1. Apply Now for the City of Toronto's Heritage Tax Rebate
Marybeth McTeague, Heritage Preservation Services, City of Toronto

Applications for rebates on property taxes paid in 2010 for eligible heritage properties in Toronto are currently being accepted by Heritage Preservation Services.

The City of Toronto's Heritage Property Tax Rebate program is the result of a jointly funded initiative between the City of Toronto and the Government of Ontario. It provides rebates to designated heritage properties with heritage easement agreements to support the ongoing maintenance of the city's significant heritage properties.

To be eligible for a heritage property tax rebate, a property must be designated under either Part IV or V of the Ontario Heritage Act, have a Heritage Easement Agreement registered on title prior to September 2006 (except National Historic Sites) and be in a good state of conservation. Rebates of 40% of property taxes paid on heritage attributes identified in the easement are available, with a maximum rebate of $500,000.

The City of Toronto is committed to preserving the city's significant heritage resources and provides support to owners of heritage properties who restore and maintain Toronto's built heritage.

Application deadline: Monday February 28 at 4 pm.

For further information and application forms, please visit: toronto.ca/heritage-preservation/taxrebate/index.htm

Contact:
Marybeth McTeague, Preservation Officer
City Planning Division, Policy and Research, Heritage Preservation Services
416-392-1974
mmcteag@toronto.ca

2. BHN on Vacation
Catherine Nasmith

I will be touring world heritage sites in Mexico until Feb 22. I can be reached by email or the usual phone number 416 598 4144, but roaming charges will apply!

If you want an item in the next newsletter which will go out the last week of February, just click on submit an event, news item, or link as appropriate and just click and paste the material into the online form that will appear.

I will check in every couple of days and make items live.

hasta la vista

Cathy

3. Architectural Record: Saarinen's Miller House Opens as a Museum
Suzanne Stephens

Miller House and Garden, Eero Saarinen

The house that architect Eero Saarinen completed in 1957 for J. Irwin Miller and his family in Columbus, Indiana, easily qualifies as a paragon of residential midcentury Modernism. Amazingly, the glass and steel, 6,838-square-foot pavilion, with interiors by Alexander Girard and landscaping by Daniel Kiley, has remained intact all these years.

Since the Miller family gave the one-story house, the grounds, and most of the furnishings to the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) in 2000, the property has undergone a $2 million restoration and will open to the public this May.

Sightseers can now add this National Historic Landmark to the long list of architecture that Columbus offers, owing to a program instigated in the early 1950s by Miller. As head of Cummins Engine, Miller brought in significant Modern architects to create civic and institutional buildings and transform the town, about 45 miles from Indianapolis, into a hub of inventive design. At the glass and gray-blue-slate-paneled Miller house, supported by steel cruciform columns and illuminated by a grid of skylights, visitors can admire Girard’s vivid colors and the living room’s conversation pit. They can also inspect the dining area where Saarinen placed his sculptural white pedestal chairs, or walk around the property on which Kiley formed open rooms with hedges and trees.

To help keep up the house museum, the Miller family and the Irwin-Sweeney-Miller Foundation have donated $5 million, and the IMA is raising more funds.

Click here for Link

4. Brockville Recorder and Times: City compiling heritage register

Fourteen Brockville properties will face restrictions on demolition if city council approves a new heritage register recommended by its planning committee.
But the chairman of that committee believes council is likely to hold off on approving the list until the property owners have been notified.

"That was certainly the flavour of the committee meeting," said Councillor Mike Kalivas, chairman of the economic development and planning committee, referring to the committee's view.

Section 27 of the Ontario Heritage Act requires municipal clerks to keep a current, publicly accessible register of properties "of cultural heritage value or interest" in the municipality.

That is distinct from properties that have actually been designated as heritage sites under the Heritage Act.

Click here for Link

5. Chatham Kent Daily Post: Highgate United Church Premiered
Marlee Robinson

Video On Transformation Of The Highgate United Church Premiered

A video based on the deconsecration and anticipated transformation of the Highgate United Church was premiered to about 40 members of the congregation on Sunday afternoon. Parts of the film have already been shown to researchers in Wales and Norway with interest in it being expressed from countries as diverse as Japan and Czechoslovakia.

Wilfred Laurier University religious studies researchers Dr. Ron Grimes and Mr. Barry Stephenson began work on the project last spring, interviewing long time members of the Highgate church and community. They also recorded the exhibition of photography by Fanshawe College students and the inaugural concert – a rousing evening with Stratford-based Celtic band Rant Maggie Rant – in the church.

Dr. Grimes explained that the project has evolved into two films: one by him entitled The Deconsecration of a Canadian Church; the second by Stephenson entitled The Transformation of a Canadian Church. Together they tell the story of the transition from the 1898 rare round church in a thriving farming community to the building now known as The Mary Webb Centre, a cultural and community centre in a village now reduced to a population of about 400.

