Our Built Heritage

 





Built Heritage — an important institution in developing countries that conveys meaning

The built heritage of Trinidad has been under threat for the last 60 years, as private houses, public buildings and various 19th century structures have given way to modernity, reflecting the extent to which Trinidad and Tobago does not require the visitor market to look at its 19th century colonial architecture, as is the case in many of our neighbouring islands, former colonies of the British Empire, who must depend on the tourist trade. We, however, depend on the petrochemical industry as our main hard currency earner. The political will to save the built heritage also does not exist, as the politicising of the country has had more to do with the eradication of the past in terms of records, archives and built heritage.

Seen here are drawings of various houses connected to the following story. La Chance and Perseverance have been destroyed. Champs Elysées has been remodelled for the purpose of the Trinidad Country Club. Cumberland House has been remodelled for the purpose of government offices. The Boissière house on St. Vincent Street and the Boissière House at Queen's Park West still exist, both are in the hands of members of the same family that established itself here in the last decade of the 18th century, before the British Conquest of Trinidad in 1797.

TOP TO BOTTOM:

CHAMPS ELYSEES ESTATE, MARAVAL, TRINIDAD, 1820
The property and residence of John Boissière, this building was the second built on the site. It replaced the original house that had been erected in 1779 for Rosa Marquise de Charras, née de Gannes de La Chancellerie by her son of a previous marriage, Phillip Rose Roume de St. Laurent, who was responsible for the framing of the Cedula of Population. Illustrated by Peter Shim.

HOUSE ON ST. VINCENT STREET, PORT OF SPAIN, TRINIDAD
built and lived in by Eugene Boissière 1870's. Illustrated by Gerald Watterson.

PERSEVERANCE ESTATE HOUSE, MARAVAL, TRINIDAD
In Spanish times (before 1797), the estate known as Moka (Mocha) in the upper reaches of the Maraval Valley was owned by Don Francisco Mendez. It is not clear whether Perseverance formed a part of that property. However, from early 19th century records, we know that Perseverance was owned by the Chevalier Hippolite Borde and comprised some 340 acres. It was later owned by M. Paul La tour who built the Great House in 1850 and whose son Dr. Georges Louis La tour and his half sister Paula Louisa Leoniza Ultima Latour was born there in 1851. The House passed into the hands of Albert (Baba) Cipriani who, by the 1920's, added many embellishments. He lived there in extravagant style until, faced with business reversals, he too was forced to sell. In 1926, Perseverance was sold to an English Man, James Evans.

CUMBERLAND HOUSE, ABERCROMBY STREET, TRINIDAD
Cumberland House, which once stood on Cumberland Street now Abercromby Street was built by Jules Cipriani. He became a successful businessman, and owned several cocoa estates at the turn of the 19th century. He was a commission agent and an exporter of locally grown produce. Illustrated by Peter Shim.

LA CHANCE, ARIMA, TRINIDAD
was the property and residence of Gaston de Gannes de La Chancellerie who was born in Trinidad in 1838. In the 1860's he married Miss Sophie Cipriani "and took his young bride up the Caroni by corial, or dug out canoe". On the banks of the river, just south of the village of Arima, he developed a large cocoa estate. A few years later he acquired some 50 acres on the 0 'Meara Road to the south of the old Arima Railway Station and there he built La Chance. Illustrated by Peter Shim.

THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE, CHARLES BOISSIÈRE'S HOUSE ON QUEENS PARK WEST, PORT OF SPAIN, TRINIDAD
Charles Boissière inherited his father's business Eugene Boissière & Co. in 1910. He retired from active business in the 1920. Illustrated by Gerald Watterson.

Architecture in Trinidad and Tobago

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.

Architecture

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 the 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 Streets 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 psyche 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 the 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.

The Great Fire of 1808

Dr. Shaw was one of the many Scotsmen who found their way to Trinidad in the first years of the 19th century. By 1808, he had established himself on lower Frederick Street, number 12, that is on the eastern side between Queen Street and Independence Square, more to the end of the block than the middle. He had a modest practice and also operated an apothecary shop from where he dispensed medicinal preparations to the expanding township.

Port of Spain had changed a lot with the arrival of the French and Free blacks form Grenada and the other French islands from 1783 onwards. Despite the upheaval of the British conquest, the old thatch and tapia buildings that clustered around the old Catholic church which was built on what is now Tamarind Square, in the general area of Duncan, Nelson and George Streets, were giving way to handsome wooden buildings, covered in wood shingles.

The French in this period built with wood. Wood was readily available. Virgin forest of hardwood stretched literally from the shoreline into the nearby mountains. The town, as it is now, had been laid out like a grill - ten streets from Edward Street in the west to Duncan Street in the east, and six streets from Marine Square to Oxford Street. Perhaps about 4,000 to 6,000 people lived there, masters and slaves, some rich, some poor, an assortment of nationalities, all shared in the growing prosperity of this busy port. Dr. Shaw, it has been reported, came home just a little inebriated as a result of having a wee drop with some of his pals, and made his way by the light of a flambeaux to the outhouse at the back of number 12. No one knows for sure what happened next - did he fall asleep on the throne? Did he drop the flambeaux, causing a blaze in between the old crates and barrels? Whatever it might have been, the next thing that happened was that his store room was ablaze. He had recently received quantities of sulfur, niter, ether and other rectified spirits and essential oils - all this soon raged with inconceivable violence. The foreday morning breeze coming from the Laventille hills churned the fire into an inferno, spreading quickly, jumping the streets not just from east to west, but from south to north. The inferno caught the town asleep. People leaped from windows, fled with nothing but their nightclothes, and in some cases nothing at all. In minutes, the place was aglow, lit up in a macabre light of raging destruction. Stores of gunpowder in various storerooms exploded. Women with children ran screaming to the waterfront. The men of the town joined in with soldiers of the 37th and the 8th regiments, who were stationed at the barracks where the hospital is now, in a vain attempt to save the town. The few water pumps they possessed had fallen into neglect, and the various wells were soon emptied. Horses and mules, tethered in stables all over the town, screamed in terror as they were killed, or bolted wildly down the blazing streets.

