Rénovation de la Résidence Fulford, construite en 1864, afin d’y aménager 20 logements destinés aux femmes.
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Emplacement: 1221 Rue Guy
Hauteur: 3 étages
Architecte:
Promoteur:
Début et fin de la construction:
Dates importantes:
Autres informations:
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Héritage Montréal veut préserver la maison Major:
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, LA PRESSE
La maison Major, à Montréal
Mario Girard La Presse
Qui réussira à mettre la main sur la maison Major, située rue Guy, juste en face de l’ancienne maison mère des Sœurs grises de Montréal ? La question est en suspens depuis des mois. Et suscite l’inquiétude. Quel sort réservera le futur propriétaire à cette propriété riche en histoire ?
Publié à 6h00
Vous avez sans doute déjà aperçu cette somptueuse demeure construite dans les années 1850 en vous demandant qui l’occupait. Depuis plusieurs décennies, cette maison érigée par James Edward Major, sur les terres du notaire et arpenteur Étienne Guy, a une vocation caritative.
Achetée par le Church Home en 1890, elle a servi à accueillir des femmes dans le besoin, notamment des immigrantes venues s’installer à Montréal, sous le nom de Résidence Fulford. Depuis quelques années, elle offrait des services aux personnes âgées.
Conçue pour accueillir près de 35 personnes, la Résidence Fulford a vu le tiers de ses résidantes succomber à la COVID-19. On a donc pris la décision de la mettre en vente en juin 2021.
La chose est rapidement venue aux oreilles de Marina Boulos-Winton, directrice générale de Chez Doris, organisme qui vient en aide aux femmes en difficulté. Cette dernière m’a expliqué la grande transformation que connaît en ce moment son refuge. Ses services se multiplient, son rôle prend de l’ampleur.
Centre de jour depuis toujours, Chez Doris (en plus d’offrir des services temporaires en période de pandémie) va bientôt inaugurer un refuge de nuit de 22 lits, de même que deux résidences permanentes (De Champlain et Saint-André).
Depuis 2017, Chez Doris observe une forte augmentation du nombre de femmes itinérantes et une plus grande gamme de besoins à combler. « Ce groupe représentait de 20 à 30 % de notre clientèle, m’a dit Marina Boulos-Winton. C’est maintenant 60 % de notre clientèle. »
Chez Doris souhaite poursuivre cette expansion en faisant l’acquisition de la maison Major. Marina Boulos-Winton a rapidement obtenu une somme (plus de 4 millions de dollars) du gouvernement fédéral (SCHL) pour l’achat et la rénovation de la maison.
Une lettre d’intention a été remise au conseil d’administration de la Résidence Fulford en juillet dernier, par l’intermédiaire d’Atelier Habitation Montréal, OBNL d’économie sociale qui accompagne des organismes dans le développement de projets d’habitation communautaire.
Cet endroit est parfait pour nous, car les chambres existent déjà et nous pourrions poursuivre la mission que cette résidence a toujours eue.
Marina Boulos-Winton, directrice générale de Chez Doris
Dans cette lettre d’intention, « un prix tenant compte de la valeur de l’immeuble dans son état actuel » est indiqué. Précisons que la valeur au rôle d’évaluation de la maison Major est de 4 millions de dollars. Atelier Habitation Montréal entend déposer prochainement une offre d’achat officielle.
Un autre aspect capital dans cette affaire est que le projet de Chez Doris assure le maintien du caractère patrimonial de cette maison qui, par miracle, a su conserver un « état d’intégrité et d’authenticité exceptionnelle », selon Héritage Montréal.
Alerté par des bruits de coulisses évoquant le spectre de promoteurs gourmands, l’organisme, qui œuvre à protéger le patrimoine montréalais, a adressé une demande de classement de la maison Major auprès de la ministre de la Culture et des Communications, Nathalie Roy.
Héritage Montréal a pu compter, une fois de plus, sur l’infatigable Phyllis Lambert pour mener cette opération. « L’évaluation de l’intérêt patrimonial de la maison Major est en cours », m’a confirmé vendredi une porte-parole du ministère de la Culture.
