Ensuring the future of a Lunenburg landmark
What was Rachel Bailey thinking as she recently stood in the restored classroom inside the iconic Lunenburg Academy?
For starters, how, when she attended Grade 2 in that very room, her teacher, Mrs. Crouse, was “kind of scary” compared to the “really nice” Miss Crouse, who taught her the year before.
About her good buddies that year, Joanie Powers and Francie Knickle, who may go by Francis now that she is a Supreme Court judge in Newfoundland and Labrador.
About how it was a wonder that no one was mortally injured that year playing on The Wave, a perilous-looking piece of playground equipment which, in scaled-down form, sits in the back of the classroom.
And also, how so much of that room and the whole building still feels familiar to her: the old wainscotting on the walls; the hardwood floors and stair risers worn down by the tens of thousands of children’s feet that have walked, skipped and run through those halls there since the school opened in 1895.
But most of all, the sense of uncertainty she has felt since the Town of Lunenburg announced that it wanted to divest itself of the academy, possibly opening it up for private development.
“We don’t think that would be the best use of the building in the long term to have it in private hands,” said Bailey.
I tend to agree.
DIVESTMENT SPREE
Whenever possible, I love to visit Lunenburg. A person can lose themselves in its
Old Town, which has won UNESCO World Heritage Site-status as the best-surviving example in North America of a planned British colonial settlement, through its wellordered streets with their arresting houses and buildings, and along its waterfront so redolent of the great era of sail and the glory days of the Grand Banks fishery.
Something, though, is up in this one-of-a-kind town where the mayor and council have been on a divestment spree of late.
The biggest and most controversial announcement, so far, involves Lunenburg’s historic Blockhouse Hill, for which the town recently issued a request for proposals seeking designs for a residential development on a municipalityowned nine-hectare site there.
The outcry has been such that some of the online comments criticizing the proposal have been reported to the RCMP.
But just wait and hear the noise if something happens to the academy, which closed as a public school in 2012 and has found life thanks to a massive effort by volunteers, and $6 million in public and private funding.
Bailey, once Lunenburg’s mayor, now president of the Lunenburg Academy Foundation, is a perfect guide through the building, known locally as the Castle on the Hill, for the imposing way it towers over the town.
‘STORYBOOK PLACE’
Her grandparents and parents studied here. So did her three sons.
“It was a storybook place to go to school,” she said of her time at the academy, even if it is built on a rise of land known as Gallows Hill, ensuring that successive generations of students believed it to be haunted.
The massive building — three-storeys high, painted red, black and white, with a complex architectural lineage that is best described by a layperson as simply “Victorian” — is just the kind of place that kids tell stories about, and production companies like to use for movies, television shows, and commercials.
I would recommend a visit. The ceilings are 4.5-metres high, just like they were in Bailey’s day. The post-and-beam construction remains. So do the hooks where boys in one room and girls, another, hung their coats. So do some of the old desks where kids from Lunenburg, and later surrounding areas, carved their initials when they should have been memorizing their times tables.
In a place of honour, hangs a brass plaque “in glorious memory of the Lunenburg School Boys Who Gave their Lives in the Great War.”
Bailey leads me past a rack of Seagull Yearbooks, detailing the comings and goings of life there back to 1935, and glass cases protecting a championship banner the school’s intermediate girls basketball team won in 1946, and a selection of programs from the musicals that Mildred (Pearl) Oxner, “remembered as Lunenburg’s ‘Mrs. Music’” mounted during her 27 years there.
You can still hear young voices in the building, but at 10:30 on a Thursday morning, they are the joyful cries of newborns in the Babies & Books gathering, a wing of the library which now dominates the main floor.
The renovations have made the Academy a public hub: along with the library, offices for language and learn-at-sea schools, MLA Susan CorkumGreek and different cultural organizations are located there.
On the top floor, instead of classrooms and the principal’s office, as it was in Bailey’s day, lives the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance, which is a marvel.
Each year, emerging artists and distinguished conductors, teachers and musicians from around the world arrive there to teach, study and perform.
MUSIC IN THE AIR
After a recital the night before, the rooms were quiet the day I visited. But music — from the in-house pianos, harpsicords, and pump organs and the luminaries and up-and-comers who ply their art there — still seemed to hang in the air.
“The most important recital hall east of Montreal,” is how artistic director Burt Warthen describes the space. With windows that provide a 360-degree perspective of the surrounding green spaces, the town, and Lunenburg’s harbour, it also has to be the hall with the best view.
For how long, is the question.
Right now, the town is the building’s landlord. The Lunenburg Academy Foundation had been working towards assuming more of the building’s costs.
But last April, the foundation was surprised to receive a letter from the town offering to sell it the academy outright.
Recently, The Lunenburg Barnacle broke the story that the town had written to Parks Canada about its intention to sell the Academy, which has a National Historic Site designation, leaving open the possibility that it could be sold for private development — a possibility confirmed by private conversations between the foundation and the mayor’s office.
In Lunenburg, discussions about things like the sale and leasing of land are held in camera, away from public eyes.
An emailed statement from a town spokesperson said, “the only option we’re exploring at this time is divestiture of the Academy to the Lunenburg Academy.”
A further wrinkle in the story emerged when Lunenburg’s current mayor Matt Risser, the driving force between the town’s divestment program, announced he was resigning.
Because the land is zoned as institutional, a buyer couldn’t turn it into housing development, but could use it for a wide range of other purposes, from a hospital or school, to offices, restaurants, or even a park or parking lot.
FEASIBILITY STUDY
The mere prospect has left the Academy Foundation scrambling to figure out a way forward. They want it to remain a public space and have hired a consultant to perform a feasibility study on taking over the property, which ran at a small deficit in 2022.
Some sort of endowment will definitely be needed if the foundation goes it alone. They would also have to find other streams of revenue.
“We know this beautiful old building is going to have capital requirements all of the time,” said Tom Hayes, chairperson of the academy’s capital campaign.
But some things are just worth the price.