Demolition is the likely fate of a historic building at the base of Argyle Street, after structural weaknesses were recently discovered in the Somass Hotel.
The Uchucklesaht Tribe purchased the building in the summer of 2013 with plans to convert the Somass Hotel into a cultural centre and central administrative office. A carving room and gallery were also set to be built where the space formally served as a strip bar under past ownership, plus 23 new apartments replacing the smaller 42 living units in the building.
But the $3.5-million renovation effort changed course over the last month when an 18-inch slab of concrete between the second and third floors was discovered to be unsound.
Scott Coulson, the Uchucklesaht's chief administrative officer, said the tribe's council is about to make a final decision on what to do with the recently acquired building.
"We did some core testing on it and it just shows that it's not stable concrete," he said of the floor slab. "There's not enough rebar in the concrete itself, and the steel beams that are holding the floor are showing signs of cracking. It's just not a seismically stable building."
Fixing up the building to make it structurally sound has grown the project's estimated cost to $8 million, making a demolition and rebuild a more economical effort the Uchucklesaht expects to be $7 million. Early plans have the new building offering 32 rental apartments and living units for short-term medical stays.
Coulson expects a new building at the same uptown location will be more viable in the long term than maintaining the Somass Hotel's 40,000 square feet of space.
"It's actually a better fit for us with a new building because with the old building we were having to take a lot of space that we really didn't need," he said.
"Now we can design something that is more economical for us, more economical to heat because we don't have to fill that empty space."
Most of the work put into the project so far has been the removal of asbestos, conducted by Uchucklesaht members specially trained for the project through an education program with Nuu-chanulth Tribal Council.
"It got 10 individuals some pretty good training that they can use elsewhere," Coulson said, adding that this work would need to be done anyway for a demolition of the structure.
The demolition job has gone out to tender for potential contractors to put forward bids. Part of the tear down job entails salvaging four-inch-by-eight-foot fir beams supporting the top two floors of the Somass Hotel.
"There's some beautiful wood in there that we're going to try and save and use in the new building," Coulson said. "We wanted to save whatever we could from the old building just for historical reasons and to put it into our cultural centre."
The original Somass Hotel was built at Argyle Street and Kingsway Avenue over a century ago, but a fire destroyed the building in 1947. The existing structure, which is currently unoccupied by tenants, was then built to replace one of Port Alberni's largest original buildings.
