Bell tolls for downtown Winnipeg hotel

The Bell Hotel in downtown Winnipeg, once considered one of the city's finest small hotels,is closing its doors Friday after decadesof decline.

The 101-year-oldhotel near the corner of Main Street and HigginsAvenue has in recent yearsbeen home to some of the city's least fortunate people.

With its closing, 50 people have had to find somewhere else to live.

"It wasn't what you could really call home," said Rick Adams, who has lived at the Bell for seven years.

His home there wasn't a great place, he said, but it was warm and dry and it was one of the few places he could afford for the $270 a month he received from social assistance for rent.

"What I had at the Bell was just four walls," he said. "You had to use the public washroom there, and it wasn't really that sanitary."

With no money for a damage deposit and no references, Adams said he had a tough time finding a place to live, facing "a lot of prejudice about where you've come from."

In the end, he did manage to find a new home in time for the hotel's closing: Friday he moves into a suite in a house on Mountain Avenue, which he'll share with another former Bell resident.

His new home is a step up, with its own kitchen and bathroom, but Adams now has to find $325 a month for rent, as well as money for a bus pass to get to a work program at the Siloam Mission, back downtown near the Bell.

At the mission, executive director John Mohan has mixed feelings about the closure of the hotel.

"One one level, it looks like it's healthy, but on another level, there's all kinds of fallout," he said.

Due to a lack of social housing in the city, Mohan expects many former Bell residents will end up sleeping at his shelter.

Still, he is glad to see the bar at the Bell close although with so many others on the strip, he says it won't have much of an impact on the area's social problems.

Adams agrees: "There's other hotels. They're just going to be a little more busier. There's other addictions down there that it's very hard to try and change. The people just get stuck in that one place, rut, and they just can't get out."

Saleto aid revitalization?

CentreVenture Development Corporation, the city's downtown development agency, purchased the property, along with the neighbouring former Bell Hardware building, in the hopes of helping along the revitalization efforts in the Exchange District.

CentreVenture spokeswoman Loretta Martin said one of the key motivations behind the purchase of the hotel was to close its beer vendor.

"The activities sometimes associated with the serving of liquor are somewhat problematic to the neighbouring property owners," she said last week.

"That is a bit of the reason that revitalization in that block has sort of stalled out."

The four-storey building itself a municipally designated heritage building is structurally sound, Martin said, although an environmental assessment uncovered mould and other safety issuesthat CentreVenture plans to address in the coming months.

The agency now plans to work with the private sector to redevelop the properties. Martin hopes the redevelopment will include some housing.