A funeral home that housed a 10,000-pound antique organ for nearly 80 years is being torn down to make way for a new Windsor Fire and Rescue Services headquarters.
Demolition began last week at the former Morris Sutton Funeral Home on Giles Boulevard near Ouellette Avenue just south of the downtown.
“We’re still several years away from seeing a permanent new fire headquarters built, but you have a relatively old building, and we know what happens if buildings aren’t attended to,” Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens said on Monday following a city council meeting.
“The best course of action was to remove that building, remove any source of a problem that may exist around a vacant building, and get us ready for the new fire hall one day when it’s funded and ready to move forward.”
Regular operations at the funeral home owned by Arbor Memorial ceased in early 2024.
The city purchased the property for $2.2 million later last year with plans to demolish the funeral home and eventually build a new fire headquarters and Station 1.
In July and August, the Aeolian organ that had been inside the Tudor-revival style funeral home since the mid-1940s was carefully dismantled by local organist Ron Dossenbach, who had spent years restoring the instrument.
The 4.5-tonne organ with its 1,280 wood or lead-and-tin pipes was packaged up and shipped to the Pianola Museum in Amsterdam — the only place interested in housing it.
The former funeral home property is located about 750 metres from the current fire HQ.
Last year, then-Fire Chief Staphen Laforet told the Star the fire department’s current three-building facility is “way too small for our needs” and was “cobbled together,” with accessibility issues and poor energy efficiency.
The existing headquarters and Station 1 at 815 Goyeau St. were built in 1967.
The city’s 10-year capital budget allocates nearly $30 million to replace Station 1 and fire headquarters, starting with roughly $1.55 million in 2028.
The document says the current headquarters are in “poor condition” and “requires constant repairs that are costly and only serve as stopgap measures.”
System failures often take a long time to repair because of “difficulty in acquiring parts.” In addition, “the aging boiler system fails regularly which requires fire crews to go without hot water for extended periods,” and heavy rains lead to basement flooding.