Saskatchewan Hospital director Linda Shynkaruk recently reported to the Battlefords Chamber of Commerce hospital staff expect to take possession of the new facility Aug. 2, with patients to move in around November.
There has been, to this point, little public discussion of what will happen to the historic old Saskatchewan Hospital building once it is vacant.
A news item in my email last week caught my eye. The headline read “Visionary landlord transforms century-old mill for 21st century tenants.”
The article said the 100-year-old mill in Pepperell, Mass. was viewed as a “dinosaur who had outlived it usefulness, but developer Eric Shapiro and his team at The Lexvest Group envisioned a business Mecca with enormous potential set on 10 rustic acres.”
To me the setting and the age of the structure sound interestingly familiar.
In reading the article, it was evident Shapiro is a visionary, who anticipated the needs of his tenants down to the smallest detail.
Shapiro says, “For many business owners, it’s no longer just location, location, location. They seek building amenities, communication connections (IT infrastructure/fiber optics, high bandwidth Internet), reasonable rent, electric capacity and room to grow. It’s not easy to find all that under one roof for manufacturing, industrial and office users. But I think we have it all right here.”
A business hub is one model that might repurpose the old hospital. Another idea has been to convert it into condo or apartment space. What is certain is it will take a visionary like Shapiro to make that happen.
Visionaries are difficult to find, but creative people do exist in Northwest Saskatchewan. Take, for example, the young local couple who purchased the Battleford post office building, another historic structure, and refurbished it in order to once again accommodate Canada Post operations and with an eye to finding ways to use other floors of the building for retail purposes.
That Saskatchewan Hospital is a historic gem that should be preserved, to me, is a given. Achieving preservation is going to take creativity and vision, but it shouldn’t take too long. Everyone knows what happens when an aged structure is left unoccupied for any length of time.
