Winnipeger here…in the 1870s up to about 1910 or so Winnipeg was called the Chicago of the North. It was BOOMING with commerce, industry, yes, hordes of cattle that put Chicago to shame, lol, and with all the attendant social problems. So, from Murdoch’s perspective, it was a happening place.
I don’t know about Omaha but Wpg is about 850,000 strong if you count all the outlying areas. Btw, a lot of us shop in Fargo and Minneapolis. It’s a shortish drive for good deals.
The Jets are ours. Can’t wait to see them play the Preds!
About mosquitoes, or skeeters as we fondly called the buggers, because they haven’t bugged us for about 5 years, thanks to early larvaciding and hordes (again) of dragonflies and damselflies. At long last I can go berry picking outside the city and grill in my backyard.
Winters are coltish but getting milder, last winter we had very little snow and only one serious cold spell in Feb. in my 35 years here, I can honestly say the winters are more tolerable, and the summers getting better too.
I had to look this up and, yes, this was true in the 1921 census. But, even disregarding that that was nearly a century ago, I’m actually surprised that it was the fourth largest city as recently as 1996. I simply had no idea that it was that big. And looking at the top ten largest cities from the latest census, I realize how distorted my idea of Canadian city populations centres are. I would have thought Vancouver much higher and Quebec City to at least crack the top 10. And I had never heard of Mississauga or Brampton (although, looking at the map, it seems I must have driven through or really close to them when I drove from Chicago to Montreal.)
Many people who mock Winnipeg have never been there. Though I’ve heard The Forks area is nice, the Peg has a reputation (fair or not) for harsh winters and some rough areas.
Ah Regina, the city that rhymes with fun… I grew up in Winnipeg and still remember that eclipse. Best one I’ve ever seen. Yeah, it has crime, wind, cold and mosquitoes that can carry off small domestic animals. It also has a world class symphony, ballet, is in the top 5 for most restaurants per capita in N.America (and a fantastic food culture), one of the world’s best beaches a short-ish drive away (Grand Beach/ Grand Marais), The Forks and some of the best early 20th c. architecture around in the downtown Market Square area. As much sass as people put on it, it was a great place to grow up.
To be fair, Mississauga is now contiguous with Toronto, so if you were driving in that direction you could easily be forgiven for thinking it was just more Toronto.
Toronto has grown by absorbing a bunch of what used to be separate municipalities (Etobicoke, for example, where I live now, was a separate city until 1998, when it merged with a bunch of others, absorbed into Toronto).
Like some sort of municipal amoeba, Toronto just keeps eating other cities and growing …
I have a good friend who has lived his whole life in Winnipeg, and that’s exactly what he’s told me – that there are some areas of the city that are rather sketchy, and that the winters are brutal.
When I tell people who have never been there what Toronto is like, I always compare it to London, England. The City of Toronto is actually quite small, while the Greater Toronto Area is HUGE!
Muscovites understand this very well. In 1989, their city had grown by a factor of nine since the end of WWII. No idea what it is today, but it too continues to gobble up the municipalities on its limits.
