Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste years away from becoming cultural centre
Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste years away from becoming cultural centre
Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative reporter
editor@qctonline.com
The Ville de Québec has launched two calls for tenders for “architectural services” for urgent work on Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste, although the city councillor for the district has warned it could be years before the landmark church can fully reopen as a cultural centre.
Built between 1881 and 1885, the church hosted mass for the last time in May 2015. Since then, it has sat empty, opening sporadically for funerals and for visits during the Journées de la Culture. The city acquired the church for $175,000 from the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parish council last year after an earlier deal to cede it to an Egyptian Coptic congregation fell through.
A contractor is already working to decontaminate the church basement, rendered unusable by water infiltration.
Cap-aux-Diamants Coun. Mélissa Coulombe-Leduc, also a member of the executive committee responsible for heritage preservation, said the city wants the church to be “temporarily occupied” as soon as possible. For that to happen, she said, completing the decontamination of the basement is “high on the list, but there’s also work to be done on the windows and the roof. … We have to finish the work the parish has [started], restore the doors and do some work on the masonry.”
The combined cost of the basement decontamination and restoration of the windows alone is estimated at $8.5 million. Coulombe-Leduc said the city is hoping to secure additional funding from the provincial Conseil du patrimoine religieux (religious heritage council) and the federal government.
Coulombe-Leduc did not provide a cost estimate or a timeline for all of the needed repairs, or a cost ceiling beyond which the city would no longer fund the restoration.
“Considering the heritage value of the church, I have always thought the city should not be the only stakeholder,” she said. “We’ve asked the religious heritage council and the federal government, and we are going to look for money elsewhere. [The restoration] will cost a few million dollars, and it won’t all be short-term spending; spreading it out over a few years allows us to amortize the impact.”
She said she hoped the cultural centre and exhibition space planned for the church would ultimately generate revenue for the city and help revitalize the neighbourhood. Before moving forward with the full cultural space project, known as Le Carrefour, the plan is to reopen the building “sooner rather than later” for community events such as Saint-Jean-Baptiste neighbourhood council meetings and neighbourhood flea markets.
“Five years from now, we won’t be [finished with] the final project, but the church will be reopened for the people of the community,” she said.