It is always hard work getting governments in this country to show an interest in heritage issues, and it will be particularly hard now when there is a pandemic raging and those who sit in power have their minds fully occupied by fossil fuel matters. The trouble with the preservation of the material heritage is that it won’t wait on pandemics and it won’t wait until the gentleman in State House feels the oil bonanza has generated enough cash to allow him to spend a few cents on what he sees as esoteric conservation projects.
Last week we reported that the restoration of St George’s Cathedral had been completed, bar the main roof, at a cost of $200 million. The work had taken four years, and $177 million of the funding had come from the Diocese of Guyana and Suriname. The Anglican Bishop told this newspaper that the National Trust along with friends of the Cathedral, one of which was Banks DIH, had contributed to the Trustees of the Diocese to make it possible for the project to proceed.
Most Guyanese will be happy about this, even if they are not of the Anglican persuasion. St George’s is a major city landmark boasting an aesthetic quality, and when viewed on a sunny day from the end of Church Street, seems to rise gleaming and almost ethereal from the ground in the direction of the heavens. But it was not the only historic landmark in desperate need of attention in Georgetown over the last four years. In fact there is one which has been in desperate need of attention for much longer than that − City Hall.
The seat of the capital’s local authority suffers from certain disadvantages, the leading one of which is that it is not owned by a responsible private agency like the Diocese of Guyana and Suriname. As a public building it has been the victim of politics, lack of official funding, bureaucratic inertia and, it might be added, a certain level of ignorance. It has been deteriorating for longer than anyone cares to remember, and yet no one in government has felt moved to seek out an avenue by which the decay could be arrested and the structure rehabilitated with any urgency. Surely the time has come to act before we all wake up one morning to find the city’s most symbolic structure collapsed on the ground in a heap of undifferentiated rubble, like the former Chess Hall in Main Street.
It would not be true to say that the present government when previously in office did absolutely nothing towards saving the building. It did provide some funding for emergency works eventually, and prior to the election of 2011 granted $20 million for this purpose. Unfortunately for Georgetown, it was a very historically-challenged City Engineer who was given charge of the project, and since he was unable to distinguish between “commercial” windows and those which were appropriate to the period when the structure was built, it was halted, and $15 million was returned to the Treasury. Three years later Dr Roger Luncheon announced at his weekly press conference that the administration had approved a substantial sum for the rehabilitation of City Hall given that it “could collapse at any time”. He said it was looking at comprehensive renovation and had resolved to fast-track interventions directed towards that end.
Apparently PPP/C government interventions were not fast-track enough, because here we are six years down the line, and not much has changed. The year before the Cabinet Secretary made this statement, the City Council had arranged for two experts from Grenada to come and give advice about saving the building. They provided their services gratis, and their report was damning, identifying “water ingress” as the most important reason for the deterioration of the edifice.
Subsequent to that the EU provided funding of about $60 million to fund a study on City Hall’s restoration which was completed in 2018. At that time they estimated the cost of its rehabilitation at €3 million, whereas now that figure has escalated to US$5 million. In the days when Mr Hamilton Green was Mayor in 2010, the sum was $400 million. It demonstrates, as nothing else ever could, that procrastination is expensive.
In between times we have had workshops, and the various mayors, most recently Ms Chase- Green and Mr Ubraj Narine, expressing their consternation about the state of the structure and the need for expedition in terms of action. It is a position also repeated by the National Trust. Neither the latter nor the City Council, however, has the kind of money required, and for its part the Trust subsists on whatever subventions the government allocates.
After discussions and the setting up of committees and sub-committees in 2018 and 19 the City Council launched a restoration fund in February this year. The Town Clerk told this newspaper that the committee in control of the fund included not just members of the Council’s administration, but also the Private Sector Commission, the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the National Trust and the Guyana Tourism Authority. The checking account would require three signatories, namely members from the National Trust and the Private Sector as well as the City Treasurer. The Mayor said that the council has external auditors, and the Auditor General would be involved at every step where money was spent.
It might be noted that during the launch the Reverend Dil Mohammed pledged to donate $150,000 to the fund, Deputy Mayor Alfred Mentore $50,000 and the company, Impressions, $5 million. Exactly how much money the fund has amassed to date is not known; suffice it to say that the full total of US$5 million will not be raised for a very long time on the basis of local donations alone.
It was Dr Keith Carter who in a letter to this newspaper last week reminded readers of the offer from the local woodworking establishment Bulkan Timber Works to restore City Hall.
“We need to take up the offer of City Hall’s restoration by Bulkan Timber Works and find the funding to so do,” he wrote. This is certainly an avenue which would need to be explored as soon as possible; apart from anything else it would not involve the level of financing external contracting firms would likely demand. In addition, as Dr Carter pointed out, this is a Guyanese company, and providing they have the expertise required for the rehabilitation of a historical building, there should be no hesitation about retaining them.
The EU study said that approximately 90 per cent of the materials used to construct City Hall could be reused for restoration purposes, and the contractors would be able to replace the damaged sections of larger structures instead of changing the entire thing. We quoted one of the consultants as saying, “It is important that the contractor ha[s] the will to want to keep the materials.” He went on to observe that they would need a contractor who “understands the philosophy” of restoring and preserving historic buildings.
There have been enough workshops and studies and declarations of intent on this subject; it is time for action. Even if it turns out that Messrs Ali and Dharamlall have no feel for aesthetics and no interest in our architectural heritage, they are not novices in the political field. As such they will be aware of the price they will pay in that department should one of the world’s most unique local government centres be allowed to decay into oblivion. Dr Leslie Ramsammy, the former Minister of Health, will never shake off his hapless reputation for cultural and historical insensitivity, if not ignorance, by refusing to intervene to prevent the New Amsterdam Hospital from falling into ruin. It is a reputation which will follow him into the nation’s future history texts and will supersede anything beneficial he may have done in the Ministry of Health. Posterity can be very unforgiving.
What one can only hope is that the government will be inspired by the transformation of St George’s Cathedral, and will commit itself to ensuring that City Hall will likewise be brought back to its former glory, among several other things by using its good offices to access the necessary funding from relevant international agencies. As an elegant structure with its fairyland-style detailing, it will pay for itself by becoming a tourist attraction.
