Nip and tuck keeping the old convent alive

(January 20) - Sometimes, saving old buildings becomes a lot like refusing to sign a DNR for your ailing granny. A lot of emotional sentiment gets in the way. Nostalgic memories make you want to keep her around forever, but sometime you can’t. The realities of her condition might outweigh memories of better days. I wonder if we are reaching that point with the Loretto Convent.

It is not always nice to acknowledge, but there comes a time when today trumps yesterday. Just as clearly, there will come a time when tomorrow will trump today. The convent is a heritage building with a lot of cultural and historic value. No question about that. It has been standing on the hill for more than 150 years. It hasn’t been used as a girl’s boarding school since 1924. Nuns continued living in the convent until 1996. The building has stood empty since then.

A task force set up by the city to look at future uses for the site issued a report in 2005. It said the convent building is “the oldest existing school building in Guelph and is recognized as an excellent example of a mid-nineteenth century limestone building. It was originally a classically proportioned three-storey building lying on a north-south access. In 1872, a substantial stone chapel was added to the north, and two additional floors and the mansard roof were added by the local architect, George Bruce, in 1896.”

It is certainly a building that deserves to be preserved. Granny still looks good when we see her in the visitors’ sitting room at the nursing home. Not as strong as she used to be, but not hooked up to the heart machine yet.

What we are seeing now is that it is difficult to breathe new life into her. Converting the convent to a museum is proving to be as controversial as the original decision to preserve it.

It has to be upgraded to modern building codes. It has to conform to the city’s accessibility guidelines. It must meet the LEED environmental standards for green buildings.

It can all be done. Not easily, given her age and condition, but possible.

When she gets out of surgery, she won’t look exactly like the granny we remember. She’ll forever have a big glass staircase up the side to make room for two exit doors on each floor. The building code requires them. Then there’s the elevator from Norfolk Street to satisfy the accessibility guidelines.

These seem to be the two most contentious issues to come out of a public meeting last week. The architects have a good record of updating heritage buildings. The new challenges the convent is throwing at them mean bringing it in at budget could be nip and tuck. She won’t be as stately and grand when she starts her new life.

There’s another wrinkle. Apparently there are two outside toilets on the north side of the building. These might be incorporated into the final design. I expect these are somehow deemed to be part of the cultural heritage of the site. So is the treatment of girls in Catholic boarding schools and the refusal to educate them in sciences. It is not a heritage worth preserving.

The council house my family lived in near London airport was built in 1948. It had an outdoor toilet near the back door. The last time I was there, most public housing had transferred to private ownership. When they were renovated, the “privies” were the first things to go.

Some memories are not worth hanging onto.

I don’t mind keeping granny on life support if that’s what the family chooses to do.

But let’s not complain about how she looks when she’s on it.

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By the time you read this, the Bush presidency will be over. Can intellectual shallowness and faulty logic follow him into the dustbin of history? In his final farewell, he pointed with pride to the fact that America has gone seven years without a foreign terrorist attack on its soil. He didn’t mention that before he showed up they went 225 years without one.

Let’s hope the change Obama brings can usher in a more peaceful and just future for the world.