© 2026, Christian Cassidy
Place: McLaughlin Carriage Works Building, now Carriage Works Lofts
Address: Originally 204 Princess Street, now 216 Princess Street (Map)
Architect: James Cadham
Contractor: Philip Burnett
Constructed: 1902, extension in 1906
The McLaughlin Carriage Works was established in 1892 in Oshawa, Ontario, by Robert Samuel McLaughlin and two other family members.
McLaughlin visited Winnipeg in 1895 to check out business conditions and his horse-drawn carriages were soon being distributed in the West through the Cockshutt Plow Company. By 1899, the company's sales had grown enough that they hired Richard McKenzie and opened a sales and repair rented shop of their own on Princess Street behind city hall.
Another Oshawa executive visited the city in 1900 and declared that it was time to begin "making things hum in the West" for the company.
The three-storey with basement building designed by architect James H. Cadham and built by Philip Burnett cost $20,000. It measured 50 feet wide by 95 feet long and backed onto a spur railway line for the easy delivery and shipment of vehicles. The main floor served as the showroom and offices with excess stock kept upstairs thanks to a large elevator.
Four years later, Cadham and Burnett teamed up again to build an identical 50-foot by 95-foot extension to the north of the original building.
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The first McLaughlin motor car sold in Winnipeg was in 1909 to James William Ackland, the vice president of D. Ackland and Son, which sold carriage and blacksmith supplies.
In 1909, McLaughlin purchased a large piece of land at Portage Avenue and Maryland Street. This became its main warehouse and repair garages, whilst the Princess Street building remained its showroom and sales floor. Even after a major fire in 1911 that which destroyed several vehicles, the Princess Street building was repaired and went back into service as a showroom.
Sales for MacLauchlin cars boomed. Newspaper ads from 1916, celebrating the company's 50th anniversary, boasted that its newly expanded Oshawa plant was the "largest carriage plant" in the British Empire.
Born in Ontario, McKenzie came West in 1880 and worked as a blacksmith at Calgary and Vancouver, specializing in the railway and carriage trade, before settling in Manitou, Manitoba.
A specialty service at McKenzie's Manitou blacksmith shop was the modification of carriages, including McLaughlins, for travel in deep snow and other rural uses. It was so successful that at one point, he had eight men working for him.
This work got noticed by McLaughlin, and McKenzie was invited to come to Winnipeg in 1899 and open a shop to oversee the repair and modifications of their carriages. That position soon became McLaughlin's Western Canadian manager who appointed sales and repair dealers throughout the region.
McKenzie followed the company's changeover from carriages to cars. When McLaughlin was bought out (see below), he became the Western Canadian manager for General Motors of Canada.
McKenzie gave up that position in 1927 but stayed on as manager of the Winnipeg office until shortly before his death in March 1931, aged 72, at his home at 125 Mayland Street.
The McLaughlin Carriage Company and McLaughlin Motor Company were purchased in 1918 by General Motors of Detroit, Michigan. They were merged with the Chevrolet Motor Company of Canada and GMC Trucks to create General Motors of Canada Ltd.
R. S. McLauchlan was appointed as the company's first president and his brother George was its vice-president.
It took some time for the McLauchlan Motor Company name to disappear from Canada. Cars were marketed as McLauchlin or McLauchlin-Buick until the middle of the Second World War.
The McLaughlin Carriage Works building on Princess Street continued to be the main showroom for the line until 1922, when a new one was built at its other property at Portage Avenue and Maryland Street. The building then became the McLaughlin "used car headquarters" until it was sold off around 1926.
The building's association with the automobile industry continued for a couple more years as it reopened in 1928 as the used car showroom for McRae and Griffith Ltd., a Chevrolet dealer on Cumberland Avenue. It closed in early 1930, likely as a result of the Depression.
November 3, 1931, Winnipeg Tribune
The building did not sit empty for long before it became a Depression relief dining hall.
Early in the Depression, the city tried to deal with the growing number of hungry single men by feeding them restaurant food. As their ranks grew, both locals and those coming from the countryside to look for work in the big city, this became unmanageable. A system of dining halls was set up that would be run by the commission's Single Men's Relief Committee and largely funded by the federal government.
By January 1932, there were five halls in the city feeding around 5,000 men two meals per day. They were managed by Richard A. Murphy, superintendent of the Single Men’s Relief Department, who had his office and administration staff at the 204 Princess Street location.
The number of men swelled to 6,000 by 1936, but the city and commission concentrated their efforts on just two dining hall sites. One was 204 Princess, which had been expanded by opening up the top floors. The other was Winnipeg's original relief dining hall on Water Street, a former CNR immigration shed that also offered a couple of hundred bunks to sleep in at night.
