Donations for Save the Water Towers Campaign

If you’re interested in donating a few dollars to the Save the Sudbury Water Towers campaign, please use the PayPal donation link at the bottom of this post.

Why donate? We’re looking to raise about $200 to print postcards to raise awareness and to sell to the public and lovers of the water towers. The water towers are Sudbury icons, they should be represented on a postcard.

We’re currently working on postcard designs using artwork that has been submitted to this blog. Postcards will be for sale in retail locations and other businesses around Sudbury soon. We just need to raise enough money to make our first set of postcards. The money raised from the sale of the postcards will go towards new postcard sets and posters to help raise awareness of the plight of the towers.

We need to act fast, so please donate today.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=F92BSDCBMGD7Q

UPDATE: For those of you who can donate $20 or more you will receive free postcards depicting the towers (from contributors to this blog)  and a FREE letterpress print of the Pearl Street tower, size 4 ” x 6″. The illustration is by Joel Kimmel and letterpress printed by Papillon Press. Please donate before March 31 to get your free letterpress print. Those of you who have already donated $20 or more will also receive a print. Thank you!

Letterpress print of the Pearl Street tower, by Joel Kimmel

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Art Submission Deadline: April 5th

Submission Deadline: April 5th, 2010, Photograph by Joel Kimmel

Photograph by Joel Kimmel

For anyone interested in participating in the art show or having their work shown on the blog and Facebook page, please submit your contributions by April 5th, 2010.

If you’ve already submitted some work, thank you! If you have more you’d like to submit, we’d love to see it.

You have until April 5th to get in your artwork, at which point we’ll collect prints or originals for our upcoming art show (date and location pending). The more entries we received the better.

Thanks in advance for your entries! See submission details in the How to Submit tab at the top of the page.

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Colour the Pearl Street Water Tower

Here’s something fun for families and kids! If you love the towers and want to contribute to the art show (location and date to be determined) coming up in April, you can use this free image to print out on your own printer to colour yourself.

Download this image to colour yourself!

We’d love to have your contributions, even if you colour outside the lines! In fact, we encourage it.  Purple skies, red water towers, orange trees, they’re all encouraged and accepted. Draw in some spaceships and flying cats if you want as well.

When you’re done colouring your water tower you can either scan it or take a photo of it so we can publish it on the blog. Be sure to include your names (and ages if you like). If you’d like your drawing to be included in the upcoming art show, let us know and we can work out a way to collect it (and return it, of course).

Click the link below to download the image and print it on your printer:

Colour the Pearl Street Water Tower!

We’re looking forward to seeing your coloured Sudbury Water Towers!

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Contact Your Councilors

We’ve just created a new tab at the top of the blog titled, Contact Your Councilors. We’re being encouraged to write letters and emails to the city councilors to show them and to tell them what the towers mean to us.

You can find links to each councilor’s city website that includes their contact information. Email addresses and tips on writing a successful letter to your councilor or Mayor can be found in the tab at the top of the blog.

We’re really gaining some great support for saving the towers. We appreciate all of your submissions so far and are looking forward to seeing many more.

Contact your councilors! The sooner the better. Thank you!

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Pine Street Tower: Before and After

We were interviewed today by CBC Radio Canada about the towers and their pending demolition. If you have artwork of the towers and want to contribute to the cause to save them, please submit whatever you have, we’d love to see it.

I put together a before and after demolition photo of the Pine Street tower. We love both towers and the Pine Street tower, smaller than the Pearl Street one, has a lot of charm. Here are the photos of what an interesting photograph would look like without its main element.

Pine Street: Before

Pine Street: After Demolition

Pretty boring if you ask us. Sure, the tower could use some renovations. The city’s current plan after a recent council meeting is to destroy this tower. According to the heritage council, it doesn’t have enough heritage value to be saved. Strangely, the city plans to demolish it and in its place they will install a plaque stating that a historical building once stood there.

If it’s deserving enough of a plaque so we can remember the tower once stood there, shouldn’t we just save it?

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Converted Water Tower Inspiration

From the response we’ve gotten so far with this project, a lot of people, including us, feel the water towers are part of our landscape and look great where they are. If we can save the towers, there are so many possibilities to use them for something other than the great billboards and symbols for the city that they already are. Hopefully they can be turned into observation decks at the very least, so tourists and locals can enjoy amazing views of the city.

Here are some examples of what other cities and towns have done with their own decommissioned water towers.  Why destroy them, when you can develop them and create something as amazing and unique as these other cities have done?

