The tent city in St. John’s is not the first. But can lessons be learned from 131 years ago?

Since early fall, a tent city in Bannerman Park has been drawing attention to homelessness and the affordable housing crisis in St. John’s.

Many of the encampment’s occupants have declined emergency shelter placements due to safety and hygiene concerns and are instead using their visible presence in the heart of the capital city to advocate for long-term, accessible housing solutions for all.

But this is only the latest tent city to emerge at Bannerman Park.

The largest appeared in the wake of the Great Fire of 1892, and we may be able to take a lesson today from how authorities handled that situation more than 130 years ago.

Quickly in ruins

Late in the afternoon of July 8, 1892, Patrick Fitzpatrick was milking cows in a barn near the intersection of Freshwater and Pennywell Roads when he noticed a plume of smoke.

Fitzpatrick maintained that a spark must have blown over from a neighbour’s chimney, but others believed the farmhand, who had been fired for drunkenness and was later arrested for cutting the tongues of his employer’s horses, lit the fire accidentally or intentionally.

Whatever the fire’s original cause, it was fanned by a comedy of errors.

The fire engine’s steam pump took 20 minutes to heat up, an emergency water tank nearby had been emptied during fire department training and never refilled, and the water pressure in the hydrants was too low to use because the the mains had been turned off for repairs that morning.

The fire spread out of control, with the help of windy, dry conditions, and by 5 a.m. the next day it had consumed two thirds of the city, leaving nearly 11,000 people homeless.

According to a first-hand account by Presbyterian minister Moses Harvey, “It made the heart ache to see the groups of men, women and children, with weary, blood-shot eyes and smoke-begrimed faces, standing over their scraps of furniture and clothing — some of them asleep on the ground from utter exhaustion — all with despondency depicted on their faces. They filled the park and grounds around the city.”

The “park” Harvey is referring to is Bannerman, and the other “grounds” were Railway Meadow, the Parade Ground at Fort Townshend and the shores of Quidi Vidi Lake — all level, open spaces at the periphery of the ruined city.

Those displaced by the fire who couldn’t find accommodations with friends or family set up donated tents at these locations, but they didn’t have to live in them for long.

A rapid response on shelter

On July 9, while St. John’s was still smouldering, Chief Justice Frederick Carter — Newfoundland’s acting head of government while Gov. Terence O’Brien was vacationing in England — directed workmen to begin building shelters at Bannerman and the other encampments.

Two days later, Justice Carter also established a bipartisan relief committee, with members of various classes, religious denominations and levels of government, and put them in charge of the donations of goods and funds that were rolling in from around the world.

Before the onset of winter, the committee had built shelters for 1,540 people.

They opened a grade school, a hospital and a School of Industry for unemployed women in the park. They also built cook rooms where hot meals were prepared until October 1892, when all of the temporary shelters were equipped with stoves.

Given the City of St. John’s controversial decision to shut down the Bannerman Park bathrooms being used by the residents of today’s tent city, it’s eye-opening to see how seriously our forebears took access to sanitation in 1892.

“Sanitary arrangements were adopted and enforced” at the Bannerman tent city, reads the December 1893 report of the relief committee, “with an abundant supply of good water to preserve the health and cleanliness of the inhabitants.”

While the shelters and supports at Bannerman provided for residents’ immediate needs, they were only a short-term solution.

Offers of aid and free lumber

The relief committee developed an incentive program to get the tent city’s residents into permanent housing by promising financial aid and free lumber to anyone who was rebuilding, on the condition that they house at least one occupant of tent city rent-free for a year.

In this way, everyone at the encampments around St. John’s was moved into safe, stable accommodations over the course of the next two years.

The acute housing shortage created by the fire also drew attention to the lack of protections for tenants in Newfoundland at the time, who were often pressured by absentee British landlords into paying property taxes and accepting short leases.

Advocates formed a tenants’ league to lobby for a fair tenancy act, only to be rebuffed by then-Premier William Whiteway who, in a conflict of interest that will be familiar to modern voters, was himself an agent for absentee landlords.

While Whiteway resisted significant change, advocacy efforts did lead the government to adopt one new piece of tenancy legislation: Landlords who offered 99-year leases wouldn’t have to compensate their tenants for any property improvements when the lease expired.

Christmas Eve set as a goal of no one left sleeping in a tent in Bannerman Park

Minister John Abbott said the group, made up of provincial and municipal politicians along with community representatives, is trying to figure out what services each person living in tent city needs. Abbott said a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. But some members of the encampment in Bannerman Park have their doubts about whether the goal can be achieved.

That may not sound like much of an advantage to tenants, but such long leases created unprecedented equality in the landlord-tenant relationship. Tenants had reliable housing and, though their descendants might not be reimbursed for property improvements, they were guaranteed to be able to enjoy those improvements throughout their own lifetimes.

The response to the Bannerman Park tent city of 1892 shows us the effectiveness of combining immediate short-term support with long-term incentives to create a more just housing market.

If such prompt and creative solutions could be implemented when the entire community was still reeling from a disaster, can’t we imagine a better way forward for the residents of our own tent city?

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