Figure skating history in peril
Building faces wrecking ball in Alcan project
How does a national historic site designed by two of Canada’s most famous architects become a noname building facing demolition?
The question arises this week, as city council votes on a motion that will bring demolition of the Winter Club of Montreal one step closer.
The proposed demolition is part of a plan by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté’s real-estate company and Yale Properties Ltd. to gut part of the Maison Alcan complex on Sherbrooke St. W. and erect a 30-storey office tower.
Documents on the project obtained from the Ville-Marie borough describe the former Winter Club at 2055 Drummond St. as a disused military armoury built in 1920, with no architect mentioned.
But in fact, the two-storey, blocklong building — built in 1912 by the celebrated architects Edward and William Maxwell — played a founding role in the history of organized figure skating in Canada.
The Maxwell brothers “developed one of the most important offices in the history of architecture in Canada,” said architectural historian Susan Wagg.
They are best known for designing the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the landmark tower of the Château Frontenac in Quebec City, Birks jewellers, the Saskatchewan Legislative Building and many mansions in the Golden Square Mile and St. Andrew’s, N.B.
The Winter Club, which opened on Jan. 4, 1913, replacing the 1862 Victoria Skating Rink, was the premier venue for figure skating in Montreal, then a mecca for the elite sport. The club hosted the World Figure Skating Championships in 1932, the North American Figure Skating Championships in 1935 and the Canadian figure-skating championships in 1941 — in which future Olympic gold medallist Barbara Ann Scott competed.
It produced champions like Norman Scott and Jeanne Chevalier, who won the men’s and pairs’ events in the first International Figure Skating Championships of America in 1914. Norman Scott was portrayed on the medals awarded to winners of the Canadian Figure Skating Championships from 19141950.
The Winter Club was also the headquarters of the forerunner of Skate Canada, founded in 1914 as the Figure Skating Department of the Amateur Skating Association of Canada. The department’s first president was Montrealer Louis Rubenstein, the father of figure skating in Canada.
In 1939, the Figure Skating Department became the Canadian Figure Skating Association (CFSA), which joined the International Skating Union (ISU) in 1946. It changed its name to Skate Canada in 2000.
“Montreal plays a huge part in Canadian figure skating history and international skating history as well,” said Ryan Stevens, a blogger in Halifax who chronicles the history of figure skating in his column, Skate Guard (skateguard1.blogspot.ca).
Rubenstein (1861-1931), a longtime city alderman who won a gold medal in a figure skating competition in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1890, was the moving spirit behind the Amateur Skating Association of Canada, founded in 1887.
The association, which included speedskating as well as figure skating, pushed for national and international standards in an era when any club could hold a competition and call it a world championship, Stevens noted.
The Winter Club ceased to be a skating rink in 1943, when the federal government acquired it at the height of the Second World War for the Royal Canadian Navy and renamed it HMCS Donnacona.
In 1995, the federal government designated the building as a national historic site for “its historical associations, and architectural and environmental value,” but that designation was lost when the government sold it in 2008.
The Winter Club’s architectural pedigree and role in sports history are glaring omissions from documents on the proposed Maison Alcan development provided by the Ville-Marie borough.
They call for demolition of all but the façade of the Winter Club and of an eight-storey office building at 2050 Stanley St., built in 1981 as part of the original Maison Alcan.
Asked why borough documents on the project give the wrong date of construction for the Winter Club and omit to mention its famous architects and founding role in figure skating, Catherine Maurice, a spokesperson for Mayor Denis Coderre, asked for proof.
“Is it possible to send me the proof of what you claim?” she asked in an email.
After being told that archival documents, contemporary newspaper reports and other records substantiate the date of construction, authorship and original function of the building, she later said its origins have been known all along.
“The architects of the original building were known and are part of the documents evaluating this project. It’s a building that has undergone numerous transformations over the years, which has made it lose its historical value. The trace of the building’s past that will be protected by the project for the Maison Alcan is its façade,” Maurice said in a response by email.
“The project for the Maison Alcan is a magnificent project that will develop this sector, including the heritage elements that will be saved and developed,” she added.
But Wagg, a leading authority on the Maxwell brothers, said to tear down the Winter Club would be entirely contrary to the spirit of the award-winning Maison Alcan, hailed for sensitively integrating heritage buildings with modern structures.
Rather than being demolished, the block-long building could be incorporated into a future project, just as the Maison Alcan integrated heritage buildings like the 189495 home of Montreal Star founder Lord Atholstan at Sherbrooke and Stanley Sts., she suggested in an interview from Hanover, N.H.
“Anybody who has the sensitivity and the creativity could manage to preserve the things that need to be preserved, that are important, and create something that will be an amenity to the city rather than just shock everybody with the outof-scale kind of thing that it looks to me like they’ve come up with now,” said Wagg, author of The Architecture of Andrew Thomas Taylor: Montreal’s Square Mile and Beyond (McGill-Queens, 2013).
Located diagonally across from the former site of the Van Horne mansion, demolished in 1973, the Maison Alcan, which opened in 1983 as the world headquarters of Alcan Aluminum Ltd., marked a departure from the practice of razing heritage gems to make way for highrise towers.
“The Alcan building was a model of urban courtesy and of how to make something fit into the environment as far as scale and context are concerned,” Wagg said.
“It seems that with this project, those lessons have been completely ignored,” she added.
Architect Julia Gersovitz, who worked on the original Maison Alcan under lead architect Ray Affleck, said she toured the interior of the Winter Club between a year and a half and two years ago.
“The building itself is quite wonderful,” said Gersovitz, a pioneer of conservation architecture in Canada and adjunct professor at McGill’s School of Architecture.
“It has a very lovely staircase that sweeps up to the second floor, where the club rooms were, which had quite interesting plasterwork and all the finishes, the fireplaces and the woodwork,” she said.
The Winter Club, whose membership list was a Who’s Who of the city’s business elite, was designed as an elegant social club, she said.
The well-appointed clubrooms, where members dined, sipped tea or played cards, were in the front, while the skating rink occupied the rear the building. In 1929, badminton courts were added.
While the rink no longer exists, the clubhouse portion at the front has retained many of its original details, Gersovitz said.
Two advisory committees on architecture and heritage criticized the proposal to raze the Winter Club in a joint report submitted to the city May 28.
The “proposed project goes against the spirit of several aspects of Maison Alcan,” the Conseil du Patrimoine de Montréal and Comité Jacques Viger said, adding that “the fact of only keeping the façade of a building is not desirable and is against best practice in conservation. Moreover, it contradicts what the Maison Alcan sought to do, where, for example, great care was taken to restore the interior of the Atholstan House.”
City council is scheduled to vote this week on an amendment to Montreal’s master plan that will pave the way for final approval of the project by the Ville-Marie borough on Oct. 13.
The amendment, which must be passed before the Ville-Marie borough can approve the project, reclassifies the former Salvation Army Citadel on Drummond St., which is to be incorporated into the redeveloped complex, from a place of worship to a former place of worship.
Anybody who has the sensitivity and the creativity could manage to preserve the things that need to be preserved.