The two meals, breakfast and dinner, were hearty and nutritious as the idea was to keep the men healthy for when the economy improved or when they were needed for the myriad of Depression relief employment schemes. These included everything from land drainage projects, road building, and the construction of facilities such as the Sherbrook Pool and Civic Auditorium.
The Winnipeg Tribune's city editor, A. V. Thomas, visited the Princess Street dining hall as a client in January 1936.
Breakfast was served cafeteria-style from 7 am to 9 am with unlimited bowls of porridge and milk, potatoes, and bread with butter, honey, and jam. Sausages, sausage meat and bacon were rotated from day to day to vary the menu.
For dinner, it was a rotation of stew, roast beef, roast mutton, or rolled veal with potatoes and vegetables and a dessert of stewed fruit or bread pudding. Roast pork was reserved for Sunday dinners.
In all, 3,000 men came for each meal that day. They were welcome to smoke or play cards in a common space, but once meal service time was over, the building was emptied for cleaning and to start preparing the next meal.
For the most part, the dining halls were well-received.
There were at times complaints about overcrowding, worn dishes, and cleanliness. The latter was aimed mainly at the Water Avenue site, which was in an old building with poor ventilation and a combined food service and sleeping bunks under one roof. Princess Street was relatively modern with large windows for ventilation and concrete floors for easy disinfection.
The menus may have sounded like those from a restaurant, but there were complaints about the food at times.
When there were shortages, the halls relied on serving stew, which got monotonous. The quantity of meals that needed to be served each day meant that some food was prepared in advance and heated up for service.
There was also the culinary competency of some of the kitchen staff, who were often recruited from the ranks of the jobless. One letter to the editor complained that "Some of the cooks at Princess hall couldn't boil water, let alone cook a meal."
In late 1937, the dining hall system began to wind down with the closure of Water Avenue. Princess Street followed in the summer of 1938.
In the six years between November 15, 1932, when the Single Men's Relief Committee took over the serving of meals at the halls, and June 30, 1938, when the last meal was cooked, a total of 17,533,366 meals were served. The majority of these, 13,163,040, were from the Princess Street dining hall.
A new chapter for 204 Princess Street began in 1942, when it became the new Western Canadian headquarters for Beatty Brothers, which had been located on Notre Dame Avenue and Midfield Street for 30 years. The building housed its sales floor, a warehouse, parts depot and regional offices.
Beatty Bros. was established in Fergus, Ontario, in 1874 and originally specialized in metal supplies for stables and farms: horse stalls, fencing, hay forks, and the like. The company eventually added home appliances such as electric washing machines, furnaces, and irons. In the 1920s, Beatty's ads claimed its Fergus factory was the largest manufacturer of electric washing machines in the British Empire.
The company retooled its factories for wartime production and struggled to regain its big slice of the Canadian appliance market after the war. Beatty Bros. was sold off in 1961 to General Steel Wares, and the Princess Avenue warehouse and showroom closed soon after.
It was after this point that the building was subdivided into multiple units and several small companies, usually with a manufacturing component, occupied the building at the same time.
From ca. 1962 to 1968, number 204 Princes Street housed Atlas Upholstery, a furniture store, upholsterer and manufacturer of curtains. Around the same period, number 208 was Corrin and Sons Ltd., manufacturers of children's coats and jackets.
In the 1970s, Permalite Electric Manufacturing, Park Leather Ltd. (clothing manufacturers), Neepawa Sportswear, and Beltex Ltd. of Canada all called it home at some point.
Carter's Auction House moved into number 208 in 1987 and eventually took over the entire building. It relocated after it merged with Grey's Auction in the late 1990s.
Black's Auction took over the building in 1999 and appears to have ceased trading in 2001. For the next 16 years, it was used for miscellaneous storage.
Given the size of the properties, CentreVenture created a partnership between themselves, a private developer, and a non-profit arts group to redevelop the space.
The Scott Memorial Hall suffered a foundation failure as its renovation into a mixed-use residential building got underway, and it was demolished in early 2020. A new six-storey mixed-use tower was built in its place.
The tower and upper floors are now 77 rental suites that are owned and operated by Space 2 Developers. The largest of the main floor commercial units is the gallery of aceartinc, which opened in April 2022.
Both buildings now have the single address 216 Princess Street and are known collectively as the Carriage Works.
Related:
Charm not without talent Winnipeg Free Press (Sep 2021)
Winnipeg has new artist-run gallery Winnipeg Free Press
Grand opening of Carriage Works Project Heritage Winnipeg (2022)
208 Princess Street Historic Building Report City of Winnipeg (includes old interior photos)
Mandate Discussion Report CentreVenture (2024)
2021 Annual Report CentreVenture
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