Lessons from mega-hospital uproar in 1919

History might not precisely repeat itself, but there are uncanny parallels between the Windsor area’s current dust-up over the site of a planned mega-hospital and one that took place in the nation’s capital 100 years ago.

Harold Fisher is now revered as one of Ottawa’s finest mayors, with a park and a major road named after him and an impressive bronze sculpture erected in his honour. But in 1919 he was the target of ridicule over his plan to build a large state-of-the-art hospital on farmland way out in the boondocks, miles from downtown.

“They all scoffed,” reported The Ottawa Citizen when the mayor proposed building a hospital “among the farmlands” of the faraway western reaches of Carling Avenue to replace three small privately-owned hospitals.

Critics labelled his proposal “Fisher’s Folly” and charged that the site, 235 acres of a dairy farm acquired for the outrageous sum of $70,488, was “Too far away from practically everyone in the city.”

The Citizen moaned that it would take 15 minutes to get out to the hospital from downtown by motor car, so who knew how long it might take to get there by tram.

But Fisher, a respected lawyer who had gained enormous credibility through his courageous leadership during the Spanish flu global pandemic of 1918-19 that claimed more than 500 lives in Ottawa, got his way.

In 1924, just five years after Fisher secured provincial approval, Ottawa Civic Hospital, a six-storey 500-bed facility, opened. That remote pasture soon became the centre of a residential housing boom as people flocked to the area. Fisher, just 51, died four years later from pneumonia, but his legacy remains.

After a century of serving an ever-expanding capital region (Ottawa recently hit the million-population mark) the facility is outdated and Ottawa, with its own site controversy, is in a heated race with our region to secure provincial funding for a $2 billion mega-hospital.

Fisher, if he could hear the current squabbling over the planned Windsor site, would surely say: “Been there and done that.” Only this time it’s a much ridiculed bean field on County Road 42 in place of a remote cow pasture cleared by Scottish settlers.

People in Ottawa in 1919 (population then around 150,000) couldn’t have imagined that their city would some day extend miles beyond that hospital site. And the critics in Windsor in 2019, appalled by the concept of urban sprawl, can’t bear the thought Windsor might continue growing outward.

Former Windsor councillor Hilary Payne believes those folks are deluding themselves because the region’s centre of gravity has been moving south and east for decades and will continue to do so “and there’s not a damn thing CAMPP or anyone else can do about it.”

When he arrived in Windsor in 1969 as city engineer, later city administrator, development of Forest Glade was just starting and massive residential expansion in South Windsor was nearing completion. Were those projects a mistake? Was that urban sprawl?

Were the more recent East Riverside residential developments misguided? Some would make that argument.

Payne, who candidly admits one of his consulting clients is planning to build 200 homes in the area annexed from Tecumseh in 2003, said it’s human nature that people with families want a home with a backyard and don’t want to raise kids in a box in the sky.

“People want to be able to say, ‘this is mine,’ from one fence to the other.” The dramatic, high-end residential growth in Tecumseh, Lakeshore and Lasalle is surely proof of that.

“By the time that hospital is built 15 years from now, when I’ll only be 101,” said Payne with a chuckle, “it will be surrounded by subdivisions.”

Windsor didn’t annex those 23 square kilometres (the consolation prize for a failed attempt at a much larger annexation during the Mike Hurst era) at a cost to city taxpayers of nearly $4 million, to preside over bean fields. The intent all along, backed by massive taxpayer investments in trunk sewers, has been to add space for residential and industrial expansion in an area that otherwise would have been paved over by Tecumseh.

If a regional hospital, serving Essex County and far beyond, is part of the mix in a progressive, well-planned city development, so much the better.

Build it and they will come. Harold Fisher figured that out 100 years ago. Now it’s our turn.