Conversions

The Reno Rage is upon us, we all know it. I've heard that the new houses being built nowadays are only meant to last 20 years - which doesn't surprise me because they seem to be made primarily out of plywood and glue. But what do you do with a building that was built a century or so ago, that may have outgrown its original purpose?

You get creative.

McLean School Annex. The original McLean School was a very cool old building that burnt down in 1980, when I was attending grade one there. Arson, but no one was ever charged. The school was K-7, so there were lots of displaced students. What wound up happening was that grades 1-4 were housed in the annex, and the district came in and built dividers to create four separate classrooms. I spent about a year and a half as a student in the basement of this building. The Annex is now a Francophone school with a flourishing student population.

Rossland's historic, copper-roofed Courthouse, a very famous building around here. Still used as a courthouse, but it's ancillary services have gradually been cut back over the years. I went to my dad's citizenship ceremony here. My parents' divorce trial was here...

...But the basement used to be a jail way back in the day. Then, many years later, the jail was converted into a public library. The entrance is just under the granite archway you can see at the bottom of this picture. I remember going here regularly to check out kids books - I loved Curious George best of all...

...Then the library outgrew the space in the basement of the courthouse, and a garage from the 1930s or 1940s on Columbia Avenue was converted into what remains to this day the Rossland Public Library.

Then we have this building. It was Mater Misericordiae Hospital. I had my appendix out here when I was seven. This was also the ambulance service's local HQ and a long-term care home before it gradually lost funding and all of its services were pulled (though there is an ambulance bay on the property, just out of view in this picture). The building went up for sale and about two years ago it was bought, and just very recently it's been converted into condos. I would not live here. I can't imagine living in a converted hospital...The energy must be very strange...