The city of Port of Spain from an
architectural perspective attained, albeit in a modest manner, a high point in
the 1920s. During this period, the city contained most, if not all,
architectural styles built over the previous 120 years.
There were the wooden, shingled
buildings built by the French that had survived the fire of 1808. There still
remained some buildings which had been built in the Spanish colonial style.
These were built by Venezuelans for refugees from their country 30 or 40 years
after the British conquest, e.g. the "Cabildo Building" on Sackville
Street.
Most of the buildings on Henry,
Charlotte, George, Nelson and Duncan Street as well as the streets that crossed
them, erected after the fire of 1808, with their massive blue limestone walls,
were constructed in a style very similar to what exists in Fort de France,
Martinique, today. They were distinguished by their tall doorways, "quoined"
corners, brick filling between dressed stone, dormer windows and stone balustrades as still seen on the
roof of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Independence Square.
Frederick Street was very up to
date in the 1920s, some may say even futuristic. After the fire of 1897 that
had burnt out lower Frederick Street, George Brown, a Scottish architect,
designed and supervised the building of "The Stores." Complete with
iron banisters, plate glass windows, mezzanines and lantern roofs they were fashionable,
attractive, up-market and more or less survived into the 1980s. Brown's facades
were reminiscent of New Orleans because of the intricately cast ironwork.
The French influence was all-pervasive
in Port of Spain and was to remain so until the 1950s. There was also the
simple, wooden chattel house, standing on pillar trees, usually two-roomed, and
neat as a pin. The idea for those houses was more than likely imported from Barbados, where ordinary people hardly
ever owned land but built chattel houses that could easily be moved if the need
arose.
The town's suburbs, Belmont,
Newtown and Woodbrook, were expanding, driven by a modicum of prosperity as a
result of the Cocoa economy, which had peaked in the last decade of the previous
century. The little "Gingerbread" houses of those neighbourhoods were
equipped with porticoes, jealousied windows, pitched roofs with dormers, and
lots of lacy woodwork. Some were quite petite, others large and rambling, some
imposing. You will find variations of these in Haiti, Martinique and
Guadeloupe. All this had come with the French people; it was part of their
cultural baggage, along with Carnival, long dresses over many lace petticoats,
fine embroidered "foulards" and a gay madras kerchiefs tied so as to
tell whether the lady was a widow or "looking".
Right alongside all of this was real
poverty, lived out in the barrack yards. These yards were old stables and slave
quarters of a previous epoch that had been hired out for rent when the original
owners had moved on to better parts of town. Trinidad's first slum lords would
have balked at such a description, and may have sought excuse by saying that
the peppercorn rent charged saved many a West Indian immigrant from
homelessness.
Most of old Port of Spain's old
French buildings that once clustered round the Catholic Cathedral were destroyed
by fire in the 1980s or willfully left to degenerate into dilapidation. Most
towns in the Caribbean possessing such architecture do what it takes to
preserve those buildings. We in Trinidad, however, not dependent on the visitor
market for hard currency, let our old town vanish. It all began when some one
said, "Massa day done", and when people without a grasp of cultural and
aesthetic values got so rich that they were able to buy properties and
sacrifice the historical and architectural gems on them for yet another
air-conditioned atrocity. - all under the excuse of the three "p":
popularity, progress and profit.
The face of the city also
contained formal or polite architecture which may be described as
architect-designed and builder-built. There are classical buildings, defined as
one whose "decorated elements derived from the architectural vocabulary of
the ancient world, the classical world" (John Newel Lewis H.B.M., from
John Summerson's "The Classical Language of Architecture"). Newel
Lewis goes on to say,
"The sense of authority and
dignity, which the classical order inspires, makes it a suitable language for
official buildings. The Red House uses the Corinthian order both in columns and
in half columns... The General Hospital employs the Doric and Ionic. The Tuscan
is often used, in the Railway Station for example... It is surprising how many
orders are found in Port of Spain."
The Building and Loan Association
building, on the corner of Queen and Chacon Street, is an excellent example of
classical artwork in the cityscape. Around and about one may still see the
Georgian style. It exists in the Police Barracks at St. James and the Salvation
Army's Men's Hostel on the corner of Sackville and Edward Street. One excellent
example was the old Deanery on Abercrombie and Queen Street; that's gone now.
The overall destruction of the
buildings of Port of Spain and of our architectural heritage all over Trinidad
and Tobago is a disturbing indication of what is taking place in the ... of the
body social and the body politic. We the people, we the town planners, we the
architects, we the property owners, ongoingly destroy the buildings that define
our history, ourselves. Every old mansion acquired by a developer is torn down replaced
by a block of apartments. So-called city planners award the permissions for
that, and in so doing destroy future generations' proud heritage.
Also, whenever there is a fire, there
is no thought of restoration. The old Town Hall and Princes Building were
examples for that. In another country it may have been rebuilt so as to
maintain the personality of the town, but we, a society whose children don't
re-use even a plastic fork, don't seem to have that in us. In Europe, whole
cities were rebuilt in the style and manner of there prewar condition. The
preserving and restorations of a nations architectural heritage is about
maturity, it is about valuing what we have so as to impart it to another
generation. Maybe it takes a couple of wars and total destruction for a society
to mature.
