Manitoba Cold Storage

Saying Hello - May 2002

     Underneath the Diserali overpass the massive warehouse which formerly housed the Manitoba Cold Storage Company had begged me to explore its vast empty space. So during the winter months I began to gather information on the structure and the various entrance points that it held.

     Unfortunately there was a massive hurdle to overcome. Imrie Demolition held its main offices on the same property of the building storing its construction equipment as well as other materials in the building. This meant that the risk of not being let go with a slap on the wrist was quite high, something I could not have as my parents forbid me from U.E.

     So as the months past the building was to laugh and mock me every time I drove past it, irritating me to my wits' end. Then one day after finishing my exam I snapped and drove down to the headquarters of Imrie and asked them if I had their permission to take photo's of the massive abandoned warehouse. He first was very hesitant but when he saw my Mike Balcaen t-shirt (a local auto racer) his attitude towards me changed and allowed me to explore the building on the condition that I would be careful and because I had my Balcaen t-shirt on.

     I entered the building finding myself in the dark literally in part because my eyes had not adjusted to the pitch darkness but mostly because my flashlight had a hard time dealing with the vast empty spaces that the building harbored. There was also another problem that I had never really encountered before, chain link fences blocked almost every open space creating a maze that was at first hard to get through.

     Eventually I did and made my way to the offices that were tossed and appeared to be inhabited by squatters yet was kept in its original state in a way. Some of the more interesting things that I found was a bowling ball, a picture of a teenage girl from it looked like the 70's and a lot of external drawings of what this place was going to look like after its transformation. It was interesting to look at all the plans that the owners of this building had in 1996 as they envisioned a thriving storage business where multiple 18-wheelers and rail cars could unload and load their contents at will and was poised to be one of the largest storage facilities in western Canada.

    What happened since then is not quite clear but what is evident is the fact that the place is now owned by the City of Winnipeg and is falling quickly into a state of dies-repair. After looking through the rest of the documents that included among other things such as the city's regulations on historical buildings such as this, I found the bathroom and realized that there were still quite a bit of cleaning supplies and toilet paper on the roll in its original wrapper.

      I then proceeded to go into a room that had a hotel type visitor centre booth and a bar with the fancy light fixtures still above it. Why the previous owners had this and for what purpose it served was beyond my imagination. There was a doorway leading out of this room and a "corridor" led cut the building in half with massive doors marking the major area's for storage. The first stairway I found was in pretty rough shape with pipes partially blocking the entrance and wires falling from the roof that made navigation a bit tricky as I did not know if the power was still on and the fact that there was water constantly dripping on these wires. The area of the stairway was a roof in itself and contained four cargo elevators that had wooden strap push up and down doors, something that I had not seen in a long time.

      After seeing that no elevators were present on the current floor I climbed up the stairs to the second floor and found that the layout was essentially the same as the first minus the offices and essentially gave more room for storage on the floor than on the first. But like the first floor there were a lot of wires and pipes hanging from the ceiling and or strewn about the floor. One thing that I noticed a lot of was a brown substance that looked similar to tack board and found that the walls were insulated with this and through the natural processes of decay were falling out of the walls.

      After exploring the south end of the building I walked to the north side and found a second stairway that I decided to climb. This stairway compared to the other had little pipes or wires hanging from ceiling and were somewhat actually clean for an abandoned building. It was neat to see how the electrician's wired this area as all the wires on the next floor when they exited the stairway were in a simple yet catchy pattern that impressed me as when I wired houses the wires were strewn everywhere. Nonetheless I made my way to the third floor and found that it was the same as the second save for an office in the northwest corner that held nothing of interest.

      Up until the fifth there is absolutely no change in in floors design and when it does change on the fifth, one will notice hundreds of meat hooks on the ceilings of every room as well as conveyor systems on the south and west sides of the floor. After examining the floor I quickly looked around the sixth floor and made my way up to the seventh floor where the elevator ceiling was much higher, about 20 feet now off the ground compared to the 10 on the previous floors. Not only was the ceiling bigger but there was now light streaming on the stairway and I knew that I was close to the roof but instead of exploring it now, I would stick to the floor I was currently on but I found that it was like the sixth and fifth floor.

