Okay, who owns this place?
To call it an eyesore is an insult to eyesores. It’s been sitting there empty for as long as I can remember. Ten years? Fifteen? Maybe even twenty?
How long must a community endure such a piece of crap sitting along it’s main street, in this case Renfrew’s Raglan Street?
Is it owned by some carpet-bagger absentee landlord who is content to let it sit and rot until somebody comes along and pays big dollars for it? Is it someone waiting for the Town of Renfrew to step in with their tax-payer dollars? The town is no stranger to real estate transactions, just not so much with successful ones. The old post office was unloaded for pennies on the dollar to a private concern who was promising to convert it into a boutique hotel. But that was several years ago now, and the heritage building sits today exactly as it did many years ago, but probably in even worse condition. Whoever bought it has become just another in a string of historical absentee landlords who sit on vacant, dilapidated properties in the heart of this Ottawa Valley town’s main business and retail area.
A drive down Raglan reveals building after building like this, many with some sort of retail or commercial entity on the ground floor, and apartments top-side, just likely not the kind of apartments you want your kids, or worse, your parents living in. But with living spaces at a premium here and everywhere, I can at least see the need for such buildings to endure, not that they’re much fun to look at.
What kind of rent do these sharks charge? Is that part of the reason why it’s almost a financial suicide move to open a business along Raglan? How many businesses have you seen open with much fanfare, only to sit shuttered and empty a few months later? I know it’s tough to be in your own business these days, but how much of a contributing factor to business closings is exorbitant rent expectations from building owners?
A lot of those downtown buildings are around 125 years old at time of writing, many of them joined together, brick to brick, in such a way as to give local fire-fighting personnel the willies. If any of these buildings caught fire, say goodbye to much of downtown Renfrew.
The place in the picture sits on the corner of Raglan and Prince streets, one of four sort-of intersections in town, which says something, because Renfrew is a town where no two streets appear to intersect at right angles, the concept seemingly anathema to anyone in the planning department a century or so ago, if one even existed. In the thirty-plus years that I’ve been here, the building has played host to a Bargain Harold’s, some other discount chain I can’t remember, a bar upstairs, followed by a gym upstairs. But for most of that time, the building just sits there, brooding over everything around it.
I remember a big fuss was made when former town counsellor Arlene Jamieson was patted on the back publicly and enthusiastically for managing to lure some enterprise into setting up shop in the decrepit structure. Except nothing ever came of it, which teaches us that maybe we should wait until the thing in question is there and operational before we start patting Arlene on the back.
Whatever the back story on this building might be, it remains today as it most always was, a dump on a prominent corner of the main drag.
With all due respect to the possible tender sensibilities of the owners or their family, I feel I have a solution to this situation. And it’s as simple as a wrecking ball, a backhoe, a bulldozer, and some dump trucks. Because I’d rather look at a pile of bricks than have to look at this anachronism every time I drive or walk downtown.
But, I suppose, that’s just me, wanting to be proud of the town I live in. Expecting property owners to properly look after and maintain their properties. Looking for signs of what’s sometimes called common sense, and dumbfounded when I see obvious evidence to the contrary.
I don’t know what you’d put in this building’s place if you were to knock it down, but even nothing would be something better than than the something we have there now.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 