Water tower converted to a home, outside Antwerp

Old Water Tower in Denmark, Converted to Student Housing

Mövenpick Hotel Hamburg, built around an existing water tower

Red Rock Lake, Iowa, now an observation deck

Seal Beach, California, converted water tower now houses offices

Sunset Beach, California, now a three-bedroom, four-bathroom home

Lethbridge, Alberta. Now a restaurant and popular observation deck

Lethbrige, AB

Lethbridge, Alberta converted water tower

The tower in Lethbridge should be a model for Sudbury to look at. There’s a great article here about how the tower, decommissioned and schedule to be destroyed, was saved and turned into a popular restaurant and landmark. I encourage you to read it, as the circumstances with their tower are very similar to ours in Sudbury.

Doug Bergen, the owner of the tower, said this about the tower:

“It’s been an iconic structure in Lethbridge and southern Alberta and if I was going to keep it alive I wanted to make it a place that the public could visit and use.”

The tower in Lethbridge is almost exactly the same age as ours in Sudbury. “The town’s public works feared it was unstable and should come down, but I had consulting engineers check it out and found it was still strong and sturdy,” said 44-year-old Bergen.

The Pearl Street tower would be an ideal location and tower for something like this to happen. However, that is the tower that is currently not owned by the city and would need to be bought back to be preserved, as it is slated for demolition in April.

Please submit your artistic representations of the tower so we can make an appeal to the city to save the towers!

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Demolition Slated for April

We received a phone call today from Cory Prause, the project manager of Hatch Associates who owns the tower on Pearl Street.

Cory initially bought the tower with the hopes of renovating it and creating something special for the city of Sudbury. Plans were made to turn the tower into a restaurant with banquet facilities, commercial and office space as well as residential living. He had ambitious plans for the tower and unfortunately they won’t be realized with his developer group.

One of the most important topics of our conversation was about the demolition of the tower on Pearl Street. Cory told me that the tower will be demolished in April, they’re only waiting for the snow to melt. The papers are in place, documents are signed and the demolition is planned.

This is not good news, but we feel we can still encourage the City of Greater Sudbury to declare the tower as a heritage building.

Cory had a vision to turn the tower into a tourist attraction and become an interesting, progressive destination for the city’s residents. Unfortunately investors do not want to invest here.

Cory Prause wants to save the water tower. He bought it to preserve it. He is willing to sell the tower to the city or private investors for $150,000, the cost he initially purchased it for. The city does not want to buy it back from him as they would have to pay to maintain it (a new paint job, estimated at $1 Million, every 20 or so years).

We may not be able to raise the $150,000, but hopefully we can show the city what the towers mean to us and encourage them to declare the towers as heritage buildings. How many unique structures are there in Sudbury? How many times are we just going to demolish something rather than preserve it?

In 2005 a historic building in Sudbury was destroyed. The Foyer d’Youville church was 110 years old when it was demolished because $750,000 couldn’t be raised to pay for the necessary reparations to keep it open.  We need to start preserving these buildings in order to preserve the city’s heritage.

Please submit your artwork depicting the towers. We look forward to seeing your work and displaying it here.

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Tower

Sudbury Water Tower

Let’s get this thing started.

The first contribution to the gallery is a sketch I made last summer. I sat in the parking lot across from the Pearl Street tower for a couple of hours to sketch.  Something about that hill with the houses just wouldn’t look right without that tower there.

I plan on sketching the other tower as well, and hopefully I can sketch them again in a few years.

Do you have any sketches of the water towers? We’d love to see them. Please see the How to Submit page on the right for more info on how to do that.

We look forward to seeing your submissions.

Illustration by Joel Kimmel

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Call For Submissions

This blog will serve as a gallery space for artists who contribute their art representing the Sudbury, Ontario water towers located downtown.

While the towers are in danger of being demolished, we need your artistic contributions to show the City of Greater Sudbury that we want the towers to remain standing.

What would the city look like without them? Too often buildings and landmarks are destroyed, only to be looked back upon as great mistakes. We need to stop destroying these old buildings and preserve them to preserve the city’s history. How many great buildings in Sudbury have already been destroyed?

If you love the towers, show us. Photography, illustration, collage, sculpture, painting, animation, digital media, all types of media are accepted as long as they depict the towers.

You do not have to be a Sudbury artist to participate. We encourage artists from all over the world to submit their artwork.

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Submission Requirements:

Maximum image height: 800 pixels

Maximum image width: 800 pixels

Image Resolution: 72 dpi

Include: Name, Website/Blog

Also include (not required): Why you love the towers, explanation of artwork, additional information

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Please read the About the Project page for more information about the project.

We look forward to your submissions! Please help spread the word by telling your friends to visit this website.

Thank you!

Joel Kimmel

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