Crews started peeling shingles off the A-frame structure that shelters a national treasure at the Vancouver Maritime Museum Jan. 11. They're exploring the work that will have to be done to ensure embarrassing leaks become a thing of the past.
"When the rain is coming from a certain angle, you will see buckets on board the ship, which is embarrassing, to say the least, and not exactly what you would require for a national historic site and one of the four great explorer vessels in existence," said Simon Robinson, executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum.
The iconic A-frame building at Vanier Park houses the St. Roch, an RCMP vessel that crossed the Northwest Passage in 1940.
"She really is a symbol, an icon of Canadian Arctic sovereignty," Robinson said. "She's an important vessel, designed along the lines of the [Norwegian] Maud, so that as the ice contracts she pushes upwards and becomes a stable platform from which officers of the RCMP were able to run out their dog teams to visit various Inuit villages and so on."
Now that the city approved $902,000 toward building upgrades last month and since hopes for a new national maritime centre in North Vancouver were dashed when the B.C. government withdrew its support for the project just before the Olympics in January 2010, Robinson said the site at Kits Point will remain the museum's permanent home.
Parks Canada gave the Vancouver Maritime Museum Society nearly $24,000 in matched funds late last year to survey the vessel, which suffers from dry rot in some areas.
Approximately one third of the $902,000 will be spent upgrading the fire suppression system in the city-owned building, which was constructed as a temporary shelter for the St. Roch in 1966. The building lacks proper ventilation and humidity control and windows may need to be replaced.
Upgrades are expected to proceed in late spring. The A-frame may be briefly closed to the public, but the rest of the museum would likely stay open with the upgrades hopefully taking weeks, not months.
Previous relocation attempts were motivated by antipathy between the museum and the city due to personality clashes and concerns about the building's poor condition. There was also discontent about the museum's ability to only display about 10 per cent of its collection at one time because of its small size, and complaints from neighbours who didn't want the museum, tour or trolley buses at their doorsteps, according to Robinson who's been with the museum since April 2010.
"I personally feel that it's absolutely essential that the busiest port city in Canada should have a maritime museum that reflects both the rich maritime heritage of the area and the fact that we are largely reliant upon the water, to me it's crucial," Robinson said.
He reports attendance numbers have remained steady over the years with roughly half of those who visit in the summer hailing from beyond the Fraser Valley, dropping to 10 to 20 per cent tourists in the off season.
Still, to survive, the museum will be looking to expand.
[email protected] Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi
