Sydney Street Courthouse (Credit: Brian Goodwin)
The Saint John Theatre Company has begun the process of redeveloping the Sydney Street Courthouse into a cutting-edge performance venue.
“What we’ve been doing for the last year is really going through the exploratory process of the project,” said Executive Director Stephen Tobias. “There’s been excavation to get a head start on knowing how the ground works around the building, engineering, environmental tests, seismic tests, you name it.”
Tobias and the Company want the Courthouse project to become a high-quality facility for shows of a mid-range scope that fall between the work they do at the Imperial Theatre and the BMO Studio.
“We’re the third largest center of English-language culture, east of Montreal, we’re a big city in Atlantic Canada,” he said. “The idea of developing a state-of-the-art, future-proofed cultural facility in uptown Saint John that would be as good as or better than any cultural facility on the east coast of Canada, I think that’s a worthy cause.”
While COVID-19 was disruptive to the project’s timeline, upending the possibility of launching a public campaign to support the development, the pandemic still gave the theatre company an opportunity to go back to the drawing board.
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- Sydney Street construction (Credit: Brian Goodwin)
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- Sydney Street construction (Credit: Brian Goodwin)
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- Courthouse stairwell (Credit: Brian Goodwin)
“We realized in April that we were designing a building that did not make sense in a pandemic world,” said Tobias, noting that a range of the venue’s designs, from congregation spaces to its bathrooms, weren’t feasible.
The company took time during lockdown to redesign and “future-proof” the venue against a similar disruption in the future.
“I think it would have been pretty tragic to develop that property, create a brand-new state of the art cultural centre and the next time a major flu comes along everyone looks at it and says, ‘Wow, this building does not work anymore,'” he said.
Tobias adds securing of $4.5 million in federal and private funding allowed the company to acquire the Courthouse building, with more fund development needed before moving onto the next phase of construction.
Work is ongoing at the Sydney Street Courthouse during the exploratory phase and they are committed to finishing the project, which has become bigger in the last year.
“It’s not a simple building, so it’s taken a huge amount of time to get us this far,” said Tobias. “We’re aware of the awesome responsibility of being tasked with repurposing this historic building – it’s a big deal.”
