Ridgeway-Crystal Beach High School demolition begins

Crews have started tearing down the former Ridgeway-Crystal Beach High School, beginning at the rear of the old schoolhouse that stood on Ridge Road for 99 years.

The teardown at 576 Ridge Road will clear most of the property for two developments for 113 new homes, ending an eight-year wait for the property’s future since the school closed in 2017. The building’s original 1927 facade, protected under the Ontario Heritage Act, will remain standing.

The facade, which faces Ridge Road, received its heritage designation on January 22, 2018, months after the final students were transferred to Greater Fort Erie Secondary School.

Tearing it down would require written consent from a majority of town councillors but that consent has never been sought.

Kim Smith, community planner with the Town of Fort Erie, told Fort Erie Radio last September that the developer holds both a demolition permit and a heritage permit, and that the facade will eventually be built into the new subdivision.

“Whatever the profit is that they make off of the demolition will be put back into restoring the facade,” Smith said.

The later additions behind the facade, built in stages between 1956 and 1995, are coming down first. One building on the north side of the school was once slated for preservation alongside the facade. It will be demolished too, a casualty of a stormwater management pond that must be moved and expanded on the property.

Smith said the developer is required to “redesign the entire redevelopment” around the stormwater pond.

Earlier layouts for the rear block contemplated as many as 90 units. Council approved 64 in October 2024: 36 single-detached homes and 28 semi-detached homes on what is known as Block 50. Council had earlier approved 49 single-detached lots on another piece of the property fronting Prospect Point Road North.

Owner Bryce Ivanchuk bought the 15.7-acre property after District School Board of Niagara trustees approved the sale in April 2021. It had been listed at $10.9 million.

When Upper Canada Consultants first brought Ivanchuk’s proposal to council in February 2024, planner Ethan Laman pitched the project as a way to deliver homes at prices below what Niagara buyers have come to expect on new builds, with some single-detached units possibly under $500,000.

“In order to make things sustainable long term for our community, we have to find ways to provide more housing,” Laman told council.

The site sits within the Ridgeway-Thunder Bay Secondary Plan, which envisions 975 new units and roughly 2,400 new residents in the area over the long term.

The school predates almost everything around it. High school classes began in Ridgeway in 1909 at the old Masonic Building down the road, taught by two teachers. The Ridge Road building followed in 1927, designed by Toronto firm SB Coon and Son and built for $96,000, about $1.4 million in today’s dollars.

Generations knew it as “the biggest little school in Ontario.”

Declining enrolment led to its closure in June 2017, along with Fort Erie Secondary School. Both were folded into the new $30-million Greater Fort Erie Secondary School, the first high school the District School Board of Niagara had built since 1971.

No timeline for construction of the new homes has been confirmed. Devon Morton, the town’s supervisor of development approvals, told Fort Erie Radio the developer must first satisfy all conditions attached to the plan of subdivision, and town staff say more updates will come as those conditions are cleared and agreements are registered.

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