Ce classement, s’il est obtenu, ne fera sans doute pas l’affaire de certains promoteurs qui n’auront plus les coudées franches pour transformer la résidence ou le terrain à leur guise. « La maison pourrait être vendue, mais on ne pourrait pas faire n’importe quoi », m’a dit Taïka Baillargeon, directrice adjointe des politiques à Héritage Montréal.
Selon Mme Boulos-Winton, un acteur de taille serait au fil de départ pour l’acquisition de cette propriété, et il s’agirait de l’Université Concordia, qui possède plusieurs bâtiments dans ce secteur (dont la maison mère des Sœurs grises). « Il n’y a pas beaucoup de transparence pour le moment, déplore la directrice de Chez Doris. On nous a dit que Concordia veut l’immeuble parce qu’ils ont besoin du terrain. »
J’ai voulu en savoir plus sur les intentions de l’établissement universitaire. On m’a simplement répondu que « ne discutons pas de la possibilité d’acquérir de potentiels biens immobiliers ». On ne souhaite pas que le partage d’information entraîne une surenchère.
Mais rappelons tout de même que l’Université Concordia a récemment fait l’acquisition de l’ancien restaurant Bar B Barn (qui était situé au 1201, rue Guy), un immeuble de moindre envergure que la maison Major, moyennant une somme importante. Acheté par une société à numéro en mars 2020 au prix de 8,8 millions, le restaurant a été revendu neuf mois plus tard à l’Université Concordia en échange de 15 millions de dollars, a rapporté Montreal Gazette en novembre dernier.
Vous comprenez maintenant l’inquiétude de la direction de Chez Doris ? Vous comprenez le type de négociations qui a lieu en ce moment ?
La Résidence Fulford n’a pas été plus éloquente que l’Université Concordia. « Nous nous attendons à recevoir un certain nombre d’offres », s’est contenté de me dire David McEntyre, vice-président du conseil d’administration (la présidente est Mary Irwin-Gibson, évêque du diocèse anglican de Montréal).
Marina Boulos-Winton trouve que la décision que tardent à prendre les propriétaires est exaspérante. « C’est évident que c’est une question d’argent. On doit se demander en ce moment qui a les poches les plus profondes. »
Si l’organisme Chez Doris ne peut obtenir cette résidence, elle utilisera l’argent du fédéral pour acquérir un autre bâtiment. Mais si la maison Major passe aux mains d’un propriétaire ambitieux, l’apparence de ces lieux pourrait prendre diverses formes.
« C’est pour cela que nous voulons nous assurer que les élus et les autorités soient alertés, m’a dit Taïka Baillargeon. Il est important que tout le monde suive ce dossier et qu’une protection soit assurée. »
Comme je l’ai déjà écrit, le sort de plusieurs bâtiments historiques du Québec se joue souvent alors qu’il est trop tard pour agir. Dans le cas de la maison Major, on ne pourra pas dire qu’on ne savait pas.
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/chroniques/2022-03-07/une-maison-historique-tres-convoitee.php
L’organisme Chez Doris serait intéressé à acheter la maison Major/Fulford Residence et aurait le soutien d’Héritage Montréal dans les démarches
Dossier toujours pas réglé
As the clock ticks, historic Fulford Residence decays
The downtown landmark has sat empty for almost two years — and negotiations on its sale are cloaked in silence.
Author of the article:
Susan Schwartz • Montreal Gazette
Published Apr 01, 2023 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 9 minute read
“I am beginning to be worried about the state of the building,” said city councillor Serge Sasseville. “In June it will have been closed for two years.” PHOTO BY DAVE SIDAWAY /Montreal GazetteIt has been more than two years since the decision to close the Fulford Residence, a downtown Montreal landmark which had been home to women of a certain age for 131 years, and the last resident left in June of 2021.
The three-storey brick building at 1221 Guy St. stands vacant, except for people entering for maintenance and inspection work, the silence within its walls echoed in responses to queries about its future: Will its social mission of helping vulnerable women, which has guided Fulford from its inception, continue? Will the property be sold to the highest bidder? How will the decision be made — and when?