     So I headed up the stairs but noticed that there were now there was a "horizontal" stairs of three stairs that connected the two "vertical" stairs. It was weird to see the light of the sun but nonetheless I was amazed to see and touch the elevator motors that the eighth floor held. I wanted to go on the roof but there was a problem, the window was closed and not about to open. Even if I had opened it there was at least a ten foot drop onto a roof that's strength was a bit sketchy and there was no debris that I could use to get back in the window.

    Since the eighth floor was only a small shack and I had my fill of the elevator motors I decided to go back and find a different way onto the roof but as I searched for the second stairway, it continued to elude me. Perplexed, I walked back down to the last floor where I had seen the two stairways, the sixth floor and thankfully found it.

     Quickly I climbed the stairs up to the roof and found that the eighth floor here was not a small shack but like the previous floors. Perplexed and seeing daylight, I continued up the now wooden stairs which were creaking like a mad man and saw that the ninth floor was actually two shacks across from each other both holding the motors for the elevators. The sheet metal door that was off its hinges provided some resistance but not much and soon enough I was standing on the tarred gravel of the roof.

     For so long I had seen this roof from the Diserali Overpass admiring and desiring it and finally I was walking on it. As I looked at downtown and the North End I realized why the eighth floor was so small, after the sixth the building was split in two by a wall signified by a difference in the two roof height's being about four or more feet apart in their respective heights. As I snapped shots of downtown and the tree on the other elevator motor shack I sat down and enjoyed the sunlight before heading down the stairs and into the dark and dank basement.

     I knew I had entered the basement when the air suddenly became very humid and colder than the above ground floors as well as the presence of my breath being seen in the path of light from my flashlight. There wasn't much at all special about the basement at first, lots of junk on the floor with rooms being along the edge of the basement. It would be these rooms that gave me some entertainment, the second room from the entrance was piled ceiling high and the entire width of the room with orange cooling rods that were cool to the touch. After I took a picture and left the room I headed to the last door on the wall (that happened to be the third) and found that it was a supply/break room for the employees. In this room were three different rooms that were connected by doorways to the main room.

      The south room was against the foundation and was used as a supply room indicated by the amount of bearings and other supplies and shelving left over, the second room was more of a closet but held chemicals such as Hydrochloric Acid, Ammonia and other nasty things and the third room was along the outer wall of the basement were I had entered in from. A somewhat comical yet kind of freaky feature of the room was on a filing cabinet as a bumper sticker proclaimed "I Love Ammonia."

     Exiting the room I headed north there I noticed a step up in the concrete floor with a lot of machinery and engines just lying along the wall on the step up along with among other things, a motorized pallet jack. I walked to a doorway on the step-up and climbed down the slanted wooden stairs to find myself in awe of what was before me, mechanical room heaven. Not only were there massive boilers but there were as well about four huge generators that I presumed were used to power the massive coolers to keep this place cold. The highlight of the mechanical room was not the eight foot panel boxes nor the long generators or the intact tool board but the massive generator wheel that was at least 14 feet tall. To see the giant wheel in submission was a humbling experience and after I admired it, I explored the rest of the mechanical room. There were about six chemical storage tanks and I was able to find the bottom of the cargo elevator shafts in a slew of swamp water.

      After all this I climbed up the stairs to get back into the sunlight and society but there was a problem. Among the first floors' maze of chain link fences that blocked certain area's a section of chain link blocked the stairway forcing me to walk all the way back to the other stairway and find my way through the maze all over again. By the time I could shut off my flashlight, four and a half hours had passed though it didn't seem at all as if it had been. Knowing that I had explored the recesses of the beast I felt proud for making it out without more than a couple of scratches and went off to work.