In the block behind the legislature building, a handful of heritage houses sits in a desert of blacktop and ugly office buildings. The provincial government wants to move the houses, sell the land and let a developer turn it from eyesore to eye-catching.
Moving the houses isn鈥檛 an ideal solution for heritage buildings, but something has to be done to improve the neighbourhood.
The province is putting a for-sale sign on much of the block bordered by Superior, Menzies, Michigan and Government streets. Only the chunk fronting on Government will be retained, the part that includes the Queen鈥檚 Printer building.
The government will hang onto the two heritage houses facing Government Street, which were built in 1885, but the five others farther west will be moved to Kingston Street, where a smaller lot is going up for sale.
The whole block is in sad shape. The office buildings were thrown up in the 1940s as temporary offices, so they are well past their best-before date. The heritage houses have been neglected, and their paint is peeling.
It鈥檚 hard to believe, but when the houses were built, the area was the suburbs of Victoria, says Ken Johnson, president of the Hallmark Society.
Moving the houses is one way of saving them from destruction and perhaps ensuring their renovation, but shipping a house to another lot takes it out of its setting. Some of its value as a piece of our history is lost.
It is a price we will probably have to pay to turn the area into an attractive place to live and work.
