Description of Historic Place

The Adelman Building is an impressive six-storey buff brick warehouse erected between 1903 and 1912 at a major intersection in Winnipeg's Exchange District, a national historic site of Camada. The City of Winnipeg designation applies to the building on its footprint.

Heritage Value

The Adelman Building, with its expressive arcaded facades, displays the grand scale, sturdy arches and enduring materials of the Romanesque Revival style derived from the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago and popular in Winnipeg's warehouse district at the turn of the twentieth century. When the building's first owners, Campbell Brothers and Wilson, a leading and long-standing grocery wholesaler, required more space from the original four storeys of 1903, they re-employed prominent architect J.H.G. Russell to add two more. Russell's 1912 plan continued the same materials, fenestration and scale, while establishing a clear separation of the warehouse into three vertical sections and reinforcing its already imposing presence at the intersection of two important Exchange District streets. The building's exterior remains substantially intact, while its continued use as a warehouse and store has allowed the interior also to maintain a great deal of integrity.

Source: City of Winnipeg Committee on Environment Meeting Minutes, September 12, 1983

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the heritage character of the Adelman Building site include:
- its location at the southwest corner of Princess Street and Bannatyne Avenue, adjacent to a former railway spur track to the rear (west)
- the building fully occupying its site and maintaining the built edge along Princess Street, surrounded by warehouses of similar style, age and materials, including 86 Princess with which it shares a party wall

Key elements that define the warehouse's exterior heritage character and Romanesque Revival style include:
- its symmetrical massing within a rectangular form and flat roof, with walls of solid brick masonry construction, finished in buff brick on the east and north elevations, rising from a raised foundation of rusticated limestone in similar hues
- the mid-section's dominant arch-and-spandrel motif on the primary facades, composed of three-storey brick arches encompassing two floors of paired windows with stone lug sills and lintels and brick mullions and one floor of three-part round-headed openings
- additional fenestration such as the large lintelled basement and main-floor openings and many windows in pairs and singles on the rear elevation
- the former internal driveway outlined on the east facade by a segmental arch and given emphasis by a variation in the window pattern in the bay above
- the modest ornamentation, including two round-arched brick and stone Princess Street entrances, stone banding elements, corbelled brickwork, hood-moulds, etc.
- the rear loading docks

Key elements that define the warehouse's interior heritage character include:
- the internal frame of stout wooden posts, beams and joists
- the brick firewall separating each floor into the former cold storage area on the south side from the other two-thirds of the structure
- details and features such as an original freight elevator at the rear, two wooden stairways in the north portion of the building, a walk-in basement safe with a scene stencilled on its door, etc.