A newly formed group of heritage advocates in Stratford are making one final effort to save the city’s first public hospital from the wrecking ball.
A newly formed group of heritage advocates in Stratford are making one final effort to save the city’s first public hospital from the wrecking ball.
Simply named Save Avon Crest, the group went public with an appeal to the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance this week, urging officials to reconsider plans to demolish Avon Crest Hospital – a unique 130-year-old building on John Street South that’s been falling into disrepair for several years.
“What we’re arguing for is trying to be a little bit creative,” member Howard Shubert, a Stratford-based architectural historian, said Thursday, a few hours before addressing the hospital group’s board of directors at an evening meeting. “We think this is a building that’s worth preserving, (and) we think it’s possible to preserve it.”
Save Avon Crest’s members – there are seven in total – also include Jayne Trachsel, president of the Stratford and District Historical Society, and Allan Tye, president of the Architectural Conservancy Ontario branch in Stratford and Perth County. The group launched a new website Wednesday outlining the hospital’s history and the arguments supporting its effort to preserve as much of the building as possible.
Avon Crest Hospital opened in 1891, part of a late 19th-century push across Canada to build general hospitals in the country’s growing cities, according to the group. It was designed by renowned London Ont.-born architect George F. Durand before his death in 1889.
Durand was also responsible for the Perth County courthouse, Stratford’s old pumphouse (now Gallery Stratford) and the Stratford Jail, all of which were done, like Avon Crest, in a high Victorian Queen Anne style featuring distinct yellow brick.
Besides Avon Crest’s connection to his architect, Shubert, a former curator at the Canadian Center for Architecture, said it’s unusual for hospital buildings to survive so long. Avon Crest’s five-acre campus is also still home to a gardeners’ cottage built in 1904 and a nurses’ residence built in 1929.
“There aren’t that many that survive across Canada,” Shubert said, comparing the Avon Crest campus to London’s old Victoria Hospital lands, a larger-scale area now being developed into much-needed housing. “They’re buildings that are constantly changing, they’re constantly growing, and they kind of eat themselves up, usually. In this case, the building survived and survived and the functions that were put in it kept transforming.”
In 1955, the hospital was repurposed as a convalescent facility. By 1990, however, all remaining inpatient services offered at Avon Crest were transferred to the current Stratford General Hospital campus.
In 2018, all outpatient and other hospital services, including laundry, were also consolidated in the newer east building, which opened in 2010.
The Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance has been searching for partners interested in redeveloping Avon Crest since at least 2020, but Andrew Williams, the hospital group’s chief executive, said the building’s location and the amount of money it would take to refurbish it – estimated to be around $25 million – has soured potential developers.
“Everybody was very clear that (it’s a) great property (with) lots of potential, but needed to be a clean site for there to be a responsible project moving forward,” he said Thursday.
Heritage Stratford, a city hall subcommittee, recommended earlier this year that Avon Crest be designated under the Ontario Heritage Act, but the motion failed in July.
The Huron Perth Health Care Alliance’s board of directors, meanwhile, has endorsed a recommendation to demolish Avon Crest’s main building. The organization has not yet applied for a permit from city hall.
Williams said Thursday the alliance, which oversees hospitals in Stratford, St. Marys, Clinton and Seaforth, must consider healthcare its top priority.
“We value heritage and would want to do what we can to preserve and continue to respect the history of the hospital, but do it in such a way that it also allows us to invest in the future health-care needs of this community,” he said. “We’re proceeding down a road that we think is responsible.”
The hospital group is still actively exploring potential partners to redevelop the site, but Williams said it’s too early to share details.
“I’m really not in a position to speak to them publicly right now,” he said. “We’re really excited about the potential opportunities on that piece of land.”
Shubert said his group would like to work with hospital officials to find a way to redevelop Avon Crest without tearing down the building, a move that comes with environmental repercussions, he argued.
“The issue is if you tear something down only to replace it with something else, you’re basically requiring two sets of building materials, and one set is going into landfill,” Shubert said. “It just seems incredibly wasteful.”
Heritage advocates would prefer to see the former hospital preserved in a way that’s similar to some of the city’s other heritage projects, including Edison’s Inn, Perth County Inn and Gallery Stratford.
The group is also hoping to bring more awareness about Avon Crest to the community.
“One of the difficulties for people in Stratford … is it’s sort of tucked away,” Shubert said. “The doors have been closed, more or less, for a number of years. I think that makes it easier to forget that it’s there.”