Almost all the buildings were destroyed, 12 square blocks in all burnt completely, 49 blocks partially. 435 houses were gutted, making 4,500 people homeless. The damage exceeded a million pounds sterling!

It was, in fact, Trinidad’s first catastrophe. The town was rebuilt, this time of stone. One can still see the high limestone walls between the buildings in Port of Spain that were erected as fire walls to prevent the repeat of such a disaster.

Life before air conditioning

Architecture in the tropics is best based on a simple principle: keep the sun and the rain out and let the breeze in. Simple! - Simple?

The tribal peoples described as ‘American Indian’, or short Amerindian, who inhabited these latitudes long, very long before we all came, lived in houses that were built along those simple principles. Their ajoupas, made of forest materials, provided shade and shelter and were yet airy. They were built differently by the various tribes, sometimes rectangular, sometimes round, sometimes with tapia walls (a mixture of mud and straw), sometimes with woven materials, they might have housed single families or several families or even the entire tribe.

The ‘primitive’ ajoupa was so well adapted to its surroundings, and so comfortable and practical for its occupants, it became the prototype of Trinidad architecture, observed John Newel Lewis, British by passport and Trinidadian by heart, who spent many years of his life researching principles of Caribbean architecture.

“We find the Amerindian ajoupa style carried through, clothed in various ways as the population had mind to do, with no imperial boot kicking it around or destroying it, or putting colonial palaces in its place,” writes Newel Lewis in his book ‘Ajoupa’.

Spanish influence:

The Spanish settlers in Trinidad were never very numerous. They mixed with the native Amerindians, and since social and administrative constraints on them were minimal, they also adapted the ajoupa very freely. Three hundred years later, the coloniser Philipe Rose-Roume de St. Laurent describes Port-of-Spain houses in 1777 as made of whitewashed mud and thatched with palm leaves. The Spanish ajoupas were fast to build, cheap and comfortable to live in. It is possible that the Spaniards adapted the ajoupa to their tastes, extending the walls of the house to form a courtyard to keep the domestic animals in and other varieties out.

French influence:

It was with Trinidad’s settlement by people from the French Antilles at the end of the 18th century that a large amount of people came to the island for the first time. They brought with them many cultural practices and tastes which were to dominate Trinidad for the next century. The French built their ajoupas with walls of timber and roofs of shingle. They added coings (corner stones), dormer windows, balustrades, mansard roofs, masonry and a second storey that protruded over the sidewalk supported by arcardes. From the simple wooden cocoa estate house, to the lavish ornamental great houses: all are variations on the theme ‘ajoupa’ - that being to let in the cool breeze, and keep out the rain and the sun.

African influence:

With emancipation, the descendants of slaves were building communities in compounds called yards. These yards were outside of planning regulations and the cradle for many cultural expressions, amongst these shango, limbo, stickfight, bongo, calypso, mas and later the steelpan. They developed their own version of the ajoupa: natural materials like tapia and thatch for walls and roofs, but with structural supports of pre-sawn timber. Later on, the materials changed to clapboard for walls and galvanised iron for roofing. The African ajoupa was raised off the ground on bricks or tree trunks.

British influence:

The British, who came very shortly after the French and Africans, had to find a way to make their presence felt in the already multicultural reality of Trinidad. Architecturewise, they did so by designing new public and clerical buildings that bore a definite Anglo-Saxon stamp, formal structures like the old Police Headquarters on St. Vincent Street, the Red House, the President’s House etc.

“The result in the 19th century was a town of Afro-Franco creolised ajoupas with English style cathedrals.” (John Newel Lewis)

With the British official style, classical orders and shapes were introduced to Trinidad. The Red House, for example, has Corinthian columns, and the General Hospital had Doric and Ionic columns. The Police Barracks at St. James are built in the Georgian style, the style which is prevalent in other West Indian islands like Jamaica or Barbados. The British colonial style does not have the ajoupa’s characteristics of being cheap to build and to recycle, and made of materials sourced from the natural environment. But the British architects found their own way of adapting to the climatic necessities of building in the tropics.

Indian influence:

The indentured Indian labourers, after leaving the estate barracks, were free to build their houses as they thought most comfortable. They did so in the traditional Indian fashion - which did not differ very much from the Amerindian ajoupa. What makes the East Indian ajoupa special, however, is the use of clay for floors and walls, and the front porch being backed by the kitchen porch, with a wall between them. It also has a large clay-covered area around it, swept clean, with stumps of trees and no vegetation. Instead of using a pre-fabricated timber frame like the Africans, the Indians built their ajoupas with round poles and bamboo, to which they would apply the tapia mixture. The house was usually thatched with palm leaves (tirite), later with galvanised iron sheets.

George Brown’s influence:

Brown came to Trinidad from Glasgow, Scotland, in 1883. He brought with him the idea of the Gingerbread House and created an elaboration on the ajoupa with iron and wooden fretwork, jealousies and a gallery. The Gingerbread House has a timber frame and roof made of slate or galvanised corrugated iron. After the great fire of 1895, Brown rebuilt many houses, introducing the iron frame to make the buildings more flame-proof. Most importantly, he introduced the lantern roof to Trinidad, which brought air and light to the center of larger buildings.