Former Weyburn psych hospital has date with wrecking ball

A last-minute proposal to redevelop the building that once housed a psychiatric hospital in Weyburn has failed, which means the sprawling 88-year-old brick structure will be torn down.

Heritage Property Corporation was interested in restoring the building, known prior to its closing in 2005 as the Souris Valley Hospital. For a time it was also known as the Weyburn Mental Hospital.

Neil Richardson, owner of the Calgary-based development company, told CBC News the building, or portions of it, could have been saved by developing the site in stages.

"Break it down into manageable pieces," Richardson said on Thursday from his Calgary office. "Get one piece done, move on to the next. That way, if you only ever get one piece of it done and you end up demolishing the rest of it, you will have at least saved a significant piece of the building."

Richardson's offer was discussed at a Weyburn City Council meeting on Sept. 22, but it was turned down.

Instead, the city plans to have the building demolished.

The provincial government, which originally owned the property but sold it to Weyburn for $1, promised to cover demolition costs — estimated at $4.75 million — if no restoration plan was in place by Sept. 30.

Weyburn Mayor Debra Button told CBC News that the city needed to make a decision and did not have a guarantee that the provincial deadline could be extended.

"Without that extension agreement in our back pocket, the city of Weyburn had no choice but to move forward with the demolition plan," Button said on Thursday.

When it was built in 1920, the hospital was noted as the largest building in the Commonwealth. It had space for 2,000 patients. In the 1950s and 1960s, the hospital pioneered the use of drugs, including LSD, to treat mental illness.

The mayor said the city will now develop the site, after the 500,000- square-foot building is razed, into a residential complex.

"It will be residential with some sort of a park," Button said. "We will be doing something out there to memorialize the Souris Valley building itself. We're going to keep a lot of the bricks and we're gonna do something. What that is yet, that's still in the discussion stages. Probably have some condos and some, hopefully, some apartments."

For a time, there was hope the site would be redeveloped as a business. A Toronto company had a deal to convert the building into an exhibition and warehouse space, where Chinese manufacturers would display their products for North American retailers.

But those plans fell through and the property was back on the market in June 2008.

Button said an American company is expected to start tearing the building down within the next few weeks.