Tenth Street Campus
DESCRIPTION OF HISTORIC PLACE
The Tenth Street Campus is an educational campus composed of classroom blocks, student residences, gym, and meeting halls in th e upper reaches of the Fairview neighbourhood of Nelson, B.C. The campus is bounded by 10th, Elwyn, and Fell streets.
HERITAGE VALUE
The Tenth Street Campus is significant for its cultural, educational and formal values, particularly for its association with the history of facilities for higher education in British Columbia, and its reflection of Nelson’s status as an important educational centre in the province’s interior.
The Tenth Street Campus is significant for its contribution to Nelson as part of its history as the educational and cultural centre of the Kootenays. Notre Dame College was established in 1952 in an abandoned bakery by Roman Catholic Bishop Martin M. Johnson. The college became a degree granting university in 1963.
Notre Dame University became the first university in North America to offer Athletic Scholarships in 1964. As a result the university became the home of the Canadian National Ski Team and student members of the Nelson Maple Leafs Hockey team.
Notre Dame opened the first purpose-built college classroom building, Patenaude Hall, on the 10th Street Campus in 1954. The Campus is representative of the post-World War II educational facilities construction boom experience in North America. With ongoing construction over the next two decades, the campus would eventually consist of Patenaude Hall (classroom and administration), Maryhall (cafeteria and gymnasium) and the residences of St. Martin’s, McCarthy and LaSallette Halls. The nearby, but off-campus, Marianne Apartments housed both single students and married couples. A chapel, library and theatre were also located on the campus.
Sold to the province of British Columbia in 1975, the campus re-opened in 1979 as David Thompson University Centre, a satellite of the University of Victoria and Selkirk College. As a provincially-funded university, the DTUC became a casualty of the streamlining of educational facilities and funding cutbacks by the provincial government in the mid-1970s and 1980s. The final closure of the Centre in 1984 and the resulting city-wide protest has significant social value. It underscores the then Nelson city council and the community's commitment to keeping the campus open as a post-secondary educational institution, and to the continuation of education as part of the community's social and economic base. Its re-opening in 1987 as the Canadian International College, an English language school for Japanese students, and later as part of Selkirk College, reveals the resourcefulness of a community making use of an important cultural asset.
Further value is found in the Notre Dame University/David Thompson University Centre Fonds and the Kootenaiana Archives, collected over a number of years at the former Notre Dame University and the David Thompson University Centre, and now held at the Shawn Lamb Archives, Touchstones Nelson: Museum of Art and History. The books and records are distributed between the Nelson Municipal Library, Selkirk College campuses and the Shawn Lamb Archives at Touchstones Nelson.
The Campus has aesthetic value through its various buildings, which are typical examples of postsecondary institutional design from the 1950s and 1960s. Its location and site planning is typical of post-secondary campuses on the edges of cities, where economics and aesthetics dictated location and layout. Other factors, including the lack of land nearer to Nelson’s downtown, the availability of the McKim Ranch and other agricultural properties, more affordable property at the edge of the City, and the rise in the use of the automobile all added to the development of the Tenth Street Campus in particular, and to the development of the Upper Fairview area more generally. In addition, the location supported an independent, unfettered cultural context for post-secondary education.
From the City of Nelson Heritage Register, Page 26