No one would have noticed, but April 18 was the International Day for Monuments and Sites. Last year the cultural authorities in this land did give the occasion some attention, because it coincided with the opening of an exhibition here and the launching of a publication entitled ‘Monuments and Sites.’ According to GINA which issued a press release about it at the time, the publication highlighted over 100 monuments, including the 1763 monument and the New Amsterdam Hospital.
This could not illustrate more vividly how empty rhetoric obfuscates the real issues relating to the material heritage of the nation. As everyone knows, the New Amsterdam Hospital is no more, courtesy of Dr Leslie Ramsammy and his cabinet colleagues. In fact, it was already in a parlous state when the publication saw the light of day. It was vandalised to extinction and then simply collapsed without any intervention on the part of the authorities. Exactly how many of the other 100 monuments listed in the publication will suffer the same fate remains to be seen, but it is unlikely that Castellani’s hospital building will be the last to take the short-cut to oblivion.
The last few years have been grim ones for one reason or another from the point of view of the heritage. On Christmas Day in 2004, for example, the Sacred Heart Church burnt down, really as a consequence of gross carelessness. Earlier this month it was the turn of the Christianburg Magistrate’s Court, which was built in 1803 by John Dalgleish Paterson, according to his descendant Mr Dmitri Allicock. In a letter to this newspaper on April 18, he wrote that the house and the sawmill which Paterson ran had been powered by a waterwheel. The building, he said, had ceased to be the family home in the 1890s, while this newspaper reported that it had once been used as the Regional Guest House, and had accommodated various agencies since that time, including the Linden Care Foundation. At the time of the fire it had housed the Linden Legal Aid Centre and the Probation and Family Welfare Unit in addition to the court.
No one knows at this stage the cause of the fire, other than the fact that it started in the upper storey. However, one would have thought that the cultural agencies in conjunction with the Fire Brigade would inspect all old buildings listed by the National Trust for possible future gazetting, to check for fire hazards like defective wiring and other vulnerabilities.
Since the overwhelming majority of our heritage buildings are of wood and this country has a poor record in terms of fires, it is common sense to have regular fire inspections at the very least. Had there been one prior to Christmas 2004, then a fire officer might have insisted that a bulb in the Sacred Heart nativity crib be removed, and even if that had not been done, he surely would have insisted that there were sufficient fire extinguishers on hand that could be easily accessed in the event of an emergency. Unlike the Sacred Heart Church, the Christianburg Magistrate’s Court, in addition to being a heritage building was also government owned, and as such, therefore, there was no excuse for not having it checked thoroughly on a regular basis.
As for plain old-fashioned neglect, the next building under threat of suffering a fate akin to that of the New Amsterdam Hospital is City Hall in Georgetown, which is in a dilapidated state. There have been some exchanges between Mayor Hamilton Green and Director of Culture James Rose on the subject, the latter recommending that a restoration plan, costs and a realistic schedule first be worked out, so that funding agencies could be approached with proposals for restoration. As a course of preliminary action this cannot be faulted, but for it to be done professional help would have first to be sought, and the council has no means of paying for this.
The current Minister of Local Government – he might not be much longer in the post – has shown no interest whatever in Father Ignatius Scoles’s masterpiece on Avenue of the Republic. The only thing which appears to galvanise him into action is quarrels with the Mayor and City Council, and there is no shortage of those. Yet this is an election year, and one might have thought that if only for that reason, the administration could be persuaded to show some interest in the survival of one of Georgetown’s most remarkable buildings – whatever it thinks or does not think of the Mayor.
In the year 2000, when Dutch consultant Dr Ron van Oers was here to advise on how to get Georgetown inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, he made an insightful observation. He said he had hoped to achieve consensus among the heritage stakeholders such as the Georgetown municipality, the Ministry of Housing, the National Trust, the UNESCO Commission and the Ministry of Culture. He went on to say, however, that while they were supportive, “total commitment” was lacking. More than a decade later the situation as far as commitment is concerned still has not changed, and if the case of the New Amsterdam Hospital is anything to go by, it might have got worse.
Our politicians love to talk about what they will do to alleviate poverty, raise educational standards, keep us above the flood level, etc, etc. This time around, all the presidential hopefuls should also tell voters about their policy in relation to the nation’s heritage, and what measures they will take to save City Hall in the first instance, in addition to their longer term programme for the preservation of monuments and sites.
Neither this government nor the PNC which preceded it has a record on the material heritage that stands up to scrutiny, and should they be so imprudent as to attempt to belabour the electorate with their achievements in this area, they will soon be alerted to the egregious nature of their failures. Accountability is a word in vogue right now. We have never had accountability from our rulers in their capacity as custodians of our heritage. In this election season we should demand it now.
