City of Thunder Bay taking closer look at restoring historic Waverley Park fountain

The City of Thunder Bay is taking a closer look at what would be needed to get the historic Waverley Park fountain running again.

In a report going to council on Monday, the city's parks department states it plans to hire engineering consultants to provide detailed drawings of what the Hogarth Fountain needs if it were to be repaired and modernized, said Werner Schwar, the city's supervisor of parks and open space planning.

The city has included $100,000 in the proposed 2025 budget to cover that stage of the project; the budget has not yet been approved by city council.

The report states the fountain has not operated for the past several years, and is currently enclosed by a fence.

Modernizing the fountain will be a difficult process, Schwar said, due to its age: the fountain itself was designed by Scottish Architect Robert Adam and originally built in 1790.

It was transported from England to Waverley Park and installed there in 1964. The fountain was a gift from Madge Hogarth in memory of her husband Maj.-Gen Donald McDonald Hogarth, who served in the First World War and was an MPP for Port Arthur.

The fountain, Schwar said, "doesn't have modern things like a flow-through system, so it's just spouting water up and then going right back into the storm drain."

"There's no backflow preventer, there's no metre," he said. "There's a whole bunch of modern things like that that are now required that aren't part of the fountain, so that has to all then be designed."

Schwar said if the funding is included in the budget, a request for proposal would go out to consultants. He hopes the consultants would finish their work in 2025, which give the city a sense of how much it will actually cost to repair the fountain.

That funding can then be included in the 2026 budget.

However, that's not all the work the city is planning for Waverley Park in the coming years.

"There's the fountain itself and then there's the area around the fountain," he said. "Right now there's the fence around it, and paving stone that's heaving."

"It can really be made into a more people-friendly space," Schwar said. "But then there's also the Cenotaph, which is right beside, which lacks accessibility and connectivity, both to Red River Road and the fountain."

"It is an opportunity to look at all of that as one big project, and how we can make that area more usable by people, more accessible by people, but also how it can complement the the work that's been done downtown."