Portage and Main

A Winnipeg Free Press Top Title of 2025

Portage and Main: How an Iconic Intersection Shaped Winnipeg’s History, Politics, and Urban Life explores stories of Portage and Main throughout Winnipeg’s history and the complicated relationship between the city’s oldest intersection and culture of the urban environment that grew around it.

Fifty years ago, Portage and Main was closed to pedestrians as part of a downtown renewal project. This left an intersection void of pedestrians, and the promised vision of a revitalized city never came to fruition.

In 2025, Portage and Main will open to pedestrians once again. With a city struggling to balance the demands of its sprawling suburbs with its need to invest in downtown, the future of this iconic crossroad is in flux once again.

Winnipeg historians Alex Judge and Sabrina Janke, hosts of the One Great History podcast, describe how open, closed, or somewhere strange and in-between, the intersection’s history reflects the ideas of what Winnipeg is, could be, and has been.

Whatever the case, one thing is clear: Portage and Main is far more than just an intersection.

Advance Praise for Portage and Main

“Portage and Main is the embodiment of anthropology of the west, yet the history of Canada’s most iconic traffic intersection has only been told through a miscellanea of unrelated writings. Until now.

Sabrina Janke and Alex Judge offer a comprehensive compilation and present it in a highly readable, entertaining and illuminating manner. Their account of Portage and Main runs from the fur trade to the formation of Winnipeg, from dirt trails to paved multi-lane thoroughfares, through celebrations and confrontations, to the recent re-introduction of the junction as a pedestrian crossing.” –Darren Bernhardt, CBC journalist and author of Prairie Oddities: Punkinhead, Peculiar Gravity and More Lesser Known Histories

“For more than a generation, Winnipeg’s famous intersection was hidden behind concrete walls, its significance slowly fading from our collective memory. Just as the physical place is being reintroduced to our city, this timely and compelling book reintroduces us to the people and stories that shaped its legacy.

For the first time, readers are taken on a complete journey through the intersection’s rich and deeply rooted story. The authors skillfully weave together a captivating tapestry of memories, moments, and milestones that have cemented its place in both Winnipeg’s and Canada’s history. The book serves as a stepping off point to the future, leaving readers with a renewed sense of connection and an anticipation for the next chapters to be written in the Portage and Main story.” –Brent Bellamy, Creative Director at Number TEN Architectural Group, columnist at the Winnipeg Free Press