St. Catharines Standard e-edition

The Benson house: from private home to city hall

DENNIS GANNON CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST DENNIS GANNON IS PRESIDENT OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF ST. CATHARINES. GANNOND2002@YAHOO.COM

Our old photographs this week show a distinguished old house that had to be cleared away to make space for a major civic improvement.

The building being demolished was built in 1841-42 as the residence of James B. Clendennan, a merchant whose family once owned a substantial portion of downtown. (James Street was named after him.)

Clendennan did not remain long in his new house. In 1846, he sold it to James Rea Benson, a successful hardware merchant.

Over time, Benson gradually shifted his focus from the mercantile to the political. After being elected to the town council in 1866, he won election to the first Parliament of the new Dominion of Canada in 1867, and just one year after that he was appointed a member of the Senate. He remained in the Senate from 1868 until his death in 1885.

The municipal government, then headquartered in the town hall (the old courthouse), faced an ever more severe space problem.

In the mid-1860s, the county offices were transferred from Niagaraon-the-lake to St. Catharines and were housed in the town hall. It quickly became clear the building was too small to house both the municipal and county offices. In 1864, the town began to rent office space in the nearby Benson house. The town remained a tenant there into the 1870s. In 1877, Sen. Benson put the building up for sale and the city finally was able to buy it. The old Benson house worked reasonably well. The municipal offices remained there into the early decades of the 20th century. However, a building that had been constructed as a private home in 184142 and that had worked as offices for a town of 6,500 starting in 1864 would not necessarily work well for a city of 20,000-plus in the 1920s.

So, in that decade the idea of building a new city hall evoked considerable public discussion — newspaper articles, city council debates, a citywide referendum in 1930.

By 1935, the move to build a proper municipal office building reached the point that architect Robert Ian Macbeth was chosen to design the new city hall. By mid-1936, his proposed design for the building, a modest example of the Art Deco style then popular across North America, was accepted.

And then the work commenced. In July 1936, tenders were called for demolition of the old Benson house/city hall. In October, the demolition crew attacked the building. It was down by the end of the month. Groundbreaking for the new building took place on Oct. 15, 1936, excavation was well underway by early November and the cornerstone was laid in mid-december. Construction continued throughout the first half of 1937 and the new St. Catharines City Hall opened on Aug. 9, 1937.

ARTS & LIFE

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2023-06-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

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