A welcome centre and plaza planned for the end of King Street in Saint John will not include the Barbour’s General Store.
Instead, city officials say the long-standing tourist attraction will be demolished
“We’re really trying to make a lot of our outdoor spaces four-season,” said Ian Fogan, the city’s commissioner of utilities and infrastructure.
He said the the city envisioned more than a tourism centre for the space and imagined a welcome centre as well.
“Almost like a concierge kind of service. A one-stop kind of place where people can go get information, you know, lead them into different directions.”
The Barbour’s store, built in the late 1860s, was given to the city in 1967 by the founder of G. E. Barbour as part of Canada’s Centennial celebrations.
Although operated by the city, the building was owned by G. E. Barbour. It has been a tourist centre and retail store, but a fire in January 2022 badly damaged the building.
Fogan said that while working with the building’s owners, it became apparent that repairs and repurposing the building would be too expensive.
G.E. Barbour Inc. president Jeff Rose said in an emailed statement Wednesday evening that the general store building will be demolished because “investigations into repair and relocation of the Store over the past months have proven difficult and the results economically unfeasible.”
The city hired Acre Architects in Saint John to design the welcome centre.
“We have our own locally owned … award-winning architects that have an office kitty corner from this location,” Fogan said. “So they get to look at it all the time. We figured who better to design a new space than somebody who has to see it out the window?”
Acre is calling the design “The Eddy.” Eddy means a circular movement of water, forming a small whirlpool, and Acre co-founder Monica Adair said this relates to how the site functions.
“That site is so unique, because you have everybody coming in at that spot,” Adair told Information Morning Saint John.
“You can’t leave the peninsula without having kind of touched it. And it’s this great moment where all this culture and people have this chance to culminate in the heart of our city.”
She said she grew up going to the Barbour’s General Store, so there’s a lot of nostalgia involved. But she believes that with the demolition of the building comes an opportunity to create “a new cherished landmark for Saint John — one that everybody would fight to keep and cherish and call our own.”
Fogan said he isn’t sure yet what the price tag will be on the new plaza and it will depend on what elements are needed. These will be decided in conversations with Envision Saint John over the next several months.
But he said as of now, $2 million has been set aside in the 2023 and 2024 capital budgets.
The next steps for the project will be working with the Barbours on the removal of the building, helping to preserve any pieces they want to, said Fogan.
Once the building is gone, he said a temporary park, designed by Brackish Design Studio, will be installed in the site, probably in July.
Fogan said he’d like to see the completed plaza open in 2025, with construction beginning in 2024.
With files from Information Morning Saint John
This story was originally published in CBC News on June 14, 2023.
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