Winnipeg's Nutty Club Building Saved in Real Life, and on the M & M Sub.

Winnipeg’s Nutty Club building may become an official part of Winnipeg's heritage.

As the CBC reports, the city's historical buildings committee has nominated warehouse, formally known as the Scott-Bathgate Building, to be added to city's list of heritage buildings.

The five-story brick-and-stone structure on Pioneer Avenue was built in 1905, at the height of the railway boom, when Winnipeg was one of North America's fastest-growing cities.

Before making candy, the building was an important distribution centre for the east-west railway traffic that coursed through Winnipeg.

The city wants to protect architectural elements on all four of the building's external facades, as well as the ornamental tin ceilings and heavy timber on the inside of the warehouse.

I’m glad the Nutty Club building may be saved. But it has already been preserved on the M & M Sub.

Some years ago, I took photos of it, then enlarged them on a colour photocopier.

After cutting it out, I affixed it to the wall as part of the backdrop in my imagined town of Fort Frances, Ont.

It has a place alongside other old or disappeared buildings from the city—like the Five Roses flour mill and the Codville building.

Presented this way, as static stand-alone photos, the buildings don’t look very convincing, I know.

But seen on the periphery of the eye, while focused on a train moving through the foreground, they cause the brain to “see” a real building there—one of the ways our brains and eyes play tricks on us.

(See my earlier post on photography, titled The Ghent Altarpiece, Model Railroading and Seeing With the Brain.)

Anyway, like I said the Nutty Club building lives on on the layout—whether or not it remains in real life. Which it just might be able to do now.

Here are some photos of other buildings on the layout.