Long and McQuade to Move to Polo Park Area

 

Long and McQuade, a Canadian national music store, started off pretty small for its Winnipeg location. They were the third location in Canada to open in 1971 and took over Winnipeg Piano, a city institution on Portage. Business boomed at Long and McQuade moved to Osborne the following year. By 1978, they had moved to Corydon.

My impression of Corydon was that it wasn't a big store but I was not sure how deep the store went or if it included a basement. One thing is clear is that the move to Stafford was one of constant expansion as they took over large swaths of the old Videon building in 1997 until there was little left that they didn't operate from. The move to Pembina Highway was a purpose-built store of 25,000 square feet in 2016. 

There are three locations in the city now at Wall Street, Henderson Highway and Pembina Highway. It is the Wall Street location that is moving to Polo Park because there is very little room to expand at their present location. At one point there was a very music shops all along Portage and Wall Street but pretty much the only one left is St. John's Music. The Pembina location boasted it had the largest curved wall of guitars in the world. At 400 guitars, they might be right.

The old Wall Street location used to be Gorden Price/Mother's Music and became a Long and McQuade in 1993 and full renovation in 2014. Mother's Music used to be right across from University of Winnipeg in the 1980s.

The Henderson Highway location is fairly new at 2019. It was a former location of River City Sports. Henderson Highway is filled with music stores.

The location for the relocated Wall Street/Polo Park location is on Ellice just east of Empress Street. It is a multi-million purchase of the whole 9 acres and 120,000 square foot building where Long and McQuade will occupy 50,000 square feet of what is presently Bianca Amor's Liquidation Supercentre.

In 2007, the whole complex was purchased by Cabela from Sidney I. Robinson who used to operate S.I.R. Warehouse, a business not dissimilar to Cabela's. Prior to that, the building was used by MTS for their fleet vehicles. 

Much of the area around Polo Park was industrial right up to the 1980s.

For those wondering what happens to Bianca Amor's, it has found a smaller spot on St. James.

The new Long and McQuade's is modelled after Halifax and Calgary which feature a store and distribution centre. The company has quite a bit of product going from place to place and at 50,000 square feet of space, the new Polo Park location can handle that.

This is a massive investment in the city and evidence that music lessons and musical instruments are big business. There isn't a company that I know of quite as coast to coast in their field as Long and McQuade.  An employee increase for the people hired for the distribution centre and for music lessons is guaranteed. Total numbers are not known. And of course, the construction and millions spent will help the economy here in 2024.