6 days ago
Weeks after pedestrian-friendly facelift, paint already peeling on new Graham Avenue murals
Murals on the now pedestrian-friendly Graham Avenue were meant to bring a splash of colour to downtown Winnipeg. But just weeks after being painted, cracks are already beginning to form in some of that artwork.
"I think anything that beautifies the downtown is a good project," downtown resident Barb Janes said on Wednesday.
"I'm sad they didn't do more research on the paint, because it's already peeling up, and that's kind of disrespectful to the artists."
After being used for three decades as a transit corridor, buses were moved off of Graham Avenue in July, when the city introduced its new transit plan, and a pilot project was introduced to transform the downtown street into a pedestrian corridor.
Rochelle Squires, the CEO of CentreVenture, one of the downtown organizations that worked on transforming the area, said murals now on the street were funded through a $100,000 US grant from the American charity Bloomberg Philanthropies. The work was done by local company Cool Streets, over an approximately 10 day-period.
On Tuesday, peeling paint could already be seen on some parts of the murals, and Squires said Cool Streets will be responsible for any repairs.
"We understand that there's some repairs that need to be made to the street paint, and that's part of the maintenance agreement with Cool Streets," Squires said.
"Ongoing maintenance will be part of that, absolutely."
Stéphane Dorge of Cool Streets, who was the project manager on the mural project, blamed some of the peeling issues on the condition of the street, as well as the quick timeline in which the pieces were painted.
"There's definitely more paint peeling than we had hoped for, but essentially two days before we started painting, this was an industrial road for transit buses only," Dorge said.
"It was 20 years of transit buses leaking oil on the street, heavy tire wear really polishing the concrete, so we anticipated that longevity of the paint wouldn't be the same as using the product on brand new concrete or brand new asphalt, as we typically would."
According to Dorge, the murals are only supposed to be on the street for this year and next year, before he said the city will work on a more permanent design for the corridor, and they do plan to touch up the murals at the end of this upcoming winter.
"It's something that's meant to fade, it's meant to be replaced in the long term," he said.
Despite the peeling, Dorge believes the murals are still a great benefit to the downtown.
"It's definitely a challenge to work on this scale at this speed, and this type of surface, but I think the benefits far outweigh the visual impacts of the wear," Dorge said.
In a statement the city of Winnipeg said, "Before the paint was applied we decided not to chemically treat the street, as this would have added at least a week to the timeline and increased costs and chemical run off. We did, however, clean it as thoroughly as possible prior to the first application.
"As this is a pilot project, we'll be able to use this data when considering the permanent redesign of the street."
Cracks forming in Winnipeg's plan to rejuvenate downtown street
11 hours ago
The City of Winnipeg got to work this summer on a rejuvenation plan to give Graham Avenue a more dynamic feel, with the work including a street mural covering 24,000 square feet of road. Now, less than two months later, the street mural is peeling.
