then I went on to teach the kids of teachers who used to teach me. Nowadays the hall is used mostly by the dance school and the Rusalka Ukrainian Dance Ensemble - one of the most prestigious, colourful, and vibrant Ukrainian dance groups in the province. I auditioned for Rusalka when I was 17 and I was so terrified and nervous I forgot to wear a bodysuit. I was thrilled to find out I'd gotten accepted despite that. I have met, worked with, learned from and become friends with the greatest and most talented people under the roof of the UNF hall. My experiences there have been exciting, nerve- wracking, hilarious, rewarding ( like when I turn on the music and my students move and it looks like what I'd envisioned in my head), happy, sad, disgusting ( like when I tell a child to keep dancing after he tells me his tummy hurts and I end up cleaning puke off the floor), challenging, frustrating, and triumphant ( like nailing that solo after months and months of practice), and overall, good. It might just look like any other old building on a notso- welcoming stretch of Main Street, and the disco ball may not have turned in the last quarter- century, and the last time it saw a coat of paint may have been when a scene from Shall We Dance was filmed inside in 2004, and it might have a distinct scent, but it has provided me, my family and many, many others with experiences and memories that will far outlive the hall itself. By Larissa Peck The hours I've spent there are distilled into a scent called contentment F ROM the outside it appeared to be an unassuming threestorey Crescentwood home. Inside, however, music magic was being made. Between 1974 and 1981, Roade Recording Studios, located in a residential block at 887 Grosvenor Ave., was the spot for local rockers to record or just hang out. " There wasn't any other place that was hip to current music recording at the time," recalls founding partner and chief engineer Glenn Axford. " It was a cool place. Just about every rock band from that era came through our doors." Axford had been operating his own recording business before partnering with CFRW deejay Bobby " Boom Boom" Branigan, aka Bill Rouse, in the early ' 70s to create a studio for recording radio ads. The two converted the second- floor apartment of Rouse's Grosvenor Avenue house into what was at the time a state- of- the- art, 16- track recording facility. The walls were lined with sheets of lead behind the Gyproc for soundproofing ( Axford never received a noise complaint from neighbours), the control room was equipped with a top- of- the- line Neve recording console ( similar to the console in the acclaimed Sound City documentary directed by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl), and the bedroom was turned into the studio proper. " The vocal booth was literally a bedroom closet," says recording engineer Howard Rissin. " I felt so bad for anybody going in there to sing because there was no air in there. They would come out sweating." The lounge featured antique furniture, wood panelling, shag carpet and a Coca- Cola machine. " It was very ' 70s." Opened in 1974, Roade quickly became a mecca for musicians. While commercial ads and jingles paid the bills, rock musicians found the ambiance appealing. " Even though it was small, it was an incredibly creative space," says Rissin. " There was so much music going on there all the time." The tiny control room was often jammed with musicians and hangerson. " I was recording overdubs for Bill Iveniuk's Bills Bills Bills album," Howard remembers. " When the bars closed all these musicians would show up because everyone knew Bill and he would tell them, ' I'll get you on the album!' We ran out of space on the tapes for all his friends to add their parts. One night we were blasting the playbacks full volume when a very drunk girl leaned over to ask me, ' Is this your stereo?' " Brian Rich came on board as partner and studio manager while third partner Jim Rouse, no relation to Bill who had since moved on to radio in L. A., was responsible for drumming up business. The operation eventually occupied the main floor for offices and tape duplication while the thirdfloor turret room was used for storage and additional offices. As studio guitarist Ari Lahdekorpi recalls, " Many of the late- night sessions at Roade included cameos by the elite of the Winnipeg music scene." Jazz player extraordinaire Ron Paley recorded at Roade as well as Tim Thorney, Greg Leskiw, Bob Fuhr ( with band Zdenka), Dale Russell, Laurie MacKenzie, Maclean & Maclean, Honey Hill, Graham Shaw and Popular Mechanix, to name a few. The latter- day Guess Who also cut tracks at Roade. " It was a lucky confluence of souls and energy," states Graham Shaw, who