The huge demolition machine opened its powerful jaws and took another bite. You could hear the steel groan and quiver as another piece of structural skeleton was ripped off. I regularly walk by this building and like an onlooker to a violent crime; I am helplessly fascinated by this dismembering progress. This monster machine first rips off all the bricks cladding the building, then it chews through the cement walls and floors, and then finally, it is goes for the skeletal steel structural.
It feels like a eulogy when I say, “This used to be the Montreal Children’s Hospital, a pillar of the community and a place we took our kids, to save their bodies, and to save our sanity”. Everyone knows children should never die before their parents and this was the place you came to ensure that didn’t happen.
They’ve torn down about a quarter of it so far and they plan to tear it all down and build 5 massive condo towers; so whenever I go by, I cringe at see it being ripped apart: becoming less and less of itself.
I used to work there and have so many good memories. I worked on my thesis on the A-wing 5th floor, and now that is almost gone. The B-wing, where all the clinics were located and where they had a fabulous mural of children riding in a multi-coloured balloon high above a fairy tale valley; that wing is completely gone.
Soon they will start on the C-wing. I had my office on the ground floor there, and our computer room was nearby… that was when computers were huge and required lots of air-conditioning. I was happy to be part of a team that built systems to made patient care more effective and efficient. On the 6th to 10th floors were the nursing care units, here the nurses and doctors performed all their miracles.
Ever since I retired, it was this building that always reminded me of all those late nights, when I was called in to fix computer problems, and was happy to do it. Everybody on the team would always put in that extra hours to ensure that the systems we built to support our miracle workers, were effective and stable.
The hospital now is in a nice new site: bright, airy, and modern. I remember when they moved; first it was the equipment, then a few weeks later, they moved the staff and patients. It all went like clockwork, except for one thing, they didn’t move my memories.
Now that this building is being torn down, I somehow feel, my memories are being demolished along with it.
We also stayed warm at the Childrens during the ice storm:-)