About

Built in 1912 for former Winnipeg mayor Thomas Sharpe and designed by Manitoba’s first provincial architect Samuel Hooper, the Pasadena Apartments at 220 Hugo Street N is a significant building in Winnipeg’s social and architectural history. It is located in the city’s Fort Rouge neighbourhood, just south of the Assiniboine River, in an area that has long been the home to Indigenous communities such as the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene, and Metis peoples. The building’s creation, as with the city around it, is rooted in the dispossession and displacement of these communities. It was built in an area inhabited by the Metis families who would form the Rooster Town community in the early 20th century, at a time when Winnipeg was rapidly expanding, pushing these communities further and further south as the city’s wealthy white elite moved into Fort Rouge. 

Although the building’s early inhabitants were primarily wealthy business people and their families, the building’s tenants have changed over the years along with the character of the surrounding neighbourhood. Today, the Pasadena is home to students, young families, artists, newcomers, as well as some longtime tenants who have been drawn to the building by its affordable, spacious apartments and its unique Spanish Mission style architecture. 

The Pasadena Project is an effort to tell the story of this building and the land it occupies. Throughout the six episode podcast series, listeners will be introduced to former tenants of the building, as well as architects and historians who provide important context about the space. Although the subject of this story is the Pasadena, this podcast is about the ways the places we call home shape our lives and affect our well-being, and is for anyone who is interested in thinking deeply and critically about the spaces we inhabit.