Lawyer Serge Sasseville, the independent city councillor for the Ville-Marie borough’s Peter-McGill district, where Fulford is located, and someone knowledgeable and passionate about heritage properties, is concerned that the landmark is uninhabited.
“I am beginning to be worried about the state of the building,” he said in an interview. “In June it will have been closed for two years. When you don’t occupy a heritage house, the decay begins.”
This week, for instance, he noticed badly peeling paint on the massive wooden beams of the raised veranda, one of the most interesting architectural elements of the 19th-century building. “So the wood is now exposed to the snow, the rain, the sun, the wind, the pollution — unprotected,” he said.
The building is exposed in other ways. It had been vacant only a short time when an unhoused woman broke in through a window, threw things around and went to sleep in one of the rooms. The alarm system detected someone inside and, when police rang the doorbell, she answered. There were also reports of unhoused people sleeping on the Fulford porch.
“It is important for me, as a heritage lover, to preserve that house … which bears witness to the birth of the Golden Square Mile,” Sasseville said.
Built when Guy St. was just a country road cutting through orchards and farmland, the 1859 house is one of Montreal’s last surviving brick buildings from that era, he said. With its raised veranda, beautiful stained glass windows featuring the initials of the person for whom it was built, potash inspector James Edward Major, and the white marble fireplaces favoured in fashionable homes of the period, it is a unique witness to the city’s past.
Last August, in response to a request from Heritage Montreal and founding president Phyllis Lambert, Quebec’s culture and communications ministry announced its intention to give heritage protection to the Major House by classifying the property, the building and parts of its interiors which are “of particular architectural integrity and interest.”
No decision is expected before at least early 2024; meanwhile, the owner must act as if the property has already been classified. Heritage classification, of course, changes the possibilities for developers: It means they can’t tear the building down.
Although the Anglican bishop is president of Fulford’s board and despite what many think, the church owns neither the land nor the building. Fulford’s owning corporation is a not-for profit organization, Résidence Fulford/Fulford Residence, governed by the provincial corporations act.
David McEntyre, vice-president of the Fulford board, and board director Pam Davidson McLernon, a real estate agent, make up the building committee charged with developing proposals from prospective buyers for the property, with lawyer Valérie Mac-Seing as real estate counsel.
Parties who have expressed interest — it’s not clear how many there are — have signed non-disclosure, or confidentiality, agreements, so they’re not talking.
On behalf of Fulford, Mac-Seing recently described the sale process as “private and confidential. As such, we have no comment.”
Responding for Fulford board president Mary Irwin-Gibson, Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Episcopal secretary Maria Abate wrote in March: “Bishop Mary is not involved with the current part of the negotiations. As far as she knows, there is no news to date.”
Still: The fate of a valued community property and an important architectural landmark has been up in the air for the better part of two years — and there is no news to date?
Concordia University has long been eyeing the Fulford property — it reached out to Fulford in 2018 about relocating the residents, although that did not come to pass — and is believed to have submitted a proposal to buy it. There is speculation that the university’s bid for Fulford would involve the Old Brewery Mission, a resource for unhoused men and women, using the property as social housing for women.
Concordia already owns much of the Guy St. block south of Fulford and north of René-Lévesque Blvd., including the site of the former Chez la Mère Michel and Bar B Barn restaurants and the venerable Montefiore Club, which closed in 2010. On the west side, the university owns the Faubourg Tower and sprawling former Grey Nuns Mother House complex.
Sasseville is concerned about continuing decay should the university buy the Fulford building and leave it vacant, as it has other buildings it owns on the east side of Guy St. “If Concordia buys it and does nothing, just sits on it, the same thing will happen,” he said.
Some observers have suggested the university is “banking” the land as part of a future development plan for its downtown campus. Concordia isn’t saying. “We do not discuss our interest or non-interest in any real estate,” spokesperson Vannina Maestracci said in an email.
