Ritz urges council to reconsider GTR site demolition

Stratford residents Rebecca Cheney (left) and Cassie Barclay (right) speak to volunteer Tim Foster (centre) about possible future plans for the Grant Trunk site at the recent community presentation, presented by Robert Ritz

Stratford architect Robert Ritz is urging city council to rethink demolition for the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) site, arguing that rehabilitating the existing structure could provide Stratford with much-needed civic space at a significantly lower cost to taxpayers.

In a presentation community town hall meeting on Feb. 5, Ritz laid out a redevelopment concept that would see the massive industrial building repurposed to house several key public services – including the YMCA, the Stratford Public Library and relocating the new police headquarters to the old YMCA site – while avoiding the high cost and environmental impact of tearing the building down.

“Once you decide what you want, you first design with a calculator to determine how you can afford it, then move forward with the design,” Ritz said.

He said the goal of his presentation was to give council “a clear path to move forward and develop the site again with minimal impact to the taxpayer.”

He argued the city already acts as a developer when it comes to major projects, pointing to both the industrial park and the Stratford Rotary Complex as examples.

“The city in itself is a developer. They buy and develop land for parking. They buy and develop land for recreation facilities at the rec complex,” Ritz said, noting that the size of the recreation complex is comparable to the scale of the GTR project. “So we’ve done it before.”

Ritz said that fully demolishing the GTR building would leave Stratford with higher long-term debt due to the cost of removing the massive structure and dealing with environmental contamination on the 17-acre site.

“There’s contamination, and that would have to be cleaned up. So the city debt increases as we tear the building down,” he said.

Ritz estimated the cost of demolition and cleanup would total approximately $43 million — or roughly $3.7 million per acre.

“Tearing it down just doesn’t make sense, because nobody will buy it,” he said. “So what are the options? To make it attractive to a developer, we have to tear the building down, and then we have a contaminated site and then we have $31 million in debt.”

“I’m trying to encourage council to look at what we have and use it for what you need,” he said.

Ritz’s plan centres on upgrading the existing structure rather than demolishing it. He said much of the building’s steel frame remains sound and could be restored.

“We basically just put a new roof on it,” he said. “We clean the steel, replace damaged steel sections, reinforce the steel as required to support snow loads and future solar panels. We put a brand-new roof on it. The walls are probably going to look exactly the way they are.”

The interior, he said, would be sandblasted and finished with exposed steel, creating what he described as an attractive industrial-style space.

Ritz questioned why the city would spend an estimated $4 million on demolition when that money could instead be put toward rehabilitation.

“If we’re going to spend $4 million tearing this thing down and we’re willing to do that, then why don’t we just take the $4 million and throw it at the rehabilitation?” he said.

Ritz said the GTR site offers a rare opportunity to solve multiple civic infrastructure challenges at once, rather than building several standalone facilities across the city.

“We have the City of Stratford, we have a police department, we have a library, we have community groups that are interested in the building. We have the YMCA,” he said. “These are the other parts of the organization.”

He argued that Stratford already knows many of its future space needs, pointing to the city’s master planning and ad hoc committee work.

“The library needs to get larger, the police need to get larger, and we’d like to have a larger pool at the Y,” Ritz said. “More recently, a new police headquarters – all these facilities that several buildings will cost money to build.”

The key question, he said, is whether the city continues to build separate facilities on new sites or uses that investment to clean up and repurpose the GTR lands.

“So the debate is, do we build on free-standing sites, or do we use that money towards cleaning up the GTR site to make it work?” Ritz said.

Ritz had businesses willing to take part in the redevelopment project on hand to discuss how they, too, believe in the rehabilitation of the building, as well as historian Dean Robinson, who also supports the project.