CAA Manitoba Winter 2018 | Page 58

by the way is unlikely to show up in any tourist guides. The four clusters of tall cement pillars, located on the city’s outskirts near Sturgeon Road and Inkster Avenue, are a mystery even to most locals. The piles are neatly set in grid- like patterns, and each is stamped with a series of numbers. Some believe the field was once a concrete testing site. Others think it’s a tribute to humanity’s alien ancestors, lending the site its other nickname, Winnipeg’s Cement Cemetery 58 Winter 2018 CAA MAnitOBA Pilehenge. In fact, the site was set to be developed in the early 1960s by British-American Construction and Materials Limited, a company that, among other things, made concrete pipes, blocks and piles—like the ones that remain on the site today. BACM’s plans to build a manufacturing plant here were scuttled before they began, and the cement test piles—stamped with their height and date of manufacture—are all that remain. —Conan Tobias ConCrete Jungle