Brick restoration delays school construction
Work to build a new home for Giles campus students is delayed by three weeks because it’s a historically significant building.
According to Giuliana Hinchliffe, the manager of facility services for the Greater Essex County District School Board, one of the key features of the building is holding up progress.
“The brick preservation, I think that’s giving us the biggest kind of headaches right now,” said Hinchcliffe.
“We're literally taking bricks off the wall, cleaning the mortar, stacking them back up and relaying a lot of those bricks," said Max Deangelis, president of the contractor Fortis Group.
The building at 1123 Mercer Street has been deemed historically significant by the City of Windsor, because of “the look of the facade, to the street” according to the project’s architect.
Colin McDonald said it’s the most exciting project he’s ever been involved with because the preservation of history while building something new is rare in his line of work.
“It’s far more of a European approach where you're heritage and your history is sort of sacred,” said McDonald.
This latest delay, while not a concern for finishing on time, is just one in a string of setbacks at the old International Playing Card factory.
“We had no idea of its significance,” said Hinchliffe when the GECDSB bought this lot at Mercer & Giles in February of 2017.
However, working with the city, the board has designed the school to look just like an “industrial building from the 1930's” from the outside but house more than 600 students inside.
When the work is done, by Christmas 2020, architects say you won’t even be able to see the gymnasium in the rear of the property.
It will be a new French Immersion school for the northwest side of Windsor and will move students out of the former W.D. Lowe High School just up the street on Giles.
Students have been there since 2011, when the board changed the boundaries for the over-crowded Ecole Bellewood in South Windsor.
The total project cost is $14.5-million.
