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Posted Apr 4, 2015, 3:33 PM
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I ♣ Baby Seals
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Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: Sin Jaaawnz, Newf'nland
Posts: 34,717
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Love this story - and they're so cute. Last year for Pride they had men's underwear in rainbow colours on their clotheslines. 
And I love that Maclean's actually gets that we have a handful of old communities that are quite old and beautiful, while the rest are more modern and just typical rural hubs.
Saving Bonavista’s architectural treasures, one building at a time
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John Norman is the sort of hometown boy of which all good burghers dream. He didn’t grow up to find the old neighbourhood too small for his ambitions and to quit it for the Big Smoke. He went away to school, got bachelor’s degrees in science and education, and returned to remote Bonavista, N.L., with a mission hatched in his youth: to tend to his roots. He’s sat on council. He’s president of the chamber of commerce and the Bonavista Horticultural Society; he’s a figure-skating coach and heads more than a dozen different organizations or committees. And he runs a company, Bonavista Living, whose business is restoring his hometown’s remarkable built heritage.
Bonavista is one of Newfoundland’s grand old towns, situated near the end of a peninsula extending 85 km from Newfoundland’s northeast coast, pointing toward Greenland. (Icebergs calved there can be seen passing in the hundreds every spring.) It’s purported to be the landfall of the Venetian explorer and mountebank Zuan Chabotto (a.k.a. John Cabot), though the historical record shows with more certainty that Basque, Breton, English and Norman fishers started establishing seasonal stations there in the early 1500s.
Unlike most ports in Newfoundland, Bonavista isn’t backed up against steep hills or cliffs, so its houses are spread across a coastal plain without mind to the unforeseen coming of the automobile. The town’s architectural glories are the many halls, churches and family homes constructed by “master builders” between 1880 and 1910. A luckless century later, many of those hand-hewn wooden treasures had fallen into disrepair. A recent real estate listing showed a dilapidated home for $2,000.
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At 29, Norman is fit and trim, dark in an Iberian way, as if he were from Canaille, Bonavista’s one-time Portuguese quarter. There’s something steampunk about the man and his enterprise: microchips governing a Victorian machine. Pardy jokes that he should be driving a Model T—but it would have to be a hybrid rigged out with Bluetooth and autonomous parking. He gets away with a bowtie as few men under 50 can, and his sealskin ankle boots flirt with dandyism.
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Putting that obsession to use, Norman began offering tours of historic Bonavista. During one such circuit in the summer of 2013, the enthusiasm he displayed so convinced Mark and Chantal Dickson that the holidaying Louisiana couple bought themselves a house in town. They soon fell for the place and its people. Mark Dickson is a principal at a 170-year-old family-owned pharmaceutical distributor, Morris & Dickson, an institution of Shreveport, La., and of its sister company, Sports South, one of the largest and oldest distributors of firearms and ammunition in the U.S. The Dicksons are well-heeled. Seeing the need to restore other properties, and seizing an opportunity to acquire them at a modest cost, they proposed partnering in a business with Norman. They would bring considerable cash, and Norman, his knowledge and boundless energy.
Outsiders with deep pockets buying up properties in town was bound to attract the attention of wary locals. And some in town came to imagine their properties were worth more than the market would bear—though the market settled that. Still, most fears were allayed early on, when it became clear Norman was driving the project, and his aims, and the Dicksons’, were not to make a museum or a twee summer getaway, but to fashion a place people call home—or, better, “the office,” “the shop,” or “the studio”—and to do so in February, when the surf pounding the breakwater and freezing spray reminds you this tough old seaport could never be Mayberry.
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Bonavista’s inventory of heritage properties—more than a thousand of them—is second only to that of its one-time commercial rival, St. John’s. Waye calls Bonavista “a big town for a small town.” The greater goal is not increasing property values. It’s about restoring the pride of purpose to the town as much as it is about period ornaments above the dormers. “If I didn’t know this town’s history,” says Norman, “I wouldn’t know who I am.” And history, from the first Great War in Europe to the changes that came with Confederation and, finally, the collapse of the cod fishery— knocked the stuffing out of Bonavista. When the big houses fell into disrepair, mature trees in their gardens were cut down. The town sight was denuded, stark.
As it turns out, the benign neglect was sometimes a hidden blessing: Without an urgency to replace or rebuild, original features were left where they lay. Some were covered, clad in vinyl siding—“disguised heritage” buildings. Others, like the one Joseph Strathie designed and built in 1902 for the prosperous fisherman Henry Tremblett, now being brought back to life by Norman, were peeled and dulled, but of such craftsmanship and solid construction, they never bent, even with their faces to the gale.
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http://www.macleans.ca/society/the-baron-of-bonavista/
__________________
Note to self: "The plural of anecdote is not evidence."
Last edited by SignalHillHiker; Apr 4, 2015 at 3:45 PM.
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