At 3pm, our tour guide* promptly began an annotated escort down Albert St.
The boom era of Winnipeg was illustrated with a story of the Roblin House on Adelaide, where two caged black bears were tied up in front of the establishment. Passersby fed the bears food and alcohol, which caused a raucous bear to escape! The bear climbed a downtown lamp post, where an RCMP officer finally shot it, and the nearby hotel served bear for dinner.
It must be said that during the course of our tour three police cars drove by, a reminder that suspicions of the Exchange District as a space of debauchery is not entirely a thing of the past. This was also my first time seeing the new black and white/zero-tolerance design for Winnipeg police cars, complete with the slogan "Building Relationships" written on the side. This is a great scapegoat slogan because they do not have to disclose the type of relationship they are building: a relationship really only conveys the connection between two or more things. That RCMP officer built a "relationship" with that bear, but that didn't go very well for the bear.
The walking grounds a few feet away from Old Market Square were once the site of Manitoba's first courthouse and jailhouse. Apparently, while doing construction on this area, they found entrances to old jail cells. Between 1874-1876 marked Western Canada's first executions. The first hanging was for a man convicted of stabbing someone 30 times, in his defense he claimed he was "maddened by liquor."
On Fridays at 8am, they would raise the black flag, bells would toll (although executions were not open to the public), a noose would be tied around the neck of one about to be executed, and the trap door would be pulled out beneath them so that the fall would break their neck. For one hanging, the regular executioner was unavailable, and so a call was put out for a volunteer to do the job. The volunteer executioner didn't tie the noose correctly and the man strangled to death.
Something to think about when you see live concerts here, on approximately the same site:
The tour was advertised as ending at the Royal Albert Hotel, recounting the brutal murder in room 309. According to this Winnipeg Free Press article, the killer is trying to claim that his intoxication is to blame for the "disorganized thinking and impaired judgement" involved in the murder committed, a similar plea from the hanged man of 1874.
This segment has been removed from the tour, undoubtedly due to complaints that murder is not to be sensationalized for entertainment purposes. The tour is required to please their audience, such as the couple in khaki shorts and matching orange Guadalajara t-shirts. One thing that we have learned is that similar crimes can occur 200 years apart and people still don't want to talk about murder.
If you want to hear a story about room 309 at the Royal Albert with a little more firsthand weight, just ask rockabilly wildman Bloodshot Bill. I met up with Bloodshot Bill in Montreal to interview him for Signifipedia's upcoming zine publication for Expozine.
BLOODSHOT BILL
performing at The Royal Albert with Winnipeg's The Angry Dragons
BB: "The first time we played that summer, showing up at the Albert, it was front page news, it just happened. It happened two nights before. Body decapitated, dismembered, disemboweled, all this stuff, I heard about room 309 and everything. The next time I came up, they always give me a room at the Albert, and they gave me room 309, which was the murder room. They painted the walls a really light light green, and you could see lines of blood on the wall. And I took a bath in the bathtub, and that's where I found out that they found all the body parts, in the bathtub. I had all these horseshoe bolo ties on the wall for good luck."
There you have it, folks:
Horseshoes will save you from murder
Guided tours will always be biased
How would we learn if we didn't try?
xxxThe LLA
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