recorded his first jingle at the studio. " A buddy in Toronto needed a jingle for a new pizza company so I made it up hung over while Glenn set up the sound. It ran for about 30 years." " I learned how to be efficient recording jingles," notes Rissin. " For a rock session you might spend the first day just getting a drum sound but for a jingle session you had maybe five minutes to get the drum sound right. You had to work quickly. I did sessions for Manitoba Tourism, Garbonzo's Pizza, Triple E Trailers, you name it." Mike Rheault wrote many of the jingles with Elias, Schritt and Bell often called in to sing on them. Over the winter of 1975 to ' 76, Burton Cummings was a frequent client, recording demos for his debut solo album. According to Axford, " He was trying out a lot of ideas and would play all night, sometimes alone and sometimes with Ian Gardiner and Gord Osland." While Burton paid his bills, others weren't so flush. " I remember Brian Rich yelling, ' Don't give that guy any tapes until he pays his bill!'' laughs Rissin. Another regular customer was K- Tel, which employed the studio to master its various budget compilation albums. " A courier truck would arrive with all these original master tapes from all these original recording artists from the ' 50s and ' 60s," recalls Axford, " and they would want it done the next day so it would be an all- nighter to get it completed." The house was rumoured to be haunted, and there were ghost stories abound. Tapes would mysteriously slow down or a piano chord would be heard from the empty studio. By 1980 the studio was struggling, as competition from other facilities in town required upgrading Roade's equipment. Rather than incurring the expense, the partners decided to close up shop. Still, memories endure. " There was a definite vibe in that very funky old house," muses Lahdekorpi. " For a pretty small space we managed to get a great sound," says Axford. " It was a fun time." Join John Einarson this fall for his " Off The Record" series of classes at mcnallyrobinson. com House of ROCK For seven years, just about every band in Winnipeg knocked on its door John Einarson remembers ROADE STUDIOS Glenn Axford at the helm of the Neve console in Roade Recording Studios. Roade Recording Studios was inside this three- storey Crescentwood home on Grosvenor Avenue. ABOVE: The piano and control- room window in the studio. RIGHT: The tape machine and equipment room. I T'S great city hall wants to increase downtown Winnipeg's residential population. The densification of this city's core is a laudable goal. But Winnipeg's curious plan to cut $ 10,000 cheques to Exchange District and Waterfront Drive condo buyers appears to be a desperate and reactionary measure rather than a sensible piece of a long- term plan to continue the revitalization of the city's core. Over the past 150 years, a variety of economic, geographic and political forces have conspired to leave downtown Winnipeg underdeveloped and underpopulated. There was the greed of the Hudson's Bay Company, which encouraged an early version of urban sprawl by inflating land values around Upper Fort Garry. There was the hubris of both The Bay and Eaton's, who built department- store edifices along Portage Avenue at a time when the commercial core was concentrated along Main Street. There was a protracted period of slow economic growth that followed both the end of the railway boom and the unresolved labour issues of the 1919 General Strike. There was a downtown- development chill following the devastation of the 1950 Red River Flood. There was a series of short- sighted postwar decisions to tear up the city's streetcar network and put off rapid- transit construction while low- density residential neighbourhoods sprouted on the fringes of what used to be the city's suburbs. Then in recent years, there was the belief in the power of megaprojects - the Civic Centre complex! Portage Place! The Forks! MTS Centre! - to undo a century of history through the magic of large- scale urban engineering. The results, familiar to all Winnipeggers, have been mixed. Some of downtown's neighbourhoods are doing well, while others are desolate. Broadway- Assiniboine, developed with the help of tax breaks in the 1960s, is among Winnipeg's mostly densely populated residential areas. Independent businesses have reoccupied storefronts on the thriving west side of the Exchange District. Thoughtful public and private investment into recreation has returned some life to Central Park. But vast tracts of South Portage, downtown's largest neighbourhood, are dominated by asphalt surface- parking lots. What little is left of Chinatown resembles a ghost town. And the east side of the Exchange, home to impressive new condos, is