Old registry office still admired by architecture aficionados

Most of us have never entered a registry office; never understood what was done there.

Land registry offices, operated by counties, catalogued land and property transactions — sales, ownership, leases and so on. Rows and rows of cabinets preserved documents from every property. Exhaustive title searches were required when ownership changed, and people skilled at searching developed specialized careers.

When the province changed over from a land registry to a land titles process in the 1980s, and with the advent of computers, that redundant documentation was phased out and the process moved online. That is a very brief overview: today’s column focuses on where this land registration was done here in Waterloo Region.

When Waterloo County was created in 1852, the courthouse and jail were immediately erected in Berlin. Little was ever said about the third building required — the registry office. It wasn’t much — just a small brick structure — but was overflowing by the mid-1930s. But when the almost 90-year-old building neared its end as a registry office, a Kitchener Daily Record editorial noted it was the “severing of another link with the inspiring past of Waterloo County.”

Fortunately, when it came time to replace the 1850s registry building, the three municipalities involved (Kitchener, Galt and the County of Waterloo) approved a $60,000 structure whose esthetics pleased then and still please now. Equally fortunate, the building survives today as the Registry Theatre, thriving as a centre for music and the arts.

Given a modest piece of land (previously the jail garden) between the prison wall and Frederick Street, Galt architect Ray Hall went to work. He designed an almost square, single-storey building with taller-than-usual main floor and basement levels.

For maximum fire protection, concrete, brick and tile were used extensively and, with war looming over the world at the time, the roof was made extra-strong for air raid protection. Heating was originally supplied from the nearby courthouse via a tunnel. Paying particular attention to the outside, Hall designed a brick veneer with Queenston stone trim and Art Deco touches around the entrance.

The raised main floor permitted large, square basement windows, giving the symmetrical façade four exclamation-mark window units that bookend the eye-catching entranceway. Inside, the vestibule and open spaces were covered in terrazzo flooring with modernistic lights, detailing and fixtures. Public counters, offices for the registrar and lawyers plus a records search room filled out the main floor.

In the basement, a large storage area preserved a century’s worth of land records. Erected by Dunker Construction, the combined beauty of marble, terrazzo, stone and brick not only caught the eye of passersby, but never failed to amaze visitors inside.

The grand opening was June 27, 1939, and the Daily Record’s description detailed the new building with breathless exuberance. No sentences, just paragraphs of phrases itemizing the many highlights.

Once the province moved to the land titles process, office space requirements lessened and operations moved to the new provincial courthouse building at Lancaster and Frederick. The 1939 building, less than 50 years old, was facing an unclear future: would it become home to Waterloo Historical Society offices? AIDS organization headquarters? A proposed Canadian curling museum? A restaurant? A storage site for the police division located next door? Happily, its fate was none of those. A local charitable theatrical group, JM Drama, had been seeking a new home, but discussions to use part of the vacant St. Jerome’s high school fell through. The City of Kitchener owned the empty registry office and, after complicated negotiations, the two sides came to an agreement: the city would maintain ownership and responsibility for the building, while JM Drama oversaw daily use, programming and rentals.

That arrangement has worked well for two decades. JM has brought a roster of musicians, actors and artists of local and international renown to the city. Architectural heritage advocates treasure the preservation of one of the city’s few local buildings containing Art Deco features. The exterior is much the same as the 1939 original: the interior vestibule and lobby area retain most of the stylistic features from Hall’s design. Overall, the building can also be seen to symbolize the end of the Great Depression in Waterloo County.