Goodbye, Wedgewood
Built by a town, loved by a community, swallowed by a city
The pool at the Wedgewood Park Recreation Centre is being drained for the last time at the end of this week. The building will be bulldozed before the month is out.
The plan is to get the land paved over before the province’s asphalt plants slow down and the frost comes — to expand the parking lot for the adjacent, 74,000 square-foot Paul Reynolds Community Centre.
Wedgewood already sits in the shadow of the new, bigger, custom recreation facility, still under construction. By comparison, the old building looks rough, worn, like a service outbuilding.
But inside, the Wedgewood Park Recreation Centre is full of activity.
Around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, early bird swimmers are on their way out, ready to take on the day. Regulars in the deep-water fitness class are headed in. It is their last class before the move.
“I started coming years ago just for exercise and have continued to come for exercise, but also it’s the friendship,” said Sandra Mitchell Cooney.
Vera Schofield worked the 50-minute class into her regimen about three years ago and is grateful for what it has done for her joints and arthritis pain she felt walking.
“The kickstart was that I thought that I need to see if this will be of benefit to my legs and it certainly has been,” she said. The close-knit community of pool users helped her stick with it.
Dorothy Burke, also headed in for class, passed by a table in the front hallway, carrying sheets of information on the new recreation centre and a guestbook where people can write in memories of the place.
“It’s always served the community, because when my kids were little 40, 50 years ago, we used to come up here swimming as a family,” she said.
Paula Kelly spent a great deal of her time at the 18-metre pool over the years and remembers her first visits.
“The pool had just opened and my father taught me how to swim down here. I was young — seven, eight — and the swim team was started or was starting and my cousins were all joining so my aunt, and I remember my parents, were saying you should go down and join,” she said. She associates the space with: “fun, family friends, community.”
Kelly went on to have a successful swimming career, representing the province in the 1977 Canada Games and named to represent Canada on the 1980 Olympic team. The Games in Moscow were ultimately boycotted by Canada. Kelly moved into the sport of open water swimming and said she continues to enjoy swimming today.
“We had lots of people,” she remembers of the old Wedgewood Park swim team, recalling the building was also generally a hangout for kids. It was where her brother and sister both worked for a time and many people found employment.
Wedgewood Park was a town in Kelly’s early days there. It emerged from a small housing development, moving from fewer than 100 homes in the early 1960s to about 400 by the late 1980s. Town status was issued in 1978, according to a handwritten note on the area’s history, provided from the City of St. John’s archives.
It was the town that built the indoor pool and added to the building over time, including town hall offices and a gymnasium, eventually becoming the Wedgewood Park Recreation Centre known today. The town eventually joined with the City of St. John’s; was, in reality, swallowed up by the expanding capital city. An agreement for amalgamation was signed in 1991.
“When you think about it, it’s quite incredible that a very small community had the ability and the foresight and the community spirit to build a pool in their community, given their size,” said St. John’s Coun. Danny Breen, who represents area residents today, noting the building became even more important in its function over time. “And people who are living here still remember that. So this has a very emotional attachment to people in the area.”
The recreation facility being built next door has been named after the last mayor of Wedgewood Park, who also served as the area’s first representative on the city’s council. Breen said the naming is meant to be a nod to all of the people who simply made the town work.
The new facility is the first recreation facility to be purposebuilt by the City of St. John’s, with others — including the H.G.R. Mews Community Centre at Mundy Pond — having been inherited.
Tendered at just under $32 million, the Paul Reynolds Community Centre will include a 25metre pool with two waterslides and a “lazy river,” among other features. It will also have a 6,700 square foot gymnasium and multi-purpose spaces to meet the needs of all ages.
According to The Telegram archives, when the replacement of the two recreation centres
and the addition of a third came to a head in January 2012, the city’s director of recreation said 175 kids were on the waiting list for after-school programs at Wedgewood Park alone.
“In this case, with this building, we just can’t offer the programs that are required, so we did an evaluation through our recreation master plan and identified the need for new recreation facilities. According to that assessment, this was the first one to be replaced,” Breen said.
“We’re going to be able to offer more opportunities, more diverse programs in the new centre and meet the needs of the residents,” he said.
The new building is scheduled to open in January 2017.