Click here for Link

6. Globe and Mail: Cameron House Lives On
Jay Somerset

The second act of the Cameron House chronicles

A year ago, things looked bleak for the Cameron House. For the first time in nearly 30 years, the bar, music and theatre venue – and artists’ rooming house – was up for sale. Spurred by management change, the four-storey building, just west of Spadina on Queen, was listed for $2.6-million. Flanked by luxe storefronts to the east and booming development to the west, its fate was sealed, judging by all precedents: condo or grande latte. Gentrify or die.

At least, it seemed that way. But the bar bucked the trend.

“We put it on the market just to establish a fair price so we could buy it out,” says Cosmo Ferraro, bar manager and son of owner Ann Marie Ferraro. “Nobody wanted it to turn into a Starbucks. So long as it was breaking even, everybody was happy to see it continue.”

A recent graduate of the University of Guelph, Mr. Ferraro, who took over running the bar eight months ago, had big plans. “It had grown a bit stagnant,” says Mr. Ferraro, 23. Working alongside high-school friend and now business partner Michael McKeown, they’re not only revitalizing the place and bringing in a younger crowd, they’re also starting a label: Cameron House Records.

“It’s a perfect fit,” says Mr. McKeown, also 23. “There are probably 20 acts a week that come here to play. We both live here, we both tend bar so we know what type of crowd a band will draw. Our A&R [artists and repertoire] is pretty much taken care of.”

Editor's Note:
One of my favourite theatre companies is based there, nice to see new energy being added.

Click here for Link

7. Globe and Mail: Graffitti or Art and the Brickworks
John Lorinc and Jeff Gray

Yes & but is it graffiti?

Mayor Rob Ford’s promised campaign to aggressively clean up the sort of graffiti that angers merchants and homeowners appears to have bagged its first cultural quarry – the artfully defaced walls of the Brick Works, a complex of heritage industrial buildings in the Don Valley.

Evergreen, the national not-for-profit agency that runs the site as a cultural and environmental hub, received a summons last month citing 13 violations of the graffiti eradication provisions of the municipal code. It was told to comply or face fines and possible legal action.

Mr. Ford’s office received a complaint and forwarded it to the municipal licensing and standards division, says city spokesperson Bruce Hawkins. The site wasn’t on the list of areas targeted for “proactive enforcement,” he says.

That’s because the buildings are protected by a 2002 heritage designation and a 2008 heritage easement requested by the province. A heritage impact statement filed along with the easement says the graffiti can’t be removed without the consent of Evergreen, the city and the Ontario Heritage Trust, a provincial agency. The bylaw enforcement officer didn’t know about the agreement, Mr. Hawkins says.

A mandated clean-up would likely damage the century-old factory and warehouse structures, which have attracted $78-million in public and private donations in recent years. “The process of removing the graffiti would have a tremendous impact on the masonry around the buildings,” says Evergreen general manager David Stonehouse. “We would lose a lot of the brick and a lot of the mortar, and the brick would be in pretty rough shape.”

Evergreen officials will be meeting Friday with city staff to discuss the situation.

Mr. Stonehouse concedes that Evergreen does receive the occasional gripe about the state of the walls, but he gets much more positive feedback from visitors, farmers’ market regulars and the well-heeled patrons of the Brick Works, whose ranks include the Weston family. “Prince Charles was here. He saw the graffiti.”

Click here for Link

8. Globe and Mail: Montreal Art Rescue
Les Perreaux

Firefighters rescue Riopelle, Pilot paintings from burning Montreal gallery

Jean-Pierre Valentin

The firefighters hauled the masterpieces out of the burning building one by one, often with a fire axe in one hand and a Riopelle in the other.

Sometimes, people walking past the gallery helped out. An elderly woman in a long dress coat stumbled on the slippery street clutching her purse and a painting. Soon workers pitched in from the bakery and boutiques all along Sherbrooke Street.

By the end of a couple hours work, they rescued 250 paintings by some of Canada’s greatest artists. Among them, several pieces each by Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jean Paul Lemieux, Robert Pilot and Paul-Émile Borduas, works completed at the height of the artists’ mastery.

“It’s a miracle, nothing less. They saved an important piece of the artistic heritage of Canada and Quebec,” said Jean-Pierre Valentin, owner of the gallery that bears his name on Sherbrooke Street.

Editor's Note:
Fantastic!

Click here for Link

9. Globe and Mail: Montreal's Trend House in Danger
Dave LeBlanc

A model of 1950s design, but time is up

I’ve said it time and again: We don’t celebrate our own. If this was the United States, more people would know about Canada’s “Trend House” program; there’d probably be a book about it, too, just like the ones on California’s “Case Study House” program. But that would mean we regard architecture as something that transcends generations, or a teaching tool, or as our collective dreams made real from bricks and mortar.

