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A collection of tours through Winnipeg’s distinctive neighbourhoods invites city residents to engage with its stories and landmarks in a more intimate way.
Bike Historic Winnipeg’s summer season starts this week with a weekly tour through St. Boniface, showcasing various landmarks and offering a unique view on the lives that shaped them.
For tour guide Raymond Sokalski, who offers this tour free of charge through Jeudis Franco Thursdays, the passion for seeing Winnipeg through the cyclist’s lens started over three decades ago. “I was a high school history teacher close to downtown Winnipeg at Kelvin High School,” he shared in an interview on Morning Light, “and a highlight for me – and I think for the students every year judging by how much they talked about it afterwords – was a tour we did of the Exchange District, Upper Fort Garry, ending at The Forks every year. It [made] everything we’d been studying in the classroom alive and relevant because history is lived right here in the streets of our city.”
For the St. Boniface tour, patrons ride for an hour, covering about two and a half kilometres with thirteen stops along the way. Those stops allow for bikers to get to know some of the people who shaped the neighbourhood such as Marius Benoist, who, among other titles was the director of the St. Boniface Museum, an integral part of the Theatre Cercle Moliere, and helped to form the St. Boniface Sinfonietta. Benoist is also associated with the historic Kittson House, which still stands on La Verendrye Street.
“When you’re riding on your bike, and you have a chance to stop and gaze up or gaze around the corner,” says Sokalski, “you notice things that are clear signs of something that’s intriguing about the past.”
Intriguing histories also reveal themselves on other neighbourhood tours which Sokalski arranges privately on the weekends. Other itineraries offered include a tour oriented around urban Indigenous history which features stops at the former Assiniboia Indian Residential School and The Forks. “We cover quite a bit of ground,” says Sokalski of both the physical and historical journey involved in the tours, “but in a way that's manageable. And you sort of get a sense of the breadth and the micro version of history.”
The tours of St. Boniface are described as “Franco-friendly” and are offered on Thursdays throughout the summer starting on June 12. For more information or to book an alternate tour, riders are encouraged to contact Sokalski at bikehistoricwinnipeg@gmail.com.