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 Illustrious Cabildo

Local Government

Local government in Trinidad has its origins in a very ancient institution. The Illustrious Cabildo, a municipal council created in Spain by the Crown after the expulsion of the Moors, was founded in the island of Trinidad at San José de Oruna (St. Joseph) in the year 1592.

Acting on the orders of governor Don Antonio de Berrio, the master of the camp Don Domingo de Vera y Bargoen, with a company of 30 men, made the beginnings of a permanent settlement.

After landing at Mucurapo, where they raised the cross and unfurled the flag of Spain they proceeded to declare the island the property of His Most Catholic Majesty. The Spaniards and their actions were probably ignored by the real ‘owners’ of the island, the Amerindians, as they went about their necessities. They proceeded up the Caroni until they came to an open savannah, and reaching higher land they obtained from the cacique Guanaguanare a site which they named San José de Oruna.

Here at St. Joseph in the latter part of May 1592 a site for a church, Nuestra Santa Fé de la Concepcion, was laid out and the first mass was celebrated most likely on the same spot where the present church is now.

Don Domingo then selected sites for the govenor’s ‘palace’, the Cabildo and the prison. These were all situated around the open space west of the church, a space which is now occupied by building erected since the capitulation to the British in 1797.

K.S. Wise writes in his ‘Historical Sketches’:

“All the Spaniards present then took part in the formal election of the members of the Cabildo, and the Illustrious body was duly constituted in Trinidad for the first time as follows:

Alcaldes Ordinario: Alvaro Jorge, Diego Diaz de Acevedo

Alguacil Mayor: José Nuñez Brito

Procurador General: Antonio Pinto Leal

Regidores: Juan Marquez, Felipe de Santiago, Juan Mexia de Prado, José Nuñez Brito, Alonso de Medina, Juan Gomes.”

Many of these names are still with us. Thus, more than 400 years ago, commenced the local government in Trinidad, which remained in place unchanged from the administration of the island by Sir Ralph Abercromby (1813 - 1829) to Lord Harris (1845 - 1854). The British administrative system was by then in conflict with the powers and privileges of the Illustrious Cabildo.

“The changing composition of the general population and the diminishing proportion of those to whom the methods of the Spanish administration were familiar, led in 1840 in Port-of-Spain and in 1845 in San Fernando to the introduction of measures of local government more in consonance with British practice.” (K.S. Wise)

For almost fifty years after the conquest by the British, Trinidad possessed a Spanish legal system through its governing body, and this on an island where 95% of the population were French and Patois-speaking!

As John Nihell, the first Chief Justice of Trinidad, put it:

“The people retain certain rights which, though they are subordinate to those of the King and his tribunals, it is the duty of the Cabildo to support and represent.”

The Illustrious Cabildo had the right to address the King of Spain and, because of their oath of allegiance to Britain, to ‘the Monarch’ through the Governor. However, the Cabildo had to obey the orders of the Governor, even if his actions were against their will, until ‘the pleasure of His Majesty might be notified’.

The role of the local governance body was more administrative than legislative. The Cabildo could not make laws for the public, rather, it had an advisory role on municipal matters to the Governor.

In Spanish times, public funds were kept in an actual ‘treasure chest’ (hence the name ‘Treasury’ and the ‘coffers’ of the government!). Only three people had a key to this chest: the Alcalde of the First Election, the Escribano and the Depositor General.

The members had certain privileges. They wore a special uniform and insignia, were exempt from duties in the militia and could not be put in the ‘common gaol’, only in their own house or a Cabildo building. The Escribano had to take sworn declarations in their own house, since they could not be cited before a judge. The privileges even included preferential choice in the public markets!

On the other hand, the Cabildo had certain duties. Ironically, they had to swear in the Governor (who was to be their superior afterwards), and all other public servants. The health system was under their inspection, and approval had to be sought from the Cabildo by physicians, surgeons and apothecaries. Other health-related duties were to finance a physician for the poor and a schoolmaster for poor persons’ children. The Cabildo also administered funds to prevent epidemics, as well as to help out people in case of ‘public calamity’.