People & Culture
Stratford’s Shakespeare Festival
Festival turns 60; Shakespeare never gets old
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Part way through researching an article about Stratford, Ontario’s three-decade struggle to find a modern use for the old railway locomotive repair shops that loom, massive and neglected, on the edge of its pretty downtown, I realized I should also look for success stories for contrast. (Find my story, “I was adored once too,” in Canadian Geographic’s April 2016 issue)
Everywhere across Canada there are examples of shuttered factories and warehouses that have been transformed into arts centres, restaurants and bars, condos, gyms, medical facilities, shopping districts, you name it.
Sure, all of these projects took years and often enormous perseverance to come up with the money, the zoning and environmental approvals and the right heritage designs. But they got done.
In Stratford, though, nothing has worked. The saga of the efforts to transform the rail shops, now nearly 110 years old and stretching for three city blocks, is one of missed opportunities, lack of will, misguided dreams and too many instances of the wrong people getting involved at the right time — and, likely, the reverse.
The result has been hard on the city-owned building, an unsightly mess that becomes more expensive to rehabilitate with each passing year. But the litany of failure has also been hard on the city’s psyche, dividing its 32,000 residents — and city council — into distinct camps that either want the place flattened now or a renewed effort to preserve the past.
I often ran into that divisiveness while researching the story, more than once enduring finger-jabbing arguments about why the building had to come down, pronto, or why it had to become the new face of Stratford’s core. One day while I was taking photos of the building, a guy in a pickup truck stopped and suggested we’d all be better off if I set the place on fire instead of snapping pictures.
Mayor Dan Mathieson, who says he hears from voters on both sides every time he ventures out of his office, told me that sometimes he wishes he’d wake up in the morning and discover the whole thing was a bad dream.
Here’s a peek into the reality.
This story is from the April 2016 Issue
People & Culture
Festival turns 60; Shakespeare never gets old
People & Culture
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