Development Rumours

[someone123]

ANS is reporting that 13 companies have submitted bits to redevelop the Dennis Building, Hansard Building (Acadian Recorder), and the empty lot surrounding them. HTNS is one bidder along with a mix of developers, some of whom have a track record of good heritage developments (e.g. Starfish and Steve Caryi, who is working on the NFB Building) and others less so. It sounds like there may be some diverse and creative proposals for the properties. The redevelopment might include improvements to Granville Street and an extension of the pedestrian mall.

One deficiency of the RFP, in my opinion, is that the province is not requiring that the upper 3 storeys of the Dennis Building be saved. Those floors may be built out of brick but they are an interesting component of the building, along with the copper cornice. They are an indication of how the city grew and evolved over time. Knocking those floors off would be like knocking the top brick levels off of Morse's Teas/Jerusalem Warehouse, or the silly proposal to cut the Champlain Building down from 6 floors to 4. Hopefully the winner will preserve at least the entire facade.

Earlier ANS also reported that the new owner of the Waverley Inn intends to keep operating it. A few weeks ago they suggested that the obvious outcome would be for the building to be knocked down and replaced by something new. This is a landmark that has been operating as a hotel since the 1870's and has had guests like Oscar Wilde, P. T. Barnum, and George Vanderbilt. In almost any other city it would be a protected heritage property.

What stands out to me from all of this is that one organization can say a building is unsalvageable or not economically viable while another may consider it very attractive to carry on maintaining or sympathetically redevelop the same property (even though profit margins may be a bit smaller). I don't put a lot of stock into single opinions that tend to be repeated as fact by the media, nor do I tend to believe reports that heritage requirements will grind all development in the city to a halt (a particularly weak argument when so few development sites have heritage buildings on them).