"That was the encyclopedic idea of the world at the time. We don't do that anymore," said Wins Bridgman, the founder of BridgmanCollaborative Architecture. "In the 19th century, people would create gardens that had greenhouses with plants from every part of the world. You would do that in such a way that you would be able to say, 'I brought the entire world here.' And it related in Winnipeg because we were sending wheat all over the world and we were able to get goods from all over the world to come back to us. It was quite a cosmopolitan city."

But flash forward to the late 1950s — the Gingerbread City Hall had aged into a relic of the Great Depression and two world wars that stunted economic growth in Winnipeg for decades. The windows leaked wind and the roof leaked rain. The doors in some of the turrets were — not unlike Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory — three- and four-feet tall.

Indeed, then mayor Steve Juba wasn't a fan of city hall or the adjacent Market Square, which for decades had been home to kiosks and shops selling everything from butchered animals to live poultry to garden vegetables.

"I don't," Juba was once said to utter, "want any @#$@# chicken farmers where I work."

Fair enough. Buildings can take on human qualities. They get old, and some age better than others. And Mayor Juba, with a flair for the dramatic, would personally provide tours where he would actually shake the city hall rafters. He would inform visitors of the bones of a billy goat in the tower (believed to be left by pranksters) that could not be removed because the floor boards wouldn't bear the weight of a man.

Juba would tell reporters, only half joking, that he had taken out an extra insurance policy should the clock tower, which hadn't kept time since the 1940s, collapse on his desk.

Meanwhile, as the future of Winnipeg's city hall was being debated, there was a series of developments — globally, nationally and locally — that would combine to change the face of Winnipeg architecture well into the 21st century. It would be the most dramatic evolution of urban landscape since the city's construction apex of the early 1900s.

First, the soldiers came home. The young men back from Europe had families, made babies, and flooded into the swelling suburbs. Over a 30-year period, from 1941 to 1971, the city's population grew from 297,739 to 535,480.

By the mid-1960s, the children of the 1940s were coming of age. So was Canada, for that matter. The war effort had given Canada a new-found prestige on the world stage and the nation was shedding the colonial apron strings of the British Empire at the same time as it was celebrating its 100th birthday in 1967.