Preserving historic buildings is vital to understanding our nation’s heritage
Dear Editor,
According to recent press reports, the Government of Guyana has announced that it will undertake the huge task of rehabilitating and restoring the now-diminished and ramshackle City Hall building in Georgetown to its former beauty.
This initiative is commendable, timely and shocking and highlights the consistency of the President and Government in honoring the commitment they gave in their manifesto of improving Georgetown. It is a well-known fact that the current opposition always collects more than double the votes than those obtained by the party in central government, which shows government altruism.
This iconic structure, built since 1889, elaborately maintained for more than a century by the exact City Council to which it belongs, was proud to be a key tourist attraction and host. many concerts, recitals and other cultural activities including civic receptions. for visiting heads of state and government.
Why the Council has just sat for the last 25 years or more and did almost nothing to maintain the structure, but instead chose to sit inside and argue over very frivolous issues, is just beyond everyone’s wildest imagination. Were they just Philistines with no appreciation of historical or artistic values, were they cultural barbarians or was it just irrational politics? Whatever it was, the Council obviously prefers to wait for some fairy godmother to come along and fund the conservation of the building they own and occupy, while they choose to use this time to illegally placing hundreds of millions of dollars in interest. waivers to owners of delinquent properties who preferred them, money they could have used in the maintenance of the building.
The arbitrary excuse that is always provided for not maintaining that and other urban buildings in the city, is that they are short of money, an integral justification given when everyone is aware of the luxury expenditures made on traveling abroad, on buying fancy vehicles. , on purposeless projects like building an unfinished presidential park on Merriman’s Mall, trying to convert recreational space at Bel Air Park into their private housing estate, on contracting garbage collection and other municipal services instead of doing the jobs themselves as they once did. , etc. during this period.
Some sound advice to central government as they embark on this mammoth project is that they ensure that the Council’s role is nothing more than just watching, as it is public knowledge that there is a complete lack of transparency and accountability, and competence and professionalism at City Hall. This is evidenced by the fact that they even botched the only maintenance work they did to the building when they replaced the original wooden windows with PVC windows, a complete no-no in heritage building preservation, using dissimilar architectural surfaces and fittings.
Conserving historic buildings is vital to understanding our nation’s heritage, and so I would recommend that the Government establish a special team to manage this project with qualified personalities such as members of the National Trust, Guyana Heritage Society, former City Council engineers , Berkley Wickham, Egbert Carter, Cephas James and Lloyd Alleyne, engineers with a wealth of knowledge, experience and ability in cultural heritage conservation and restoration, and other personalities such as Carleton Joao who worked on the restoration of St. George’s Cathedral. project.
Truly,
Jermain Johnson