The Hully House is one of the oldest structures on Camosun’s Lansdowne campus, and one Camosun student is petitioning to have it designated as a heritage building and to stop the college from tearing it down.
First-year Employment Training and Preparation student James Fink-Holder was fascinated by the building on a recent tour of the Lansdowne campus.
“I saw what I only knew was an old house by the Dawson Building, and I said, ‘Hey, that’s a nice looking house,’ and the lady who was running the tour said, ‘No, it’s actually kinda garbage, they’re probably gonna knock it down,’ and I said, ‘I don’t really like that, I think it should stay,’” says Fink-Holder.
According to the Victoria City Directory, the Hully House was built between 1917 and 1921, and its most recent resident was Frederick Charles Lewis Hully—known as “Old Man Hully” in Camosun lore—who died in 1991 as the Lansdowne Library was being built.
Fink-Holder has been a long-time advocate of saving old buildings in Victoria. He says that he’s tried to rescue others but they’ve all been torn down or have burned down.
“I’ve always liked preserving the heritage of Victoria, and I’ve tried promoting the sparing of other houses; there was one on Cook Street, but it burned down, and another house in my area that got knocked down, and the most recent one was the Plaza Hotel, which also burned down.”
In an endeavour to preserve Hully House, Fink-Holder created an online petition, which, as of press time, has 10 supporters. One section of the petition states that the building will be demolished within two months, but Camosun director of facilities services Ian Tol says that isn’t true.
“We don’t have any immediate plans to remove the Hully House,” he says. “What the Campus Master Plan says is that those buildings in very poor condition would be candidates for replacement or removal, and that would be whenever the college has a plan to do that, or a need to, or if we have another building that might go in its place, or something like that.”
Tol says that repairing the building would be cost prohibitive, particularly since Hully House doesn’t have much utility for Camosun. He estimates it would cost “in the hundreds of thousands” to bring the building up to code.
“It’s a former residence,” he says. “It’s not well suited for what we typically use in a college when we have educational buildings.”
Although Fink-Holder has suggested the possibility of relocating the house, Tol says that this is also not practical or economical.
“There’s a lot of work that goes into moving a building, and even though this one is relatively small, [the cost of moving it is] still high,” he says.
Richard Rickard, a fourth-year UVic Geography student taking Creative Writing electives at Camosun, says that the Hully House might be well utilized as a social space.
“I think it’s a nice building; it could be a nice place for people to gather and convene on campus,” he says.
However, Rickard says that the number of renovations required to make Hully House safe may take away from the building’s historical appeal.
“As far as trying to be inclusive and accessible to all abilities, you do need to be able to get into a building like this; they’d need to put a ramp or an elevator, and that would probably take away from the character of the house itself, as a historical house. If you had to slap a big hydraulic lift on the side of it, I don’t know if it would look the same,” he says.
First-year Arts and Sciences student Chance Wasieczko believes that the space could be put to better use and that restoring the building might not be economical.
“A community garden or something like that could go in there, and it would probably be a better use of the space, as it were, and I definitely think that there’s more beneficial ways the area could be used,” he says. “Especially as far as a cost analysis goes, if it doesn’t make sense logistically and they’re not going to do anything with it, then there’s other things that the school’s money could be used for.”
Second-year Psychology student Kate Johnson thinks that the building adds some much-needed flavour to the campus.
“I kind of like it; I think it’s really unique,” she says. “I think the campus is getting a little drier. They’re painting the Wilna Thomas grey; I think there needs to be a bit of character here,” she says, adding that restoration costs could be bundled into student fees. “If you can protect it, I’d pay extra tuition to keep it. I’d go maybe $5 a student.”
Johnson says that smart choices about usage would prevent renovations from unnecessarily compromising the structure of the building.
“I could see maybe an art studio,” she says. “I don’t see a science lab going in there—that would be a little too complicated—but I could see art, or maybe philosophy, something like that, something you don’t need a lot of space for.”
Tol says that he is sympathetic to Fink-Holder’s plight but that the cost and complication of everything involved is not a priority for Camosun.
“I do understand his interest, and I do feel for him that he’s looking at this house and hoping that it could be saved, but unfortunately, the economics of that idea are very difficult. It’s just not doable,” he says. “Plus, we also have to make decisions about where we spend our money, where we invest, and we want to do that in the areas that make the most sense and that support the mission of the college the best, and so, unfortunately, trying to restore a residence to usable condition is not really in line with what we’re trying to do here.”
Fink-Holder believes that old buildings should be shown more respect, and this is the main drive behind his campaign.
“Heritage architecture is a really big part of our city, and now a lot of corporations are compromising it, and it’s really sad to see that happen,” he says.