A wind of protest is rising in Lévis to preserve the century-old house which housed Chocolats Favorites until the fall of 2022. The fate of the latter now rests in the hands of the city’s demolition committee. Two groups this week implored him to protect the woodpeckers’ home from demolition workers.
The current owners of the company, who acquired it in 2012, say they have considered all avenues to renovate the house. Each led to a dead end, according to analyzes commissioned by the company. Chocolats Favorites therefore requested authorization to demolish its building on Avenue Bégin, located in the historic heart of Lévis, to erect a new one on the same lot.
“This house must absolutely be spared from demolition,” proclaims the Group of Initiatives and Applied Research in the Environment (GIRAM) in a letter addressed Friday to the demolition committee. “We cannot support their efforts to try to replace this building with its exclusive and remarkable architecture with a imitation reconstruction, a pastiche building in volume, but whose architectural characteristics are far from reaching, in quality and grace, those of the current building. »
The group asks Chocolats Favorites to explain the reasons which make it impossible, in their eyes, to restore the building. He also asks the demolition committee to order an independent second opinion to validate the failures reported in the analyzes ordered by the company.
A viable building?
Earlier this week, it was the Fédération Histoire Québec which came to the defense of what, in its eyes, constitutes a “magnificent building of great heritage value”.
“We strongly recommend preserving the original building, because we are not building “new heritage,” wrote the president of the federation’s heritage committee, Clément Locat. Demolishing an old building made of noble materials to replace it with a simulacrum is not a defensible solution. »
The voices of the Fédération Histoire Québec and GIRAM are added to those of 105 owners of heritage buildings in Lévis who had expressed their opposition, earlier in October, to the demolition of the parent company of Chocolats Favorites.
In the eyes of GIRAM, the exterior envelope of the house suggests that the building remains viable: its walls, underlines its vice-president Gaston Cadrin, are “still quite straight” and its roof covered in sheet metal “in the Quebec style seems in excellent condition.” state “.
Chocolats Favorites claims that the humidity has eaten away at the masonry walls to the point of making them dangerous. The roof would have to be supported to repair them, a maneuver that the building’s foundations cannot support, according to the company.
The Fédération Histoire Québec welcomes these claims with skepticism. “We have often been confronted, in the case of similar cases, with the mention of threats of building collapse, but now this argument no longer convinces anyone,” writes Clément Locat. Like GIRAM, the federation also calls on the demolition committee to order a second opinion carried out by “a firm of architects specializing in old buildings”.
The Lévis house of Chocolats Favorites is not among the heritage buildings classified under the Cultural Heritage Act. The legislation also concerns very few buildings on Lévis territory, although “Old Lévis is the district in Quebec which has the greatest concentration of 19th century buildings.e and the beginning of the 20th centurye century,” according to Michel Lessard, a heritage expert.