FINAL EXAM AT CONCORD
Crews with jones demolition work on tuesday to tear down the former concord public school on raymond avenue. the property south of the riverside baseball park is slated for residential development.
Anyone who loved watching the fireworks classic Burning Schoolhouse as a child might like seeing the former Concord elementary school being bashed into rubble by heavy machinery.
“I’m a teacher, so this feels kind of funny for me,” Ashley Lafreniere said Tuesday from her yard on Janisse Drive in Riverside, where she claimed to have the “best views of the destruction” of the longvacant school directly behind her house.
On Tuesday, walls were ripped open revealing classrooms looking pretty much as they were left when the school was closed in 2010. A collection of old chalkboards was piled up outside awaiting removal from the site.
Workers from the Jones Group started demolition of the building’s exterior Monday after two weeks of work inside that included containing and removing potentially hazardous asbestos. The city hired a third-party expert to make sure the asbestos was safely and properly removed, said Colleen Middaugh, the project administrator for the City of Windsor, which owns the property and plans to develop it into residential building lots.
Late last week, an occupational hygienist gave the green light for demolition.
“We’re confident, based on her review, that the contractor is following the regulations and the asbestos has been fully abated as best as it can be,” said Middaugh, who is overseeing the demolition. It’s expected that the demolition, awarded to the Jones Group for $247,000, will be completed in four more weeks. By then, the land should be backfilled with soil and seeded with grass. It will be a vacant patch of grass until the city moves forward with developing it. That should start in the next few months as the city starts the approval process to divide the property into lots. “We don’t have a definite lotting plan right now, but it’s going to be low-density housing for sure,” said project administrator Stacey McGuire, who is overseeing the redevelopment. “Either single family or townhouses or a combination of the two.”
The total number of homes will be between 10 and 15 on a cul-desac off Raymond Avenue.
The city will put in the road, sidewalks, sewers, watermains and other servicing and sell the lots on the open market, either to individuals or a builder wanting them all. The city has done this before, developing city-owned properties into residential lots that increase tax revenues in existing neighbourhoods. In recent years, the former Edward Street community centre and the former Town of Tecumseh water treatment plant near the Ganatchio Trail in Riverside have been redeveloped. “Really, we always have to weigh whether it’s going to be feasible from a monetary standpoint to sell the lots, if we think we’re going to break even or not,” said McGuire. The Concord property is directly south of the Riverside Baseball Park and the former Riverside Arena site that’s currently being proposed for a Miracle Diamond project involving $2.5 million in fundraising pledged by Riverside Minor Baseball. The lease agreement, where Riverside Minor Baseball would pay $1 per year for the property, is going to council for approval Monday.
The Concord school was closed eight years ago as its students, along with students from Princess Anne, moved to the new David Suzuki elementary school. “David Suzuki is a lovely school, but it’s huge and it was overcrowded from the get-go,” said Riverside resident Karen Gunby, who was walking by the Concord site Tuesday and taking photos of the demolition. “I like the smaller schools, it’s more like family.” Gunby said before the fencing went up this spring, she dug up some flowers at Concord and replanted them on her property. “So I have some memories of Concord in my garden, which I like.”