The Tribune

By DIANE PHILLIPS

A four-storey hotel in the heart of Bain and Grants Town collapsed on Monday. So what, you ask? What difference does it make? The Reinhard Hotel looked for years like it had been abandoned, neglected. Yet there it stood – and stood out – its large, stone blocks staring us right in the face at the intersection of Blue Hill Road and Tin Shop Corner. Its presence dominated the surroundings, begging, calling out for attention.

We ignored its silent demands and let it crumble, taking with it whole slices of Bahamian history that can never be put back together again. The Reinhard was where black people stayed when white hotels did not welcome them. Many call it the birthplace of Majority Rule. It was where the original members of the PLP met and where the Women’s Suffrage Movement gained momentum and where the Bahamas Union of Teachers, BUT, got its start.

It housed The Voice, a paper that made no bones and no apologies for telling the news and exposing the stories the way their writers saw it what was happening around them. Objectivity, be damned. The important point at the end of a manual typewriter was to enlist support, or anger, or fury or whatever it took to make readers rise up and stand up for what they believed in,

And it was all gone in a matter of hours, crumbled to the ground where Ministry of Works crews were quick to sweep away the mess. And with it the history that mess of rubble and stone contained.

Anthony ‘Ace’ Newbold wrote about it in a piece that appeared the next day, calling it “another victim of indifference and neglect.” Where were those, he asked who should have spearheaded its preservation and featured the building as part of that many must-see tours it advertises to visitors?

Some time before its collapse, Jessica Dawon and Tracey Thompson wrote in their thoughtful Ramblings blogpost “Bahamian history seeps from every inch of the four-storey Reinhard Hotel... Initially designed and constructed by Dr Claudius Roland Walker and Mrs. Mabel Walker in the 1930s, the hotel furnished the stage for everything from social soirees to local business operation to pivotal moments in Bahamian political history. Perhaps the paramount year in the hotel’s history was 1967, when the space served as headquarters to the Progressive Liberal Party during the landmark 1967 elections that led to Majority Rule.”

The day the Reinhard crumbled, Ace Newbold asked why “this kind of history has been ignored”. He is so right, and I ask, what can we learn from this lesson?

The Reinhard is not our hotel version of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put the Reinhard Hotel back together again, but what that single collapse can teach us is the need to act to preserve and protect now before we sit idly by and allow another precious piece of our history to suffer demolition by neglect.

In other countries, sites as important as the Reinhard where history was made would not only be protected, preserved and respected, they would be plaqued and promoted. Imagine the Instagram, Facebook or Tik Tok images and posts that could have made their way around the world had the Reinhard been treated with that kind of dignity. To this day, we can hardly get enough visitors into Vendue House to experience its remarkable collection and the story of slavery – as told, by the way so eloquently in the newest book by Exuma author Rosemary Minns, Tangerine Skies whose chilling description of what a group of four slaves left to die on a sinking slave ship endured before three were bound and shackled and displayed to be sold as chattel in Vendue House in 1800.

Do we care too much about the material things we own, the car we drive or the watch we wear or the phone we boast? Are we so caught up in the here-and-now that we neglect what was in the then-and-there?

Did we bury our history with the graves that hold the bones of those who wrote it?

No, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put the stone blocks of the Reinhard Hotel back together again, but we can use this tragic moment to rise up and protest. We can vow to find the resources and energy and wherewithal to make sure that never again is a piece of history so valuable as the Reinhard allowed to disintegrate and deteriorate without owner responsibility through law and policy. Never again shall a physical piece of history be permitted to wither and crumble as if it held no more importance than a stale biscuit left out on a counter overnight.

We can learn from those like Graycliff who plant their history on a wall for all to read, photograph and share. We can memorialise designs by incredibly talented architects like the late Jackson Burnside and the late Henry Melich. We can finish what we started and stopped numerous times to save Collins House and transform it into one of the most beautiful wedding and event venues in the capital as well as sectioning off parts for a specialised museum. With its flowing gardens, we can make it practical, historic and desirable for daily meetings, coffee, wine, a gathering place for all. We can preserve and renovate many of the old harbour warehouse designs creating loft living spaces downtown above retail stores. We can provide tax exemptions for those who did preserve like the most sterling example of all in historic Nassau, Victoria Court, the incomparable building that can never be replicated. We can ensure that the carved three-storey brass staircase of the original Tomlinson residence on Sanford Drive, now Balmoral Club, is protected.

We cannot ask government alone to do this. Much will come from the private sector but if there is one thing the loss of the Reinhard can do for us it is that we can ask government to amend the legislation, making demolition by neglect illegal and punishable by fines or imprisonment. That is the responsibility of government – to set the tone that history matters and history does not live in the books we are forced to read in school. It lives in the communities in which we live.