A highly anticipated project that would have transformed an old church in uptown Saint John into an indoor climbing gym will not go ahead as planned.
Climb 1884 was the vision of David and Mary-Gwen Alston, owners of TimberTop Adventures in Dominion Park, who bought the former Church of St. John the Baptist on 58 Broad Street last June.
On May 10, Alston wrote on social media that the team at Climb 1884 had made “the emotionally-hard decision to not move ahead with building a climbing gym” at the site.
Alston called the decision “a very difficult one,” considering the tremendous general and climbing community support he and his team had received since sharing the idea last year.
“We have been working with an incredible extended team of people to try to figure this out over the past 11-plus months,” said Alston. “What we discovered was that set-up of the building is just not conducive to how a rope climbing gym typically gets built.”
He continued, adding most rope-climbing gyms are built in steel constructed warehouses with concrete floors.
“The most cost-effective way to build climbing walls is directly on concrete pads, while using the steel beams in the walls and ceiling to support the walls,” said Alston. “Our location, unfortunately, has none of these attributes.”
Complex engineering
Alston said last year when he bought the former church that Climb 1884 would primarily be a rope gym where people could wear a harness connected to ropes, or an auto belay system, allowing people to climb much higher within the gym area itself.
With an ambitious plan for repairs to the building and new construction, Alston had originally targetted for Climb 1884 to open this summer. But he now says the building has provided too much of a challenge to retrofit the way he and his team had envisioned.
He said while designs were developed to overcompensate for the challenge, using what he describes as “a complex set of engineering approaches,” the plan would have forced his team to build a complex concrete and steel structure inside the church.
“Unfortunately, this essentially offset any of the cost advantages, and then some, of utilizing the church structure in the first place,” lamented Alston. “No matter how many variations we looked at, the constant requirement for all this extra complexity, and the costs associated with it, made the business case for this location not work.”
The idea that Saint John would be a great place for a climbing gym had been on the Alstons’ minds since a family trip to Alberta five years ago offered some memorable indoor climbing. It was enough to help inspire the idea of creating more opportunities to enjoy similar adventures in the Saint John area.
That inspiration ended up being the creation of the Alstons’ first climbing endeavor, TimberTop Adventures, an aerial adventure park, located in Dominion Park on the city’s west side.
Upgraded building to go back up for sale
Alston said the decision to not go ahead also means they will be putting the building back on the market at the beginning of next month, only one year after purchasing it.
“The team is proud of the role we played in saving and investing in this beautiful building,” he wrote Tuesday.
Climb 1884, named after the year the church was built, would have put climbers closer to the amazing gothic architecture under a ceiling 42 feet high. (Image: Climb 1884)
He said the 138-year-old structure will be moving forward with a new roof, rebuilt brickwork, and new windows in the basement and vestry. It also has an improved heating system, which the building needed back when it was purchased.
Alston thanked the community for helping with the much-needed renovations and noted how his team was able to help others along the way, including supplying kitchen cabinets to the Elizabeth Fry Society of NB for its recent renovation and selling pews from the former church to help raise funds for AscentNB. They even donated reclaimed wood to the Saint John Tool Library.
“All of the work done over the past year will not only extend the life of the building for decades to come, but by opening up the basement and vestry areas we have also made it developer-ready for the next owner to immediately realize their vision of this beautiful property,” he wrote.
The Alstons are still kept busy by their existing experience, TimberTop Adventures. David said they’re looking forward to a busy fifth season at Dominion Park, with opening day coming on May 21.
He said TimberTop Adventures is encouraged by an increase in school and group bookings so far this Spring. To help meet the anticipated demand, they’ll be returning to a seven-day-per-week schedule for this summer and expanding TimberTop’s team.
Alston also said a video documentary that began shooting last fall to document the church conversion will still go ahead, with the team at Burdock Creative.
“We have discovered just how many parallels there are between an entrepreneur’s journey and the problem-solving one does while climbing a route and we’d like to continue to explore that for the benefit of the community,” he added.
Alston maintained that while the original “happy ending” is not unfolding as he and his team had hoped, it’s still led to some rather interesting and unexpected outcomes, not the least of which is the documentary itself, which is still targeted for release next winter.
Tyler Mclean is a reporter with Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