In 2021, following the decision to shutter Fulford and relocate its residents, the executive director of Chez Doris, a downtown organization which helps women in distress, reached out to Fulford’s Irwin-Gibson to express interest in having Chez Doris buy the property; Marina Boulos-Winton was asked to submit a proposal. Unhoused women represent fully 80 per cent of Chez Doris clients, up from 20 per cent not that long ago: Its 24-bed emergency overnight shelter, which opened last September, is alway full.
Like Fulford, Chez Doris is in Sasseville’s district. He is impressed by its work on behalf of vulnerable women and understands the need is great. “It’s a neighbourhood where we need more buildings for women in difficulty — and Chez Doris is the perfect organization to buy and operate the Fulford Residence,” he said.
Fulford was founded in 1855 by Mary Drummond Fulford, wife of Montreal’s first Anglican bishop, Francis Fulford, “for the counsel and protection” of single women arriving from abroad to work, mainly as governesses and schoolteachers. Its vocation evolved over time, but its social and care vocation have remained constant: to care for women who need to be cared for.
“Mrs. Fulford dedicated the house to helping women to get their bearings and it has always been dedicated to some social purpose,” architecture icon Lambert said this week. “It seems to me it should remain that way.”
Board directors “could come off as heroes and the Fulford mission could be perpetuated,” Lambert said. “In the meantime, they are doing something for the city — and for people, who make up a city. Why is it better to sell it for the most money, this place that has had a social mission forever and has it now? You would think they would want to perpetuate that mission.”
Sasseville said the Fulford building would be a suitable living space for Chez Doris clients, who are younger and more mobile than Fulford’s former residents — and that its large community space could be used to provide services for women who don’t necessarily live there. “It would be the perfect place to offer free meals to vulnerable women as well as social and recreational activities,” he said.
Jo LaPierre, a long-serving Fulford director who was dropped this year from the board, said she repeatedly expressed concern at meetings that the board had not ranked or thoroughly debated terms of reference for selling the property before offers were solicited — and that there was little discussion by directors of Fulford’s history or the community’s need. Characterizing the board as “docile,” she said she was the only one who spoke up at meetings, which rarely lasted more than an hour.
LaPierre, a historian and retired Dawson College professor, said McEntyre told her the executive and board had “lost confidence” in her because she’d broken her confidentiality agreement regarding the sale of the Fulford property. Dismissing the allegation as “invalid,” LaPierre said in a statement she read at Fulford’s 2021 annual general meeting, held in February of this year, that building committee members McEntyre and Davidson McLernon and the Bishop were “aggrieved over me questioning the process they have adopted to manage” Fulford’s sale.
An option favoured by some board directors seems to be selling the property to the buyer who would pay the most for it; an endowment could then be created, with proceeds from the sale used to make charitable grants. The board would take on more of a foundation role — and the social mission of Fulford will have ended.
Another, hybrid, option would be to sell the property to an organization with a use for it consistent with Mary Fulford’s original social mission — but at a discount which would make it affordable. The Grey Nuns sold their Mother House property to Concordia in 2004 for $18 million — far less than selling to developers would have yielded: They said it was important to them to sell to an organization that shared their education mission and would preserve the landmark.
With grants and other funding, Boulos-Winton said back in 2021, Chez Doris could afford to pay more for the Fulford property than its municipal evaluation, currently about $4.86 million. She acknowledged at the time that Concordia has “much deeper pockets,” but said the social mission of Chez Doris, caring for vulnerable women, is aligned more closely with Fulford’s.
Yet LaPierre said in her statement that Fulford’s building committee has shown a “repeated focus on getting the best price and ignoring all other aspects of the sale.”
To her, this represents “a matter of bad governance by a very small group.”
Meanwhile, the building stands vacant, its future and the place of Mary Fulford’s legacy still undecided.
Fulford is a unique witness to Montreal’s past in terms of its remarkable physical survival but also in terms of its continued social and care vocation, observed Heritage Montreal secretary Bruce McNiven. It was established at a time when health and welfare initiatives like Fulford operated almost exclusively outside the government realm in Quebec, he explained. They were created and managed by religious institutions — the Roman Catholic Church in the French-speaking milieu — or charitable initiatives of private citizens in the Protestant and English-speaking community and often led by women.