But we don’t, and that’s why we’re on the verge of losing the Montreal Trend House in suburban Beaconsfield, Que.

“I’m sure many [area residents] have just driven by it and never realized the story behind it,” said Michael Goodfellow about his father’s design on CBC Montreal’s radio program Daybreak the morning of Jan. 28. “It was considered one of his proudest works … I know it was a project he put a lot of effort into.”

Philip F. Goodfellow (1919-1972) was one of 11 architects chosen to design a modernist Trend House. The program began in 1952 with a one-off exhibition home built to showcase B.C. lumber products in Toronto’s Thorncrest Village (profiled here in January, 2004), but was so successful the project expanded and 10 more were built in 1954. In addition to another home in Toronto by Fleury, Arthur and Calvert, Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, London, Montreal and Halifax each got a home designed by local architects of note.

In Toronto on a business trip the day after his radio interview, Mr. Goodfellow and I sat down for a chat at the home of his son, Phil Goodfellow (an architect like his grandfather) to talk about the fate of his father’s Trend House.

“It has been characterized as a rotten wood house that needs to be torn down,” he said in disbelief. “That’s how the town is characterizing it.”

It’s true: In the CBC interview, Beaconsfield councillor Brian Ross – one of many who were responsible for granting a demolition permit – states: “[I]t’s been neglected for too many years. We have our architect’s report that there’s very little salvageable left in the house; the original plan had been altered … so it’s not quite the same as it was back in the fifties when it was built.” Citing code issues with the wiring, wood rot and the possibility of mould, he summed up with “there’s an awful lot wrong with it.”

Click here for Link

10. Hamilton Mountain News: Restoring Auchmar one dollar at a time Heritage foundation sets up challenge fund for west Mountain mansion
MARK NEWMAN

Ivan Sorensen - Flickr. Hamilton Heritage Foundation is raising money to aid in the restoration of the historic Auchmar mansion, located at Fennell and West 5th.

The Hamilton Heritage Foundation is hoping to draw thousands of $10 and $20 donations to aid in the restoration o f the historic Auchmar mansion at Fennell and West 5th.

Before Christmas the organization set up the Auchmar Challenge Fund in a bid to attract donations from individuals and groups from across Hamilton and outside the community.

“It seemed to be the time now to try and kick start community investment in Auchmar,” said Grant Head, a foundation board member and retired historical geography professor at Laurier University.

Head said the foundation will match public grants up to a total of $25,000, with an overall goal of $50,000 that would be put toward restoring the front entrance of 157-year-old building that was acquired by the city in 1999 and requires about $6 million worth of restoration work at the 10-acre estate.

Head noted the challenge fund could be continued past the $50,000 mark if there is a strong public response and he’s encouraging area businesses to get involved.

Click here for Link

11. Hamilton Spectator: Developer says heritage sculptures are safe
Emma Reilly

Developer Darko Vranich says he’s prepared to save six sculptures on the front of the old federal building.

And if he doesn’t, the city has unearthed an agreement Vranich signed in 2004 that requires him to save the sculptures and other key heritage elements.

In a letter to downtown Councillor Jason Farr presented to the city’s planning committee this week, Vranich says he has “retained a heritage architect and an appraiser to assist in the removal and preservation of the art works.”

Vranich also said he’ll foot the bill for removing and storing the art.

However, Councillor Brian McHattie, a member of the municipal heritage committee, says he wants more protection for the carvings.

“I think that the letter or ‘trust-me’ approach from Mr. Vranich – nothing personal — is not good enough,” he said. “It’s great to see more downtown development and I’m really keen on that, but we also need to pay attention to the heritage features downtown.”

Click here for Link

12. Hamilton Spectator: Federal building can't be demolished: Ottawa
Daniel Nolan

Ottawa says the federal building cannot be torn down and features and facades are protected under a covenant that runs with the land in perpetuity.

The point is contained in a letter to developer Darko Vranich, who is looking at demolishing the building at Main Street West and Caroline Street, but says he’s prepared to save six sculptures on the front made by Hamilton artist Elizabeth Holbrook. The city issued a demolition permit Thursday.

The Feb. 2 letter to Vranich is from Robert Brick of the Ontario office of Public Works and Government Services Canada.

“Please be reminded that the Government of Canada sold the property with a covenant that runs with the land in perpetuity which, in addition to protecting certain designated features and facades, requires that you and subsequent purchasers not ‘raze to the ground or otherwise demolish the entire building,’” says Brick.

He says the government requires Vranich to withdraw his demolition permit “immediately” and that it will ask that the City of Hamilton to “refuse your permit application and protect the heritage character and designation of the property on our behalf.”

Click here for Link