Newsletter Article -- January 2002

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Another Kind of Heritage

by Gordon Cullingham

It looks like the Strand Theatre on Bank Street in old Ottawa South will be coming down. We have known this for a while. Many of us were initially alarmed, and then on reflection I think we almost unanimously said, "Too bad! But it’s not heritage."

That facile dismissal has been bothering me ever since, and now I know why. It is because our definition of heritage buildings is too narrow. We have allowed architectural merit to govern our conclusions, when the standards of that art form are only one, if the most important, factor in determining our course of action.

What seemed to be troublesome in the case of the Strand was detecting a mysterious but real sense of loss, that that poor old piece of Ottawa construction trivia was in fact much more. It was a social signpost, a period piece, an old, if little known, friend, part of a cherished environment whose loss maybe should not be accepted with a sigh. And yet our current heritage doctrines can’t comprehend some parts of our real heritage. They should be able to, in order that we don’t lose -- in a dazed state of ideological confusion -- even more of what we thought Ottawa was about.

That sense of loss is difficult to articulate -- the reason, I suppose, that we haven’t done so. So wistfulness may be itself a call to action, rather than to resignation. I’ll certainly miss seeing that relic of the thirties brashly proclaiming on a lacklustre stretch of Bank Street that things might not be as dull inside as they are elsewhere outside. But is glimpsing that vertical sign on a long darkened cinema-turned-bingo hall anything more than the comfort of the familiar? What right has it got to be defended and preserved?

These are questions that we don’t normally ask in the technical objectivity of applying standard heritage tests. But patently there is more to our appreciation of our built environment than being gratified by the sureness of our knowledge of what is heritage and what isn’t. This is the treacherous domain of subjective assessment, where standards are dodgy and certitude unavailable.

But that is no reason to refuse to confess our attachment to something that we deem important, even in unorthodox ways. What is begged here is a respectable theory of architecturally valueless heritage structures, a system that would provide the mechanism to defend and protect community buildings that should be allowed to live in more than nostalgia. We learned to prize streetscapes composed of those “architecturally valueless” buildings. Perhaps we should go farther, and openly champion community heritage in individual structures whose claim to survival might not be much more than that we are fond of them.

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