We need to save Parkside High School

Yesterday Shannon Kyles wrote a captivating piece on Raise The Hammer. In it, she petitions that Parkside High School should not only be saved from the wrecking ball, but also repurposed.

She’s right.

Tearing down one of the city’s greatest examples of midcentury modernism would be a tragic loss in a city that is steadily seeing it’s historical buildings disappear.

Parkside High School is an award-winning design (by architect Lloyd Kyles) with an incredible, swooping, saddle roofed, Eero Saarinen-esque entrance. It’s a building that means a lot to a town that saw generations of their loved ones walk through those doors.

It’s not only the nostalgia worth saving. It’s really just common sense.

One commenter on the aforementioned RTH article called it “just a box”. Perfect. Boxes are made for stacking and re-using. The simpler it is, the easier it should be to find a viable, cost effective way to convert the building into condos.

Related: Turn Parkside high school into affordable condos, says Dundas group

Rolled out sympathetically on a sloping site, the school would be prime for adaptive reuse. The dead-end street it resides on would still remain quiet (much quieter than when it was a high school) and it could be a perfect opportunity to add impactful residential building stock in the greenest possible sense. It even has an expansive, inclusive park behind it.

Demographics are shifting in the Valley Town. A younger generation is filling the neighbourhoods with new families. Empty nesters thinking of moving out of their 4-bedroom suburban homes are limited when it comes to condo options, both in availability and a financial sense, causing many to take flight to Aldershot and other surrounding areas. The housing market is tight, constricted, and in need of smart growth. The town needs more District Lofts and less Governors Road suburban sprawl.

Let’s preserve what we have. Isn’t that the Dundas way?

Preservation doesn’t just mean old buildings (which Dundas has in abundance). It means importance, value, influence, style, and so much more. It means not allowing the lineage of our architectural past vanish for a cluster of prefabricated townhouses and a cemetery.

A cemetery? How about we build to accommodate old age, not cast it upon an aging population like a profitable, impending doom.

Let’s take action. Sign the petition and save a piece of Dundas:
https://www.change.org/p/arlene-vanderbeek-hamilton-ca-i-want-to-stop-the-demolition-of-parkside-high-school-in-dundas

It’s time to keep history. Lest it be another chapter in Vanished Hamilton’s ever growing list of buildings that were worth saving.