HomeMy WebLinkAbout390"Article copied from the Toronto Star, date not available, written by Tracy Hanes.
Tea room fits spirit of house in Brougham
Illustration: BUILDING A DREAM: Jack McGinnis and Carrie Newman have spent a lot of
""blood, sweat and tears"" — and money — restoring Commercial House, a former hotel in
Brougham, north of Pickering.
If not for Jack McGinnis and a dedicated group of volunteers, one of Durham Region's historic
landmarks would have been rubble by now.
When McGinnis, a pioneer of Canada's recycling movement, was looking for a building for the
Durham Conservation Centre in 1982, he settled on the dilapidated Commercial House,
a former hotel in the hamlet of Brougham, north of Pickering.
Most of the south brick wall was missing and all the windows had been stolen or destroyed,
the building was, and still is, owned by the federal government, which expropriated Brougham
and 18,000 surrounding acres for a proposed airport.
""I went through properties acquired for the airport land and there were a lot of empty buildings
that weren't suitable for housing,"" McGinnis says. ""I struck a deal with the department of
public works to take this one over as an empty shell. I wanted to save the building,
but I wanted it to demonstrate useful ideas.""
From 1982 to 1986, the house was an energy conservation project, to show how old buildings
could be brought up to modern energy efficiency standards. All work was by volunteers,
under the direction of local resident Gail Lawlor and a community board of directors.
Today, the building, also called the Green House, is headquarters to McGinnis' business,
the Recycling development Corporation, an environmental library, an antique store,
and a newly opened tea room.
House boasts energy conservation features.
To the casual eye, it may look like any other restored historic house. However,
its interior walls are drywall and the windowsills are extra wide to allow for Insulation in
excess of R2000. All windows are reproduction and triple-paned.
As Well as serving as a hotel, the house was also the town jail for a time, then became a
private home in 1926.
Restoring it ""took an incredible amount of blood, sweat and tears,"" McGinnis says.
One of the only parts that hasn't been reproduced is the front porch, because the the building
sits too close to Highway 7.
When the Durham Conservation Centre moved to other quarters in 1986, McGinnis moved
himself and his business into the house. One day, he arrived in Brougham ''and something
seemed wrong. Then I realized in the span of two days, two buildings, including another
old hotel, had been flattened. It was upsetting to see it go like that.""
The Commercial House is now the only of the village's three hotels to stand on its original site.
The Brougham Central Hotel was moved to the Pickering Village Museum; the bulldozed
building was the Brougham Hotel, built in 1858.
In 1986, McGinnis and Carrie Newman, his partner in business and life, applied for heritage
designation for the Commercial House and six other buildings. The applications were blocked
by the ministry of transportation, which wanted to protect future rights to build an airport and
Highway 407.
""We were laughed at so many times by the public works department, asking why we were
spending money on the building when we didn't own it. We might be slightly insane,
but the insanity attracts other people,"" says McGinnis, who estimates $200,000,
much of it from his own pocket, has been spent to restore the house.
""It's still our dream to own it. Brougham was expropriated as an airport buffer zone originally,
but with changes in airplanes and technologies (thus need for less land), Brougham is no
longer needed, even if an international-scale airport was built.
'We might be insane, but the insanity attracts other people'.
""We feel as if we own it,"" adds Newman, who had a plaque made which describes the
Commercial House's history and is mounted on the front of the house.
(The house was turned down for heritage designation.)
The couple points out they are only two of the stakeholders in Commercial House:
all six Recycling Development employees are part of it, as are Gail Lawlor and others
who spearheaded the original renovations.
This tea room is the latest venture to make the Commercial House part of the community
and to gather stories about it from people who knew the building in the past.
""The antique store was Jack's idea and the tea house mine,"" says Newman.
""We are trying to keep the same spirit alive as when it was a hotel"".
"