The news that Mayor Hamilton Green had convened a meeting attended, among others, by some well-known engineers, not to mention Eddy Grant, on how to go about restoring City Hall was certainly uplifting to the spirits of all citizens who have the material heritage of Georgetown at heart. A decision came out of it on how to proceed, which would have given residents a glimmer of hope that Ignatius Scoles’ stately structure may yet not suffer the same fate as the New Amsterdam Hospital. The only reservation, if such it could be called, was the fact that no senior representative of government was in attendance, although that would be of little account provided that they are prepared to work with the city council and with the special technical team which is being proposed. The National Trust, however, was present, and they are of course a critical agency in their own right.
But it is not just City Hall which citizens have to be concerned about. The face of Georgetown is changing at such a rapid rate, that those who left it even ten years ago, would barely recognize its overall aspect nowadays. There was a time when one could wander down any street in some parts of the capital, and see house after house from the colonial era – some large and expansive and others small and modest, but all with their Demerara shutters, their fretwork, their wallaba shingles and their unique front doors, said to represent the signatures of the carpenters who built them.
And then there were the churches, chapels and temples, and later, the mosques too – all of them a creative collaboration between the pastor or pandit or moulvi, and the local carpenters. Architects were employed in the public sector, but it was the architect-builders who were responsible for most of the private structures in this city and along the coast. The carpentry traditions here may possibly have their origins in the Winkels of Berbice (Winkle district in New Amsterdam was where they were given house lots eventually), who originally were skilled enslaved artisans held in high regard by the Dutch as well as by the British who followed them, and who brought many Winkels to Demerara for a time to work on their building projects.
But where, one wonders, are these carpentry traditions in evidence now? Where are the streets with their rows of colonial housing which used to give Georgetown its character? It is not as if these buildings were not as well adapted to our hot and humid climate as our modern creations; quite the opposite in fact. The trays of the Demerara shutters packed with ice (brought down from Halifax starting in the 1840s) or set with trays of cold water, allowed cooled air to circulate around the well-fenestrated homes. At each end of the house close to the roof, were two windows, which facilitated the escape of the hot air which had risen. As a building material, wood in any case, is very much cooler given our temperatures, than the concrete which is so favoured nowadays.
The former resident returning after a decade’s absence would be bemused if not shocked by the concrete and glass urban centre that Georgetown has become. It is not as if these structures have any especially aesthetic features to recommend them; at their best, they are reminiscent of hundreds of others in the Western world which have no particular individuality or character, while at their worst they are really quite bizarre. Eccentric palaces which owe nothing to anybody’s architectural traditions tower above ordinary homes in residential areas, lacking coherence of design and looking for all the world like an assemblage of mismatched units from a child’s lego set.
Which is not to say that there are not some residents who break from local tradition and still design a house which is pleasing to the eye; it is merely to observe that in general, we seem to have become alienated from the skills, the craft and the styles which not so long ago lent our capital its grace, uniqueness and beauty. Unfortunately Georgetown is one large building site at the moment; malls and stores and bars are shooting up out of the coastal mud as though someone had sprinkled them with the construction equivalent of plant food. As a general rule, the larger the structure, the more tasteless it is, and one is forced to the reluctant conclusion that by and large (there are exceptions), those with taste have no money, and those with the money have no taste.
The latest victims to the philistinism that is surging over us are two colonial houses in Camp Street, the front one of which was especially elegant. They were razed so quickly, that the average citizen was stunned to wake up one morning and see that all that was left was a huge void where once they had stood. We now wait to see what concrete monstrosity (fully air-conditioned, of course), will be implanted in their space; whatever it will be, it cannot replace what we have lost.
As has been said previously in these columns, Minister Irfaan Ally can burble on incessantly about tourism, but it will mean absolutely nothing until he confronts the matter of our material heritage. What does he think that all these tourists he is expecting to be ensconced in the rather tasteless Marriott Hotel will want to see? Another concrete shopping mall, when they have bigger and better ones at home? Even the most intrepid of gamblers might want to put his nose out of the hotel door at some point, and there is no white sand and turquoise sea here to catch his eye.
The government must make a decision about the built heritage, and once it decides it has economic and not just aesthetic importance, it should take the legislative and practical measures which are necessary to preserve it. In principle it should be prepared to work with all groups in the society that want to restore the city beyond the level of just clearing the garbage.
