At least one SP hack has come out in favour of preserving the Barry. As alluded to in this piece, no one in the private sector has stepped forward to take on the property and the challenge of cleaning it up. It has been on the market for quite sometime.
More symptoms than symbol
Randy Burton, The StarPhoenix
Published: Thursday, December 06, 2007
City Coun. Pat Lorje is likely right about the Barry Hotel, but for all the wrong reasons.
She says the Barry must die because it's a symbol of everything that's wrong with Riversdale. Bulldoze the hotel and the area's spirit will rise like a phoenix from the ashes, she says. Leave it standing and it will continue to be a millstone around the neck of the neighbourhood.
Well no, actually. You don't have to tear down the Barry to get rid of the problems. All you have to do is close the bar.
Deprive the drunks of a place to fight and there would be no calls to police from the place. Without a watering hole, the ne'er-do-wells will have to go somewhere else.
It's not like the Barry is the first building in Saskatoon to have an unsavoury reputation. Those with long memories will remember when the Broadway Theatre was the kind of place where guys in raincoats went to watch soft-core 🞵🞵🞵🞵 movies.
Did anyone demand it be razed in order to cleanse the neighbourhood? No. Eventually it closed, later to be reborn as the Broadway we know today, a symbol of alternative cinema and community involvement.
Those with even longer memories will remember Nicholson Bros. motorcycle shop on Third Avenue, which closed after the Nicholsons decamped for Calgary. For awhile, the building was a Greek restaurant, and it became a peep show, right across from city hall. It was eventually zoned out of action and later became part of a business college.
The peep show was hardly a positive symbol for the downtown, but no one felt the need to call in the bulldozer there, either.
The question for the Barry is not what it represents, but whether it's realistic to renovate the building for something else. The answer lies right across the street at the former Albany Hotel.
In it's more notorious days, the Albany was every bit as unsavoury as the Barry, a dodgy place that featured regular fistfights and worse, including an incident in which the bar's bouncer was stabbed to death right outside the bar.
It too, was a symbol of neighbourhood decay, but no one claimed the answer was the wrecking ball. Instead the Albany was converted to a halfway house for federal prisoners designated as no threat to the community.
Today, it's called Meewasinota, a Cree word for "good place to camp." It now houses about 25 people trying to integrate back into the community and there have been no particular problems, in spite of the reservations expressed by the community at the time. You might even call it a symbol of hope and new beginnings.
However, the cost of renovations likely doesn't justify redeveloping the Barry, says the Meewasinota's owner, Dale Beavis, a longtime Saskatoon hotelier. He says it cost something like $600,000 to $700,000 to refurbish the old Albany, and that was seven years ago.
"I think you could factor that by three or more times now," Beavis said in an interview.
If the city was to think about redeveloping the building, it would not only have to deal with cleaning it up and ensuring it meets the proper building codes, but the whole design would likely have to be changed, too.
This is a problem the old Albany didn't have, since Corrections Canada was able to use the small rooms of the hotel.
"We didn't really move any walls at all, so that was relatively inexpensive, but as soon as you have to change things around, that really, really gets expensive," Beavis said.
It might be possible to construct low-income housing in the place, but it might be cheaper to simply build new.
As for the heritage value of the Barry, it was completely rebuilt in 1946 after a major fire, so it's no longer a relic of Saskatoon's boom years but merely a post-war survivor.
Still, Beavis looks at the pending closure of the Barry with mixed feelings. Even though the building could likely be saved, "there's a perception over on 20th that it's not a desirable area. In reality it's changing and it's probably changing faster than the perception.
"If that building was sitting on Second Avenue North, recycling it would probably be the way to go, but there, it's just so risky.
"If I were to say to you today, would you like to get up right now and go have your office in the Barry Hotel? Even if it was a nice new building?
"But you know, I had my office in the Albany back in 2000 when we were renovating and it's a very nice place to be around. There's nothing going on over there that isn't happening everywhere else, but now I'm talking about the daytime.
"But if the night-time drinking crowd went away, the night time wouldn't be that bad either."
It may not be economic to rebuild the Barry Hotel, but to say it could never live down its past is to ignore a lot of Saskatoon history.
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