The Tribune Building

In the early 1910s, acclaimed American-Canadian architect John Danley Atchison set out to design a new headquarters for the Winnipeg Tribune, one of the city’s major daily newspapers. Atchison proposed a ten-storey, Chicago Style tower paneled in marble and terracotta, featuring pilasters and ornate carved motifs. Though the realized building only attained six storeys, it largely conformed to Atchison’s vision and was lauded as a handsome addition to “Newspaper Row” (the segment of McDermott Avenue bookend by Princess and Main Street, which was also home to the headquarters of the Free Press and the Daily Telegram). 

The building’s interior featured quarter-cut oak decorations, hardwood and terrazzo flooring, and marble wainscotting. The exterior was decorated by fourteen grotesques which crowned the building, looking down onto pedestrians from above the sixth floor. These grotesques, two feet tall and moulded of clay rather than carved, each represented one aspect of the newspaper trade. They posed with tools like an old fashioned printing press or scissors. In 1969, the grotesques were painstakingly removed from the building, supposedly because they posed a threat to those walking below. All fourteen were sold, and two have been acquired by the Manitoba Museum (“The Printer” and “The City Editor”). 

On August 27th, 1980, the Winnipeg Tribune abruptly ceased its operations, laying off its entire staff of 375 employees unexpectedly. Three years later, the building was demolished to make way for a parking lot. The Winnipeg Tribune’s previous headquarters on McDermott Avenue, destroyed by fire in 1930, also remains an empty lot.