Nimmons building gets committee nod for heritage status
A city committee endorsed labelling a 120-year-old red brick Calgary abode as a municipal historic resource on Monday, even though the ranch house may be moved slightly in the future to make way for a nearby development.
The conversation in council chambers about protecting the Nimmons Residence in perpetuity, so future owners can’t demolish or dramatically renovate the home, prompted questions about the relationship between heritage preservation and new developments in a city keen on increasing density.
Located on a large corner lot on busy 14th Street S.W., the city considers the Nimmons Residence a community landmark, one of Calgary’s “finest examples” of Queen Anne Revival-style architecture, and a symbol of Calgary’s “golden age of ranching.”
But the future of the large innercity lot the home sits on remains unknown, with previous chatter centred around physically moving the Nimmons house onto the front corner of the land to make way for an L-shaped development on the same lot.
“Does the act of designating it as a heritage resource today prevent a viable development to happen in the future? Are we going to be faced with the situation we face with the Eau Claire smokestack?” said Ward 9 Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra after Monday’s planning and urban development committee meeting.
A decision last year by municipal politicians to pull the heritage designation off a 27-metre-tall brick smokestack in Eau Claire, so the monument could be moved 10 metres to the southwest and eventually re-designated, marked the first time a municipally protected site in Alberta had been de-designated.
“De-designating a heritage asset is not something we want to get into the habit of doing because it cheapens the idea of actually designating heritage,” Carra said.
Built in 1898, the striking house named after its owners and pioneer ranchers William and Isabelle Nimmons, was first on the council agenda in 2015.
At the time, a land use re-designation was sought to pave the way for additional development on the parcel, and during that application, the home’s owner agreed to protect the historic Nimmons Residence.
At Monday’s meeting, city administration was officially asking councillors to designate the site as a municipal historic resource, with the understanding the owner may “permanently move the Nimmons Residence a short distance within the existing land parcel, to increase development flexibility on-site without cutting off public view of the historic residence.”
“If we’re going to densify and see new developments, I think that this was the best possible solution for this plot of land that we could arrive at,” Clint Robertson, senior heritage planner, told elected officials Monday.
The heritage designation will now go to council for a final say.