Rocket ship looking for new launch pad
CAMBRIDGE — The city’s silver sentinel still stands, nose cone pointed to the heavens, on the same Hespeler Road patch of high ground it has held for 56 years.
But the iconic steel rocket ship won’t stand guard at the front entrance of the soon-to-close Satelite Motel for much longer.
That’s because two apartment buildings, with 120 total units, will rise on the tightly packed site as the old 22-room motel is torn down.
And the retro rocket ship? It must
find new space to occupy.
Housing Cambridge, a nonprofit which will own one of the new buildings featuring 33 affordable units, has put out a request for proposal on the oversized toy planet-hopper in a state of perpetual liftoff.
It is to be sold, with funds helping pay construction costs of those prized affordable units. It also needs to be relocated, Housing Cambridge insists, somewhere in Cambridge.
The old mock rocket, standing four astronauts high on an Ibeam pedestal and older than Cambridge itself, is about to blast off into the unknown.
“I go past it quite often,” said Susan Bardwell, whose father-inlaw Horace Bardwell ordered the rocket built. “Great memories there.”
Yes, memories of her late husband George, who used to cut the grass and open the pool at the motel — with the family home at the back of the lot — that his father Horace Bardwell was responsible for building.
Verda Bardwell, a powerhouse organizer and Horace’s wife, scrubbed and cleaned all the motel rooms. She also served out-of-this-world breakfasts in the long-lost Orbit Room too. Susan helped George work in the motel office in the evenings.
The motel was Horace’s idea after he closed his Water Street Canadian Tire store in 1960. He set up the Satelite (with its unique single ‘l’ spelling) pit stop for weary travellers on the barren outer rings of Galt two years later.
Horace had seen a similar “Final Frontier”-themed hotel in Florida, his Waterloo-raised granddaughter Laura Archibald said. He imported the enterprising idea back home to the future Cambridge.
“He was truly the entrepreneur,” said Archibald, who lives in Kitchener. “Everyone was space crazy at the time.”
The dummy rocket ship Horace had George Irving of Irving Steel in Galt construct for his front entrance fit the moonjumping aspirations of the emerging Star Trek decade.
In 1962, John Glenn circled the world three times in his Friendship 7 module. The first American flung into orbit got there with the upward shove of a silver Atlas rocket and the Satelite’s rocket mimics it.
“The rocket looks pretty much as good today as when they put it up,” Susan Bardwell said. “It doesn’t look worn at all.”
Four potential rocket purchasers have inquired to Housing Cambridge, which, along with a private partner, purchased the motel site a year ago. Suitors will be asked where they would move the rocket.
The deadline for sealed bids is Oct. 10.
“It’s one of those things everybody seems to remember,” Housing Cambridge general manager Steve Garrison said of the rocket. “It’s been there forever.”
Forever is coming to an end. Many things have changed since Horace Bardwell sold the motel to an accountant after a decade or so.
The motel, which will close by Halloween, no longer has an Orbit Room. The pool was filled in years ago because unruly guests kept smashing beer bottles around it. But the rocket ship keeps attracting visitors all on its own.
“People come in the summer time to take a picture,” said Jeet Dhaliwal, who has owned the motel for 26 years. “They take pictures with the rocket all the time.”
Pictures are enough for Susan Bardwell. She isn’t interested in making a bid for her late fatherin-law’s rocket ship.
“My kids don’t want it either,” Bardwell said. “It’s too big. It’d be fun at first and then, all of a sudden, you’ve got this monstrosity to look after.”
Archibald, however, aims to bid and take the rocket for a spin.
“We’re hoping we have a chance, being family,” Archibald said. “We’re trying to figure out where to move it.”