only beginning to develop a pedestrian streetscape. In other words, every time elected officials and civil servants try to stick their fingers into one segment of the downtown- revitalization dike, a leak springs in another section. This is why CentreVenture, the city's downtown- development agency, has decided to forsake residential development in South Portage in favour of throwing all their policy eggs into the Exchange District- Waterfront Drive basket. The focus is a good idea, as it's easier to achieve a critical mass of development in a smaller geographic area. But what was hastily approved by city council last week - the Exchange- Waterfront Neighbourhood Development Program - actually ensnares all of downtown. This plan involves: A) Scooping up $ 7.8 million of future property- tax revenues from new developments in every section of downtown; and B) Funnelling that money into the Exchange District and several adjacent neighbourhoods. Some of the cash will be used to address concerns raised about downtown living, such as safety issues, parking and the absence of a major grocer. While there may be merits to increasing foot patrols, expanding car- sharing and offering incentives to retailers, it is improper to devote precious growth revenues to routine spending priorities. The city has a budget process and CentreVenture should not be allowed to circumvent it. It is even more outrageous to devote $ 2.3 million of future city tax revenue on condobuying incentives simply because developers might not be able to sell the condos they built with the help of another tax- incentive program. While developers who've chosen to invest in downtown deserve the gratitude of Winnipeggers, they do not deserve our charity. If they're having trouble selling condos, they can sit on their stock or lower their prices, like every other business on the planet faced with a glut of supply. What officials have only hinted at publicly is some of the developers who took advantage of an earlier program - the city- provincial Downtown Residential Development Grant Program - are deeply unhappy they were unable to qualify for the maximum tax credits promised under that plan. It was billed as a tax- increment financing program, but it wasn't a real TIF. Under a genuine TIF, any new property- tax revenue in a blighted area is either reinvested in streetscaping improvements or returned to the developers. Also, governments don't control what developments take place; they only decide how to reinvest the resulting windfall. The downtown residential program, however, was not a TIF but a series of grants, with the city and province effectively deciding who could qualify. Even worse, the provincial demand for an affordable- housing component weakened the TIF- like mechanism, as developers could not achieve the maximum possible profits - and thus could not return the maximum amount of new revenues to downtown. As a result, very little affordable housing wound up getting built, some developers were deeply disappointed and - here's the crucial part - downtown was left with more new condos ( that many Winnipeggers can not afford) than new apartments ( which more Winnipeggers can afford). Now, to add insult to injury, CentreVenture and city council plan to correct the previous blunder by offering cash incentives to condo buyers. Meanwhile, impoverished Winnipeggers in desperate need of affordable housing - and middle- class people who just want to live downtown - get absolutely nothing out of either the old grant program or the new incentive package. Although council has already approved the Exchange- Waterfront plan, they have a chance to kill it this fall, when they vote on the bylaw required to enact it. The right thing for council to do would be to refuse to approve the bylaw. Councillors should then take a huge deep breath, a big step back and promise to never, ever approve another top- down, megaprojectstyle downtown- revitalization policy ever again. How instead do you improve downtown? Listen to the planners and not the plutocrats. Eliminate the red tape and zoning barriers that restrict small- scale, storefront- by- storefront commercial development. Create real tax- increment- financing zones that don't pick winners and losers among developers. In short, get the eff out of the way and let downtown be a downtown. You really want downtown to shine? Start by killing the condo- buyer bribery scheme Listen to planners, not plutocrats A Ukrainian KID IN THE HALL PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Larissa Peck outside her favorite place, the Ukrainian National Federation hall at 935 Main Street. Do you have a favourite place in Winnipeg? Email dave. connors@ freepress. mb. ca with your story ;