Premier Event

Set squarely on York Avenue, a secondary thoroughfare running southwest to northeast through Winnipeg’s downtown, is a ten-storey modernist building constructed in the late 1950s. Designed by an Icelandic-immigrant architect and erected by one of the city’s Belgian-immigrant construction firms, it was for a decade the city’s tallest structure, used primarily as a home for government and administrative offices. A variety of services still occupy it, yet few people, if asked today (or even sixty years ago), would be able to identify the person for whom it is named: John Norquay. One of the first premiers of Manitoba, Norquay also has a mountain named after him in Banff, Alberta, as well as a town in south-central Saskatchewan, though the latter’s website contains scant reference to its eponym.

As someone who went through the K–12 school system in Winnipeg from the mid‑1960s to the mid‑’70s and picked up some Manitoba history along the way, I grew up knowing about the...