Heritage a dirty word in Surrey and White Rock

 Frank Bucholtz photo

The Neville C. Curtis home on 182 Street was still in good condition in April. Now it is gone, despite being on Surrey's heritage register. It will be replaced by a large, modern house. The neighbourhood is changing rapidly, with such houses dominating. The large lots are an added attraction.

The H-word is raising its ugly head in Surrey and White Rock again. Politicians, developers and realtors are hoping its use will soon decline so they can continue to give the green light to destruction of the few remaining reminders of the past that get in the way of  new development, construction, growth and change.

The H-word of course is heritage – in particular heritage buildings. They are a nuisance to growth-oriented cities like Surrey and White Rock because they often sit on more land than a contemporary building does. In addition, the taxes they bring in are low. Perhaps most gratingly, they get in the way of development plans and tie up planning departments with do-gooder work, taking them away from the massive developments which allow cities to sprawl and mayors to beat their chests about how important their cities are.

On Aug. 17, an excellent story by Cloverdale Reporter editor Jennifer Lang detailed how Surrey basically ignores the fact that a home is on the heritage register, and also ignores its own heritage advisory commission. If someone wishes to demolish a home which is listed on the register, it doesn’t take much for that to happen.

The latest example is the Neville C. Curtis house on 182 Street in Cloverdale. The heritage advisory commission asked planning staff to put a 60-day protection order on the home, after a request was made for a demolition permit. The only reason the commission even knew about the demolition request is because the home was on the heritage register.

In March,  Coun. Dave Woods said there was nothing the city could do because the home was privately owned. In other words, the heritage register is meaningless.

There were at one time many potential heritage homes on that street. One, the Hugh and Helen Currie house, was actually moved by the city at great expense to a nearby city-owned property. It languished there on blocks for several years, until the city finally demolished it. In that case, the city was the owner – but couldn’t bother to preserve the home. A similar fate recently overtook the Orange Hall, which was built in the 1891, moved and stored by the city at Surrey Centre Cemetery, and torn down last year, after languishing in limbo for 22 years.

Frank Bucholtz photo

The Boulter house at 5720 182 Street was likely built about 1951, according to Isobel Curtis Speer, daughter of Neville C. Curtis, who remembers when the home was built. It is one of several unique homes still standing on 182 Street.

 

Only one home on 182 Street has a chance of withstanding the current drive to build massive homes on the large lots there. The Cecil Heppell house at 5818 182 St. is formally protected by a Heritage Revitalization Agreement specifying key elements to be retained or protected. This is the city’s main tool for preservation, but is almost never used unless the owner consents to it.

Cloverdale has been particularly hit hard by this official attitude towards the past, as it has had many heritage buildings, given that it was Surrey’s first small town. Not all can be saved, of course, but some that are representative of the way the town once was should be. This includes commercial buildings, institutional buildings and residences.

Frank Bucholtz photo

Elm Street in White Rock runs off Marine Drive on the west beach area. The area is a hub of new construction, including a large multi-storey condo development at Marine and Oxford. The block of original beach homes on Elm Street are virtually the only intact reminder of how the seaside city once looked in its earliest days - but they are under threat, as the realtor's sign shows.

 

The same skittishness towards the past is also on display in White Rock. There is no better example of what White Rock once was than the homes and vintage apartment building on the east side of Elm Street, just off Marine Drive in White Rock’s west beach area.

Until very recently, these homes were in immaculate condition and walking down the street was an opportunity to glimpse back to the days when White Rock was primarily a summer resort town, with most homes in close proximity to the railway station.

Now one home has a sign in front with photos of a “plan” for a new home on the lot. The one next to it is for sale. Unquestionably, the others are threatened as well, as is the small apartment block.

Lorraine Ellenwood’s book Years of Promise, White Rock 1858-1958 states that “Elm has the distinction of being White Rock’s oldest inhabited street (other than Marine). “ It details when the five cottages were built (between 1910 and 1913) and states that the apartment block sits on the site of a home built by customs officer Alex Smith and later lived in by the Merklin and J.E. Gardiner families. The apartment block was constructed about 1940.

Most of the homes built in White Rock’s early days are long gone, and given the property values, it is understandable why they have fallen. However, Elm Street’s east sides offers a unique look into the earlier, less hectic days of the city. City council and heritage organizations should work together to somehow preserve that short stretch of streetscape.

The B.C. attitude to heritage, particularly in the Lower Mainland, is that it is a nuisance at best and a direct threat at worst to new development. This is a selfish attitude, but it is dominant. Any city or town is a sum of all its parts, and some of those components go back to its early days. To completely obliterate any trace of earlier days is shortsighted.

I initially responded to the Cloverdale Reporter news story about the teardown of the Curtis house in a Facebook comment to the newspaper's website. My response was also published as a letter to the editor on Wednesday (complete with my spelling error of George Scott's name). Here is that post:

The destruction of the Neville Curtis house is a sad commentary on the lip service that Surrey gives to heritage. I take this one personally - I grew up on this street and remember when the Curtis family lived there.

About 20 years ago or so, the Hugh and Helen Currie house on the same street was the subject of much preservationist ki-yi-ing by council and was temporarily moved to city property (once the Claude and Mabel Harvie property, now a park) up the street. It was eventually torn down. The cost to taxpayers was in the hundreds of thousands, and the net result was nothing.

There are several heritage homes on the street, most in good condition, but other than the Cecil and Anna Heppell house at 5818 182 Street, nothing is actually earmarked for preservation. My parents lived on that street from 1955 to 1993, in two different homes. Our original home was built in 1954-55 on a 2.5-acre lot my Dad bought for about $7,000. Because he was a veteran, the federal government offered a mortgage to help pay for the home under the Veterans Land Act. Many people moved to Surrey to acreage at that time to take advantage of the VLA financing that was available.

When our original property at 5736 182 Street was sold in 1980 for a development (which is still in place along 57A Avenue), my parents moved to the Harry Parr house at 5973 182 Street (later owned by George and Edna Scott). That home featured unique design and woodworking, with broadleaf maple beams and tongue and groove roofing milled in Cloverdale by CP Woodworking, the Parr family business. It also featured some very unique wall paneling.

My parents sold it in 1993 to the Carnegies, founders of Red Barn Antiques, who also appreciated its unique character. They sold it and it was later town down so that two lots could be created and two new homes with no unique character could be built. The Parr house would have been worth preserving, but that didn't happen either. There is still an opportunity to preserve several of the most unique homes on this street, but I won't count on Surrey doing anything about it.