Fulford took over the Major House on Guy St. in 1890, moving from smaller quarters elsewhere downtown, and for many of the 131 years that followed, older women lived autonomously and happily in an environment that was more boarding school than seniors residence, with activities and outings.
But as community resources developed to help people age in their own homes, women entered Fulford much later in their lives. By then many had lost their autonomy and Fulford was not equipped to accommodate them: Most of its 38 rooms were too small to manoeuvre a wheelchair, for one. Just five rooms had private bathrooms. There was only a single, small, elevator. Occupancy declined and, with it, revenue.
In early 2021, the coronavirus pandemic sealed Fulford’s fate when it took the lives of 10 of its 31 residents. With 17 vacant rooms and the prospect of a continuing decline in occupancy, the board voted, reluctantly, that February to shutter the residence and relocate the women who had called it home. By June, they had all left.
La Résidence Fulford a été achetée par l’organisme Chez Doris qui vient en aide aux femmes dans le besoin
Sur le compte X d’Héritage Montréal : https://twitter.com/heritagemtl/status/1788774513586377173
Une annonce bienvenue pour une fin heureuse !
Chez Doris et la Résidence Fulford s’entendent pour créer une ressource pour les femmes vulnérables de Montréal
« Après la décision du gouvernement du Québec, à la demande d’Héritage Montréal et de Phyllis Lambert, de classer la Résidence Fulford, aussi appelée la maison Major, son site et certains de ses intérieurs patrimoniaux documentés par le photographe Brian Merrett, l’annonce de son acquisition par l’organisme Chez Doris @chezdorisrefuge protégera ce patrimoine aux valeurs tant sociales qu’architecturales. Rappelant que cette ancienne résidence construite en 1859, logea pendant 130 ans jusqu’à la pandémie, des oeuvres caritatives au service des femmes. Héritage Montréal salue le travail de collaboration qui mena à cette entente et qui, avec l’aide des autorités et du soutien de la communauté, permettra la réussite de ce projet d’intérêt collectif » souligne Dinu Bumbaru, directeur des politiques, porte-parole d’Héritage Montréal.
Toutes les photos de cette publication sont de Brian Merrett, 2021
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/chez-doris-acquires-fulford-residence-1.7200896
L’OBNL Chez Doris organise un marché de Noël pour recueillir des fonds pour financer les travaux de restauration de la maison Fulford
Montreal non-profit hosts holiday market to boost funds for heritage building repairs
Chez Doris is looking to raise $8 million to make the necessary repairs to the newly acquired Fulford Residence before clients move in by 2027.
Chez Doris, an organization that helps Montreal’s most vulnerable and marginalized women, has received a significant gift in its campaign to renovate and reopen the Fulford Residence — one that brings it within striking distance of its $8-million fundraising goal.
The $3-million gift is notable because it is from the board of Fulford’s owning corporation, Fulford Residence, from which Chez Doris purchased the historic downtown building in May 2024 — and because it brings full circle the mission of Mary Fulford, who as the wife of Montreal’s first Anglican bishop, Francis Fulford, founded Fulford in 1855 “for the counsel and protection” of single women arriving from abroad to be governesses and schoolteachers or seek employment. The Church Home, as it was known, was located initially on St-Dominique St.
The next bishop, Ashton Oxenden, transformed it into a facility for “ladies of reduced circumstances.” In 1890, the Church Home moved to the gracious three-storey brick building it would occupy for the next 131 years, and Bishop William Bond, who followed Oxenden, said he hoped it would be “the happy home of many women in their time of need, whether that be from infirmity, bereavement or old age.” It was that for decades — until declining occupancy forced it to close in 2021.
On Thursday, the board of directors of Fulford Residence, which is winding down, announced the funding of three “leadership grants” totalling $7 million to continue Fulford’s mission “to help vulnerable people in Montreal.” Chez Doris will receive $3 million — $2 million for its campaign to renovate, update and restore the Fulford building and $1 million to establish an endowment fund for operating costs.
