Two legacy buildings seem doomed for demolition
You could hardly imagine two more different buildings.
The Minchau blacksmith shop opened in 1925 on 81 Avenue and 101 Street, back when Strathcona was home to a thriving German immigrant community.
The solid red brick building, with its distinctive roof line and its arched casement windows, gives a certain Wild West feel to the streetscape.
It’s the last building of its kind left in Edmonton, a legacy of the pioneer families who shaped this city with their labour, with their hands.
The glass-walled modernist mansion Soaring is a sleek, dramatic home on a cliff overlooking the North Saskatchewan River. Situated on 4.8 hectares of landscaped grounds, Soaring was built in the late 1950s for Sandy Mactaggart and his wife, Cecile, by Mactaggart’s Harvard architecture school chum, Gerry Liebman.
The Mactaggarts donated Soaring to the University of Alberta in 2010, at which point the estate on Whitemud Road was valued at $26 million.
When Sandy Mactaggart died last summer, I toured Soaring for a column I was writing.
It was a truly extraordinary work of architecture — playful, bold, full of light.
Two different buildings with one thing in common: both look doomed to demolition.
The blacksmith shop is at the most imminent risk. The site’s owners, Cejay Ventures Ltd., applied for a demolition permit late last month. The city’s heritage planning department spent much of the last three years negotiating with the owners, offering generous city grants to help restore the building — or at least retain its striking facades.
But the owners — who did not return my phones calls — didn’t take the deal.
With the rail line decommissioned, the east end of Strathcona is ripe for residential redevelopment.
Back in 1987, the city upzoned this particular lot to allow for a 12- storey building. It’s a zoning virtually no other site in the neighbourhood has. That makes the property remarkably valuable.
And it makes it next to impossible for city council to exercise its powers to designate the building a historic site without the owner’s consent, because they’d have to compensate the company for the lost value of that hypothetical highrise.
“It’s a golden opportunity,” said David Johnston, principal heritage planner with the City of Edmonton.
About the only chance to save the blacksmith building, he said, would be for Alberta Culture to designate it a protected provincial historic site. But that honour is usually reserved for more prominent buildings that have played a greater role in provincial history.
Soaring isn’t in immediate danger. But its fate seems inevitable. Until now, the U of A had been maintaining the house as a conference centre, and renting it out for events like weddings.
But fearing pushback from neighbours, the university didn’t do a lot of marketing for the site. In seven years, Soaring hosted just 36 events.
Meantime, the university was spending more than $260,000 per year to maintain the mansion and the grounds.
So this week, the university announced it was shuttering Soaring as part of its new budget efforts to cut spending by four per cent. The mansion’s amazing art and artifacts will be moved into the museum’s permanent collection, the water will be turned off, the grounds will get only basic upkeep.
Andrew Sharman, the university’s vice-president of facilities and operations, says they simply don’t have a use for the house.
It needs a new roof. It’s poorly insulated. It’s not wheelchair accessible. Sharman estimates Soaring requires at least
$1.5 million in repairs, money the university can’t spare.
I’m no psychic. But if the university closes Soaring to public use and public eyes, if it doesn’t invest in repairs and maintenance, the building ’s fate is sealed.
By the terms of the donation, the university could sell the whole property.
But a future buyer might have ambitions to subdivide and put in several new houses, rather than maintain one magnificently quirky one.
Sure, it would be more pragmatic, more utilitarian to knock down these two buildings. A 12-storey condo tower on 101 Street could revitalize the east end of Strathcona. The university could sell Soaring for millions and put that money back into university operations.
But utilitarian decisions don’t make for beautiful, fun, memorable cities. When we can’t summon the will to preserve and protect the buildings that give Edmonton its character and soul, we erase our history and homogenize our community.
It’s long past time to come up with better legal tools and better financial incentives to protect legacy buildings that make our city unique, that tell Edmonton’s own story.