Two buildings that collapsed by Hamilton’s Gore Park early Monday morning were slated for demolition in 2013, only to be saved after heritage advocates pushed for a different development plan to restore their facades.
But the buildings have sat boarded up and fenced off since then. On Monday morning, facades collapsed into a pile of rubble on the sidewalk.
The collapse exposed the interior rooms to passersby, who gaped at the massive hole. A Hamilton police officer on the scene told CBC Hamilton that calls came in around 6 a.m. reporting the collapse.
Firefighters were also on scene investigating to determine, along with police, the “severity of the compromised building,” Hamilton police posted on social media.
Mayor Andrea Horwath and city manager Marnie Cluckie visited the site Monday and told reporters no one was injured.
Horwath said city officials who are investigating currently “don’t know a hell of a lot” about how the collapse happened and are investigating. She’s asked them to try to save whatever they can of heritage value.
“It’s a loss for the city,” Horwath said.
Nearby Remembrance Day ceremonies were held at the cenotaph a block east later that morning.
The day before, hundreds of people had walked by the buildings for the garrison parade, Horwath said.
“I cringe at the thought of what could’ve happened had this devastating incident occurred yesterday,” she said. “I feel speechless to be honest with you.”
‘Demolition by neglect,’ says councillor
Ward 2 Coun. Cameron Kroetsch surveyed the damage Monday as well, and told CBC Hamilton that firefighters have been using drones to assess the damage. He said they won’t know for sure what caused the collapse until they excavate through the fallen material.
He said the interiors appear to have been exposed to the elements for some time.
“Demolition by neglect is my basic understanding of what happened here,” he said.
The buildings that collapsed were part of a swath between 18 and 28 King St. E. that was set for a $120-million-development announced in 2012.
They date back to the 1870s and have been owned over the years by several companies associated with developer David Blanchard.
The developer obtained a demolition permit but did not bring down the buildings — located on the south side of King Street East, between Hughson and James Streets — in 2012. The developer then agreed in 2013 to preserve the facades and incorporate them into a new project.
Then-Ward 2 Coun. Jason Farr helped secure a last-minute heritage designation in an attempt to protect the properties.
In 2016, the city’s municipal heritage committee heard from the developer’s lawyer that it wouldn’t be possible to save the facades, and that they were being held up by scaffolding at 24 and 28 King St. E.
But the following year, the developer said yet again that it would, in fact, preserve the facades, calling it a “win-win for interested stakeholders” while also “respecting the wishes of the local heritage community.”
Robert Miles worked on plans for the Gore Park buildings in his time at Wilson Blanchard. He told CBC Hamilton Monday that when he left the company in 2019, the plan was to take down the facades and add those pieces onto a more structurally sound building.
“The only thing that is heritage on the building was the block veneer on the outside,” said Miles, now a sales representative at Blair Blanchard Stapleton, a real estate brokerage of which David Blanchard is president.
“Everything was caving in. There wasn’t much to save.”
City staff surveyed site Friday
CBC Hamilton called Blanchard-affiliated companies Wilson Blanchard and Markland Property Management on Monday but did not hear back before publication.
Graham Carroll, vice-chair of the city’s heritage committee, said in an interview that the city issued the developer a building permit two years ago, but nothing ever transpired.
The developer was expected to install a retention frame to hold the building together, but didn’t, said Carroll who added he wasn’t speaking on behalf of the heritage committee.
“When they were doing the inspections for the heritage permit, they were actually putting their fingers into the brick and it was collapsing,” he said.
In the area where the the buildings collapsed, the downtown Hamilton Business Improvement Area (BIA) had held a children’s hay bale maze during its Halloween Spooktacular event weeks before, on Oct. 25.
The chair of the BIA is Evan Apostol, who is also president of Markland Property Management — one of Blanchard’s companies. Apostol did not return several calls from CBC on Monday, and the BIA did not respond to an email.
On Friday building staff had visited the site to try to “facilitate action,” Cluckie said.
She and Horwath said there would need to be a review, as other buildings have sat in a similar state for years across Hamilton, including on King Street East where a facade collapsed two years ago.
Hamilton Fire Chief Dave Cunliffe said in a statement that the building department staff would issue an emergency demolition order and would call in a company to complete the work.
A structural engineer will review the surrounding buildings to determine the extent of the damage, Cunliffe said.
