Winnipeg was once thought to be Canada’s version of Chicago, a nexus of train lines where freight and people would be transferred for passage between east and west. Victim today of some of the highest real estate taxes in Canada, said to be a hotbed of child poverty, and nearly flooded out a couple of years ago, Winnipeg lives on speculations of what it could have been. In A Winnipeg Album: Glimpses of the Way We Were, journalists John David Hamilton and Bonnie Dickie offer up Winnipeg’s colourful past in a chronological pictorial review that includes settlers’ carts headed to town in 1872, the 1886 City Hall gingerbreaded to look like an Istanbul palace, early educational institutions done up in Gothic revival, and grain merchants’ domed mansions. There are photos of Governor General Byng in bespoke splendour, plutocrats in full kit, and the flood of 1950. Hamilton’s accompanying explanations are lucid.