Well. I left town for one day and came home only to discover that Joel Rose had the Broadway School demolished. First, the facts:
1. JR has owned the school for years.
2. All he had to do was request a demo permit and there's nothing anyone could do. That's how this private property thing works.
3. There are currently no heritage by-laws in Woodstock to prevent this from happening.
As for hearsay, I head that JR had attempted to reconfigure the building as apartments, but thought that the cost of bringing the building up to code (we're talking elevators, electrical overhaul, h-vac etc.) was too much. Apparently he has 'no future plans' for the site - I'm guessing it was torn down so he wouldn't have to continue to pay property taxes. All of which is his business, except....
When the Wesylan church was torn down, it was the Weslyan congregation's business, and the same for all those other historic buildings Woodstock continues to lose. And people inevitably get upset but there is no way to channel the loss people experience when a beautiful and still structurally sound old building gets replaced by a newer, uglier chunk of vinyl. Our collective heritage is going the way of the dodo.
If we planned a forum about preserving historic buildings, would anybody come? This is something I have been thinking about for a long time. If we're serious as a community about our built heritage, we need to get off the couch (or in my case, offline!) and do something about it. And I don't just mean complain. I mean come up with workable real-world solutions to alleviate the problem.
If you're game, let me know. If not, see you on facebook.
2 comments:
Mary Dimock and Emily Clark are two people I've spoken to in the last 36 hours who both said they would be interested in brainstorming sessions and further planning.
You're right, we can't just complain and we have to figure out solid plans years before it comes an issue. Let's let the Broadway School and the Wesleyan Church be examples.
I'm not from here and I feel a sense of loss every time a piece of history is beat to the ground and I've been watching and taking photos and thoroughly felt the loss.
At the Broadway School yesterday, a woman was there and she said things like, 'there's the gym! we used to have Christmas concerts there.' or "There's Mrs. Stevens classroom, she taught me Grade 1 and she was the best teacher ever."
That's just one person's story and there were 80 years of them wrapped up in that building.
Let's be forward thinking...what's to come next? The Woodstock Middle School perhaps? Plans are in motion to build new schools and then what happens to that one? What can we do?
I'm on board to start asking and planning for our future as part of New Brunswick's Oldest Town!
Thank you for this post, Amy. I agree with one of the FB comments on your post: much of the blame for this trend can be attributed to town politics. I am consistently mystified by the decisions made by Woodstock town council--decisions that seem to favour the destruction of historic buildings, the erosion of public space, and the mighty car. However, this seems to be a reflection of Carleton County culture. Our built environment mirrors our values as a society, and I see very little respect for historic buildings, beautiful design, quality workmanship or, frankly, art in general, in the Woodstock/Carleton County area. Gorgeous old homes that in other communities would be restored, are slapped with vinyl siding which is not only an eyesore, but an environmental catastrophe, or these buildings are left to moulder and crumble while hideous, soulless, expendable, plastic bungalows are erected as replacements only feet away. The subject of your post--the recently demolished school in Woodstock--reminds me of a building in Vancouver that was in a similar state. Not only was the structure restored, but the apartments that were built in the space were sold for *lots of money* and the owner and developer profited greatly, because on the West Coast of Canada, and in Nova Scotia, and in Paris, and in lots of other places in the world, people value heritage and culture, and they *really want* to live in spaces that are beautiful. Can self-respect, as a culture, come from legislation? I care, a lot. But I have little hope that attitudes will change before downtown Woodstock is totally destroyed. It is happening before our eyes, while the Walmart sprawl of upper Woodstock grows like a cancer.
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