The Park Hotel fire
The fire which razed the Park Hotel on Saturday, destroyed one of Main Street's great landmarks. While no one is certain of the building's precise date of origin, it had the appearance of a late nineteenth century or early twentieth century structure. According to Long, a colonial District Commissioner who spent his retirement years there, it was run by a Mrs Forbes from l887 to l902. The lot would undoubtedly have been occupied much earlier than this, but whether it had been a boarding house prior to l887, Long does not say. In any event, Mrs Forbes operated a boarding house at a time when Main street boasted a large number of such establishments, all run by women. There were few hotels in the nineteenth century in the sense which we understood the term today. The best known of them was Beckwiths, owned by a temperamental expatriate of the same name who came from Leeds. Even he operated his business more like a boarding establishment than a hotel, expecting all his guests to return early in the evening, and locking out those who did not observe the curfew. He clearly had little competition. Running a boarding house was one of the few options open to widows for making a living at the time, and it is possible that Mrs Forbes may have fallen into this category. Exactly who took over her business in l902 is not clear at present, but Long says that around l9l2, the building became known as the `Park Hotel'. Perhaps it is about this time too that it acquired the distinctive contours, such as the dome, with which generations of Guyanese became so familiar. Not only is the destruction of the Park Hotel itself a great loss to the architectural landscape, but the destruction of its art collection is a great loss to the cultural heritage of this nation. This country has a bad record in terms of the liquidation of what is sometimes called the movable material heritage. A huge fire in l828 which consumed many buildings between Water and High streets, also burnt some of the records belonging to the Colony of Essequibo in the Dutch period. Those which were not burnt were, it was said, stolen. In l864, another large fire destroyed the first RA&CS building, among others, taking with it a priceless library of books and papers on the nation's history. The l945 fire which consigned 23 buildings to the flames, hit the RA&CS again. Having reconstituted its library, it was once more reduced to ashes. On this occasion, some papers from the achieves standing in crates on the floor of the library were also destroyed. J.G. Cruickshank, who had once been the archivist, and had borrowed documents from the archives on the maroons of Guyana for his research, left all his papers, which included the archival documents, to the RA&CS after his death. They had been sent there unsorted just prior to the outbreak of the fire. There is no doubt that Guyana's older wooden buildings are a fire hazard. Over the course of the last two hundred years, some sectors of the city - notably Water Street and its environs - have burnt to the ground on more than one occasion. In many instances, the fire brigade was ill equipped to fight the blaze, the Great Fire of l945 being a case in point. (At this stage it is a moot point as to whether the brigade could have contained the Park Hotel fire at an earlier stage had it been better equipped.) Our heritage sites are disappearing one by one. The Ministry of Culture in conjunction with the Fire Service needs to interest itself in fire safety in our historical buildings as a matter of some urgency. It needs to set out guidelines for premises under public control, and offer advice to the owners of those in private hands. Most of all, of course, the Government needs to review again the equipment and resources at the disposal of the fire brigade, to see if these are adequate to meet the needs of a city like ours.
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