I'm very excited to welcome the first guest on OHA+M: Michael McClelland.
To recap from last time: the Stratford White House is an 1860s Italianate mansion dressed up with a much later oversized portico (with 18 columns!) and boasts a landscaped front and semi-circular drive. Prominently located on St. David Street, one of the “best” streets in town, the house currently has three residential units and an events facility. The property is the subject of an intensification/infilling proposal that would keep the house but cram in three new building lots on the back and west side (Areas 'A', 'B' and 'C' on the plan below).
Sticking with Stratford, our local Architectural Conservancy Ontario branch has just heard that the branch’s nomination of the city of Stratford for induction into the North America Railway Hall of Fame has been accepted. Hooray!
"What's past is prologue."[1]
Picking up from last time… if we can — and do — have automatic protection for archaeological sites in Ontario, why not for other kinds of cultural heritage?
Let’s get back to the concept of automatic protection for cultural heritage resources — the idea that they get “instant” protection without going through some form of decision process.
I say “back” because perceptive readers may have noticed that the three shipwrecks we looked at last time are not automatically protected. Or rather, they get the same automatic protection in Ontario as archaeological sites on land, but the added protection they enjoy — the no-access zone surrounding them — is not automatic. Far from it! As we saw it takes a regulation passed by the Lieutenant Governor in Council (aka Cabinet) to confer this special status.
Still with archaeology and how it is protected in Ontario, what about our marine heritage?
What if cultural heritage resources were automatically protected? No painstaking selection, no long designation process, no council decisions and political shenanigans, no drawn-out, unpredictable reviews or appeals. The law just decrees that all heritage resources are protected, end of story.
Pure preservationist fantasy, right?
Sure, but one that may not be as far-fetched as we think.
Last I checked Ontario was the only province to have a legislated listing mechanism — that is, a way of giving official recognition to heritage property separate from heritage designation.
How did this develop? And how did what started out as one kind of animal — a formal identification tool — mutate over time into something rather different.
The depths of February may make us yearn for summer. So let’s celebrate Heritage Week with an escape from the day-to-day — and the serious policy talk — to an historic summer resort in winter, its beauty tinged with the wistfulness of the snowy off season.