Description of Historic Place

The Utility Building consists of two restored four-storey facades (east and north) of a brick retail-office block built in 1892, expanded by one floor in 1902 and now part of a modern educational facility in Winnipeg's historic Exchange District. The City of Winnipeg designation applies to the east and north walls on their footprints.

Heritage Value

The Utility Building is significant as the northern anchor of a rare pre-1900 streetscape preserved in situ in facade form to recall the type of early commercial development that occurred near Winnipeg's City Hall in the Exchange District National Historic Site, including the central role played by the agricultural industry. The mixed-use structure, Classical in its composition and subdued detailing, was the first purpose-built headquarters of the Winnipeg Grain and Produce Exchange, which became one of the major markets for grain in the world. Designed by C.A. Barber, whose firm planned two earlier buildings at the south end of the streetscape, the structure was given a more modest exterior than its neighbours, but was finely appointed within to accommodate the exchange's trading floor, offices and display space for farm implement dealers. It was the first of two buildings (the other being 160 Princess Street) erected for the exchange by one of its founders, Nicholas Bawlf. The surviving facades, which retain their original openings and details, now form the highly visible northeast corner of Red River College's downtown campus.

Source: City of Winnipeg Committee on Environment Minutes, June 18, 1979

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the site character of the Utility Building include:
- its corner location at southwest Princess Street and Elgin Avenue, across from the civic precinct and with two facades (east and north) flush to the public sidewalks
- its historical and physical relationships with the four designated facades to the south, including the structure at 160 Princess Street
- its three-dimensional profile, distinguished spatially, architecturally and materially from the modern construction to which it is attached

Key elements that define the facades' sparse but elegant Classical Revival style include:
- the blocky rectangular massing and flat roof
- the generally flat, symmetrically composed walls of buff brick, crowned by a shallow metal cornice with modillions and dentils, an abbreviated east-side pediment and urn accents at the corners
- the brightly lit main floor, including on the east side the central entrance flanked by large storefronts with display windows, transoms and double-door entrances, cast-iron columns and lintels, etc.
- the extensive upper-storey fenestration, notably the second and third storeys' single flat-headed openings alternating between paired windows in segmental-arched surrounds of cast iron, and the distinctive arrangement of lintelled windows in singles and pairs on the fourth-floor addition
- the restrained yet fanciful details, including stars, scrolled oak leaves and geometric ornament in the cast-iron surrounds, metal medallions with floral motifs, patterned and corbelled fourth-floor brickwork, rough-cut limestone sills and main-floor banding elements, the east-side flagpole, etc.